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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Joe E. Tata, the actor known as the Peach Pit diner owner Nat Bussichio on the 1990s teen drama “Beverly Hills, 90210” has died. He was 85.
His daughter, Kelly Katherine Tata, announced in a GoFundMe page posting on Thursday that her father died Wednesday night. She previously wrote that her father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2018.
“My father and I are forever grateful for the love and support of family, friends and fans,” said Tata’s daughter, who also wrote that the remaining funds raised from the campaign will be donated to the Alzheimer’s Association. She called her father was “honest, kind, and a truly incredible father.”
Tata appeared in television shows including “Lost in Space,” “The Rockford Files,” “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and the original “Batman” series. But he was most popular for the role he played on “Beverly Hills, 90210” for all 10 seasons of the hit series.
Tata reprised the Nat Bussichio role in the spin-off series “90210,” which aired on the CW network from 2008 to 2013.
Ian Ziering, a “90210” star, wrote in a social media post that he admired Tata as “one of the happiest people I’ve ever worked with.”
He said Tata was “generous with his wisdom as he was with his kindness.”
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https://www.ktalnews.com/entertainment-news/ap-joe-e-tata-actor-for-beverly-hills-90210-dies-at-85/
| 2022-09-21T02:27:34Z
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — A concrete obelisk topped by Soviet stars that was the centerpiece of a monument commemorating the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany was taken down Thursday in Latvia’s capital — the latest in a series of Soviet monuments brought down after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Heavy machinery was spotted behind a green privacy fence at the foot of the nearly 80-meter (260-foot) obelisk shortly before it was felled. The column, which had stood like a high-rise in downtown Riga, crashed into a nearby pond, causing a huge splash at Victory Park.
A Latvian media outlet broadcast the event live as onlookers, some with Latvian flags wrapped around their shoulders, cheered and applauded.
The obelisk, made up of five spires with three Soviet stars at the top, stood between two groups of statues — a band of three Red Army soldiers and on the other side a woman representing the “Motherland” with her arms held high.
The monument was built in 1985 while Latvia was still part of the Soviet Union. It has stirred controversy since Latvia regained independence in 1991 and eventually became a NATO and European Union member.
On Twitter, Latvia’s foreign minister said by taking down the monument, Latvia was “closing another painful page of the history and looking for better future.”
The country shares a 214-kilometer (133-mile) border with Russia and has a large ethnic Russian population. On Russia’s annual Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II, people gathered in front of the Riga monument to lay flowers.
Latvia’s parliament voted to approve the demolition of the Victory Park monument in May, and the Riga City Council followed suit. Work to clear away the monument started three days ago with the removal of statues. The area was then cordoned off and authorities issued a flight ban for drones. Police temporarily closed traffic near the park on Thursday, citing security reasons.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February has prompted authorities in several eastern European countries to remove symbols from their communist eras.
The government in Poland — another country once was part of the Soviet sphere — said Thursday that a memorial site in neighboring Belarus containing the graves of Polish soldiers who died during World War II is being leveled to the ground by the Belarusian authorities.
Lukasz Jasina, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said on Twitter that the cemetery in Surkonty, where Poland’s resistance battled Soviet forces, is being “devastated by the services of the Minsk regime.”
The development comes a day after Poland said it was demolishing a monument to Soviet Red Army soldiers in Poland, one of dozens that have been marked for destruction.
Belarus has been a key ally to Moscow while Poland, which lies on Ukraine’s western border, has been supportive of Ukraine.
Last week , Estonia removed a Soviet World War II monument from near a city on the Russian border as part of a wider effort to dismantle Soviet-era symbols. The tank replica was sent to a war museum north of Tallinn.
In 2007, the relocation of a World War II monument of a Red Army soldier in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, sparked days of rioting.
___
Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
___ Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T02:27:41Z
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CHICAGO (AP) — A former girlfriend of R. Kelly wept on the witness stand Thursday as she testified that a Kelly business manager told her in 2007 she should have been killed for causing the R&B star so much trouble by stealing a video from a gym bag full of recordings of Kelly having sex with women and girls.
Prosecution witness Lisa Van Allen said she rummaged through the bag on a rare occasion when Kelly left it unattended at a studio one day in 2000. She said she then watched the videos one after the other on a VHS player. She took one that, among other footage, showed Van Allen, Kelly and a younger girl who testified against Kelly last week under the pseudonym, “Jane,” having sex.
Van Allen, 42, is the only witness so far to have testified both at Kelly’s ongoing federal trial as well as at his 2008 state child pornography trial, at which Kelly was acquitted.
Kelly, who rose from poverty on Chicago’s South Side to become a superstar singer, faces charges in his hometown of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex. The 55-year-old and co-defendant Derrel McDavid, the former business manager, are also charged with rigging the 2008 trial by threatening witnesses and concealing video evidence.
Kelly was handed a 30-year prison sentence by a federal judge in New York in June for convictions on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If convicted in U.S. District Court in Chicago, he could see years added to that sentence.
Van Allen, crying and reaching for tissues during her testimony Wednesday, said it was McDavid who told her in 2007 at a Chicago lawyer’s office that a polygraph had indicated she wasn’t truthful about the video she handed back. Kelly and his insiders were worried Van Allen had made other copies.
“He said that I failed (the lie-detector), and that they should have murked me from the beginning,” she testified, using a slang word for killed. She said she took the comment as a threat.
Van Allen sounded shaken, too, while recalling McDavid’s response to her when she told him she was going to tell Kelly about McDavid’s threat.
“He said (Kelly) knew everything that was going on,” she said.
Kelly’s 2008 trial revolved a around a different video that state prosecutors said showed Kelly abusing the girl called Jane at the Chicago federal trial. After acquitting Kelly in 2008, jurors said they had no choice because the girl did not take the witness stand at that trial. Last week, Jane did testify that she was the child in the video and Kelly was the adult man. The evidence at the current trial includes several videos.
Van Allen, who said she began a nine-year relationship with Kelly in 1998 when she was 18, said Kelly was obsessed with control, prohibiting her from speaking to other men and other men from speaking to her. She told jurors Kelly would sometimes hit her because, as she put it, “I wouldn’t listen to daddy.”
She testified she only learned after Kelly filmed himself having sex with Van Allen and Jane that Jane had only been 14 at that time.
Asked by a prosecutor how she felt as she viewed the videos at the studio in 2000, Van Allen responded, “Disgusted.” She also recalled being nervous Kelly might walk back into the room at any moment, knowing he’d be furious if he saw what she was doing.
The same video she took from Kelly also had footage of Kelly sexually abusing Jane at two different locations, Van Allen testified. She said she took the tape because she never wanted Kelly or anyone else to see it. She said she decided in 2007 to return the tape she had taken and that, while she insisted she didn’t pressure Kelly for money, he offered to pay $250,000 for it.
In cross examination, a defense attorney for McDavid, Beau Brindley, asked Van Allen that if her goal was to prevent anyone from ever seeing it, why didn’t she simply destroy it in 2000. She answered, “I could have if that crossed my mind.”
Brindley sought to cast doubts about her account that McDavid threatened her. His voice soaring, Brindley asked Van Allen if she was “prepared to admit” that her claim McDavid made a death threat “is a lie?”
“I am not prepared to admit that,” she shot back.
He asked her if she ever had any indication McDavid was “a murderous accountant” prior to their 2007 conversation about the lie-detector test.
“Not until he said they should have murked (killed) me,” she answered.
___
Follow Michael Tarm on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mtarm and find AP’s full coverage of the R. Kelly trial at https://apnews.com/hub/r-kelly.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/entertainment-news/ap-witness-r-kelly-manager-threatened-her-over-stolen-video/
| 2022-09-21T02:27:56Z
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MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WREG)– A Southaven, Mississippi woman says Taylor Swift ripped off her book of poems called ‘Lover’ when the superstar released a book of the same title in 2019.
Teresa La Dart filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the U.S. Western District Court of Tennessee in Memphis Tuesday.
She said Swift’s book ‘Lover’ has several creative elements that copied the designs and arrangements of her “Lover” book published in 2010.
Swift’s book accompanied her ‘Lover’ album. La Dart said both works not only share the same title but are each a “recollection of past years memorialized in a combination of written and pictorial components.”
La Dart said Swift also copied her cover shot with Swift looking down and her pastel pink and blue color scheme.
The suit claims Swift has made close to $7 million from worldwide sales of her book ‘Lover’ since its release date, and La Dart has not received any credits or payments.
La Dart wants more than a million dollars in damages. Swift’s legal team has not responded to the claim.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/entertainment-news/memphis-area-poet-suing-taylor-swift-for-1m-over-lover-book/
| 2022-09-21T02:28:03Z
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Friday said the latest fever cases detected in its border region with China were tested to be influenza, not coronavirus infections as initially feared.
The report by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency came a day after the North said it locked down unspecified areas in Ryanggang province after four people had fevers that were suspected to be COVID-19.
North Korea maintains it has had no confirmed coronavirus cases since Aug. 10, when leader Kim Jong Un declared a widely disputed victory over the virus, just three months after the country acknowledged an omicron outbreak.
KCNA said diagnostic tests of samples, the nature of the symptoms, and information gained from contract tracing led health workers to conclude that the fevers were caused by influenza. The patients have since returned to normal temperatures, it said.
North Korean officials lifted the lockdown but urged residents to maintain vigilance by continuing to wear masks and reporting to health authorities immediately if they experience fever symptoms.
While Kim claimed that the country’s success against the virus would be recognized as a global health miracle, experts believe North Korea has manipulated disclosures on its outbreak to help him maintain absolute control. The victory statement signals Kim’s aim to move to other priorities, including a possible nuclear test, experts say.
After admitting to a coronavirus outbreak in May, North Korea reported about 4.8 million “fever cases” across its mostly unvaccinated population of 26 million but only identified a fraction of them as COVID-19. Experts say the country’s official death toll of 74 is abnormally small, considering the country’s lack of public health tools.
North Korea dubiously insists that rival South Korea was responsible for its COVID-19 outbreak and has warned of “deadly” retaliation, saying that the virus was transported by anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets and other materials flown across the border by balloons launched by South Korean civilian activists. South Korea has dismissed such claims as unscientific and “ridiculous.”
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https://www.ktalnews.com/health/ap-north-korea-says-new-fever-cases-were-flu-not-covid-19/
| 2022-09-21T02:28:11Z
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GENEVA (AP) — The World Health Organization chief made a passionate appeal for his embattled home region of Tigray in Ethiopia on Thursday, saying he has relatives he cannot communicate with or send money to amid a blockade by government forces.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in some of his most personal comments about the region that erupted in violence again on Wednesday after months of calm, lamented his inability to help loved ones among the 6 million people all but trapped in Tigray.
“I have many relatives there. I want to send the money. I cannot send the money. They are starving. I know I cannot help them,” he said, the latest in a string of pleas about Tigray he has made during regular WHO news briefings.
“I cannot help them. I can’t help them. I can share from what I have. I cannot do that because they are completely sealed off,” Tedros added. “I can’t speak to them. I don’t know even who is dead or who is alive.”
Tedros, an ethnic Tigrayan, insisted that he’s not playing favorites with Tigray and has spoken out about humanitarian crises in many places, including Yemen, Syria, Ukraine and Congo.
But he has sought to overcome perceived inaction and inattention from a world consumed with other trouble spots and worries, and previously said he believes his people have been overlooked because of the color of their skin.
He said the Tigray crisis was exceptional because the region is all but cut off from the world — including from most humanitarian aid shipments that its people need — by government forces in Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea.
“Can you tell me any place in the same situation in the world?” he said. “We are talking about the six million people (who) are collectively being punished.”
On Wednesday, Tigray authorities accused Ethiopia’s military of launching a “large-scale” offensive for the first time in a year in Tigray. Government officials countered that Tigray forces had attacked first.
The conflict began in November 2020, killing thousands of people in Africa’s second most populous country.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/health/ap-who-chief-laments-fate-of-starving-relatives-in-tigray/
| 2022-09-21T02:28:25Z
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GENEVA (AP) — The number of monkeypox cases reported globally dropped 21% in the last week, reversing a month-long trend of rising infections and signaling that Europe’s outbreak may be starting to decline, the World Health Organization said Thursday.
The U.N. health agency reported 5,907 new weekly cases and said two countries, Iran and Indonesia, reported their first cases. To date, more than 45,000 monkeypox cases have been reported in 98 countries since late April.
The Americas accounted for 60% of cases in the past month, WHO said, while cases in Europe comprised about 38%. It said infections in the Americas showed “a continuing steep rise.”
At a press briefing on Thursday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said although there were indications the monkeypox outbreak was slowing in Europe, which once accounted for 90% of the world’s lab-confirmed cases, the spread of the virus was now causing concerns elsewhere.
“In Latin America in particular, insufficient awareness or public health measures are combining with a lack of access to vaccines to fan the flames of the outbreak,” Tedros said.
In late July, Tedros declared the unprecedented spread of monkeypox to dozens of countries to be a global emergency, despite a lack of consensus on his expert committee.
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday the continent had 219 new cases in the past week, a jump of 54%. Most were in Nigeria and Congo.
British health authorities said last week there were “early signs” the country’s monkeypox outbreak was slowing. The U.K.’s Health Security Agency downgraded the country’s monkeypox outbreak last month, saying there was no evidence the once-rare disease was spreading beyond men who were gay, bisexual or had sex with other men.
Since monkeypox outbreaks in Europe and North America were identified in May, WHO and other health agencies have noted that its spread was almost exclusively in men who have sex with men.
Monkeypox has been endemic in parts of Africa for decades and experts suspect the outbreaks in Europe and North America were triggered after the disease started spreading via sex at two raves in Spain and Belgium.
WHO’s latest report said 98% of cases are in men and of those who reported sexual orientation, 96% are in men who have sex with men.
“Of all reported types of transmission, a sexual encounter was reported most commonly,” WHO said.
Among the monkeypox cases in which the HIV status of patients was known, 45% were infected with HIV.
WHO has recommended that men at high risk of the disease temporarily consider reducing their number of sex partners and refraining from group or anonymous sex.
Monkeypox typically requires skin-to-skin or skin-to-mouth contact with an infected patient’s lesions to spread. People can also become infected through contact with infected clothing or bedsheets.
With globally limited vaccine supplies, authorities in the U.S., Europe and the U.K. have all begun rationing doses to stretch supplies by up to five times.
WHO has advised countries that have vaccines to prioritize immunization for those at high risk of the disease, including gay and bisexual men with multiple sex partners, and for health workers, laboratory staff and outbreak responders.
While Africa has reported the most suspected deaths from monkeypox, the continent has no vaccine supplies apart from a very small stock being tested in a research study in Congo.
“As we know, the situation with monkeypox vaccine access is very topical, but there are not enough doses of vaccines,” Nigeria Center for Disease Control Director-General Ifedayo Adetifa said this week. “Potentially, a lot more more doses will become available, but because of challenges with manufacturing factories and unexpected uptick in monkeypox cases, the vaccine may actually not be available until 2023.”
___
Chinedu Asadu in Abuja, Nigeria, and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed reporting.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of monkeypox at https://apnews.com/hub/monkeypox
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| 2022-09-21T02:28:33Z
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A Connecticut woman with cancer sued Vermont on Thursday for allowing only its own residents to take advantage of a state law that lets people who are terminally ill end their own lives.
Lynda Bluestein, 75, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who has terminal fallopian tube cancer, and Dr. Diana Barnard, of Middlebury, Vermont, argue in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Burlington that Vermont’s residency requirement violates the U.S. Constitution.
The Vermont law allows physicians to prescribe lethal medication to state residents with an incurable illness that is expected to kill them within six months.
Bluestein said in an interview Thursday that she is not yet at the point where her life expectancy is less than six months, but that it is her third bout with cancer and she watched her mother die of the disease.
“She said, “I never wanted you to see me like this.’ I don’t want my children to see me like that, either,” she said. “I’d like their last memories of me to be as strong as possible, to interact with them and not in an adult diaper curled up in a fetal position, drugged out of my mind.”
Barnard said in the lawsuit that she would like to be able to offer the end-of-life option to her patients who live in New York. The two women have been advocates on the issue in New York and Connecticut, which currently have no laws in place to allow for medically assisted suicide.
The lawsuit — filed by the group Compassion and Choices, which describes itself as an organization that “expands options and empowers everyone to chart their end-of-life journey” — argues that the residency requirement violates the commerce, equal protection, and privileges and immunities clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
Bluestein and Barnard are asking the court to block enforcement of the residency provision.
Compassion and Choices says the Vermont lawsuit is the nation’s second to challenge residency requirements for such laws. Ten of the 11 jurisdictions nationwide that have authorized medical assistance to help people end their lives have a residency requirement, the group said.
The organization in March settled a similar lawsuit in Oregon that resulted in the suspension of the residency requirement in that state.
The office of Vermont Gov. Phil Scott referred questions to the attorney general’s office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mary Beerworth, of the Vermont Right to Life Committee, which opposes assisted suicide, said that if the challenge is successful Vermont could become a destination for terminally ill people seeking to end their lives.
Bluestein is a retired community public health professional who worked with women and children. She was diagnosed with cancer in March 2021. At the time she was given six months to three years to live and is undergoing treatment.
Bluestein said she met a woman with advanced lung cancer in a survivor group in Connecticut who moved to Vermont to take advantage of the state’s law.
“Every other day or so, she’s telling me, she said, ‘Don’t wait until the end,’” said Bluestein, who noted her friend established Vermont residency and died this year with the help of the law.
For Bluestein, moving to Vermont would be too complicated, she said.
Under Vermont’s Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act, passed in 2013, once a determination has been made that a patient has fewer than six months to live, the patient may ask their physician for a prescription for a medication that would hasten death. The process requires both oral and written requests, witnesses and the second opinion from another physician.
Physicians and pharmacists are not required to participate in the actual suicide.
In a January report, the Vermont Health Department said that between May 31, 2013, when the law took effect, and June 30, 2021, 116 people took advantage of the law. Of the total, 77% had cancer.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/health/ap-woman-sues-over-residency-requirement-for-assisted-suicide/
| 2022-09-21T02:28:40Z
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (NBC) — The wife of a Northern California congressman died late last year after ingesting a plant that is generally considered safe and is used as an herbal remedy for a variety of ailments, including diabetes, obesity, and high cholesterol, KHN has learned.
Lori McClintock, the wife of U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, died from dehydration due to gastroenteritis — an inflammation of the stomach and intestines — that was caused by “adverse effects of white mulberry leaf ingestion,” according to a report from the Sacramento County coroner that is dated March 10 but was not immediately released to the public. KHN obtained that report — in addition to the autopsy report and an amended death certificate containing an updated cause of death — in July.
The coroner’s office ruled her death an accident. The original death certificate, dated Dec. 20, 2021, listed the cause of death as “pending.”
Tom McClintock, a Republican who represents a district that spans multiple counties in northern and central California, found his 61-year-old wife unresponsive at their Elk Grove, California, home on Dec. 15, 2021, according to the coroner’s report. He had just returned from Washington, D.C., after voting in Congress the night before.
It’s unclear from the autopsy report whether Lori McClintock took a dietary supplement containing white mulberry leaf, ate fresh or dried leaves, or drank them in a tea, but a “partially intact” white mulberry leaf was found in her stomach, according to the report.
McClintock’s death underscores the risks of the vast, booming market of dietary supplements and herbal remedies, which have grown into a $54 billion industry in the United States — one that both lawmakers and health care experts say needs more government scrutiny.
“Many people assume if that product is sold in the United States of America, somebody has inspected it, and it must be safe. Unfortunately, that’s not always true,” U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said on the Senate floor this spring when he introduced legislation to strengthen oversight of dietary supplements.
Daniel Fabricant, CEO and President of the Natural Products Association, which represents the dietary supplements industry, questioned whether McClintock’s death was related to a supplement.
“It’s completely speculative. There’s a science to this. It’s not just what a coroner feels,” said Fabricant, who oversaw dietary supplements at the FDA during the Obama administration. “People, unfortunately, pass from dehydration every day, and there’s a lot of different reasons and a lot of different causes.”
Fabricant said it would have been ideal had the coroner or the family reported her death to the FDA so the agency could have launched an investigation.
Such reports are voluntary, and it’s not clear whether anyone reported her death to the agency. FDA spokesperson Courtney Rhodes said the agency does not discuss possible or ongoing investigations.
The FDA, Fabricant added, has a system in place to investigate deaths that might be linked to a supplement or drug. “It’s casework,” he said. “It’s good, old-fashioned police work that needs to be done.”
Tom McClintock has remained mostly silent about his wife’s death since he released a statement on Dec. 19, 2021, announcing it and giving a tribute to her at her Jan. 4 funeral. Until now, the cause of death had not been reported.
Tom McClintock, contacted multiple times by phone and email Wednesday, was not immediately available for comment.
At his wife’s funeral, McClintock told mourners that she was fine when he spoke with her the day before he returned. She had told a friend that “she was on a roll” at a new job she loved in a Sacramento real estate office, he said, and “she was carefully dieting.”
“She just joined a gym,” he said. “At home, she was counting down the days to Christmas, wrapping all the gifts and making all the plans to make it the best family Christmas ever, and it would have been.”
According to the coroner’s report, however, the day before her death, “she had complaints of an upset stomach.”
Sacramento County spokesperson Kim Nava said via email Wednesday that the law prohibits the coroner’s office from discussing many details of specific cases. As part of any death investigation, the office “attempts to locate and review medical records and speak to family/witnesses to establish events leading up to and surrounding a death,” she said.
If any medications or supplements are found at the scene or if pertinent information is in the person’s medical records, those are passed along to the pathologist to help establish cause of death, Nava said.
“Any information the office obtains from medical records can’t be disseminated to a third party except by court order,” she said.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/health/congressmans-wife-died-after-taking-herbal-remedy-marketed-for-weight-loss-and-diabetes/
| 2022-09-21T02:28:48Z
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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — West Nile virus is on the rise in Louisiana and residents need to take precautions against mosquito bites, the state Department of Health said Wednesday.
“This is shaping up to be a very challenging West Nile season and we are entering the peak time for transmission in our state,” Dr. Tina Stefanksi, regional medical director for a seven-parish area in Acadiana, said in a news release.
Fourteen people — including the first in Acadiana since 2018 — have developed dangerous infections of the brain and spinal cord, and two of them have died, the news release said. That compares to five neuroinvasive cases and no deaths by about this time last year, according to reports on the department’s website.
It also equals the total of such cases for all of 2020, and is three more than the total for 2019. Louisiana reported 16 of the nation’s 1,855 neuroinvasive cases and two of 191 deaths last year to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to preliminary CDC data. More than 1,100 of last year’s dangerous cases and 112 of the deaths were in Arizona.
And the number of mosquito pools testing positive for the virus around Louisiana is 2.8 times the number reported at this time last year — more than 687 compared to 242, the news release said. In Acadiana’s Region 4, “the number of mosquito pools has jumped from 8 at this time last year to 56 this year,” it said.
Last year’s final report said 474 mosquito pools had tested positive, 17 people had developed neuroinvasive disease and two had died.
Eight in 10 human infections cause few or no symptoms, but many people can get flu-like West Nile fever and a few develop the most serious form, which can cause brain damage or death.
Symptoms of neuroinvasive disease can include high fever, stiff neck, disorientation, muscle weakness, numbness, coma and paralysis.
Precautions against mosquitoes include using federally approved mosquito repellent and wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants outdoors. For indoors, make sure windows and doors fit tightly and that all screens are free of holes. The state health department has a detailed list of precautions on its website.
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| 2022-09-21T02:28:55Z
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President Biden on Thursday likened the “MAGA” wing of the GOP to fascism, leaning into his midterm campaign strategy to paint Republicans as extreme.
“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” he said at a fundraising event hosted by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in Bethesda, Md.
The White House has said Biden, while campaigning for Democrats ahead of November, will aim to paint Republicans as stewards of special interests who are pursuing an “extreme MAGA agenda that costs families,” seeking to tie them to former President Trump’s “Make American Great Again” slogan.
The event in Maryland was the first formal pre-midterm event for Biden, who is expected to fan out across the county to tout his agenda. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre previewed the president’s remarks earlier on Thursday and said he would display “the choice before Americans.”
Biden, at the event, mentioned the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, as well as the potential for Republicans to work towards overturning marriage equality or repealing the Affordable Care Act.
“This is not your father’s Republican Party. This is a different deal,” he said. “Our team has to show up and quite frankly vote, just simply vote.”
He also targeted Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the head of the GOP’s Senate campaign arm, for his tax plan that Biden has consistently criticized. The White House has sought to tie congressional Republicans to the plan, but other lawmakers have either distanced themselves from the plan or declined to embrace it.
“Rick Scott, who heads up the ultra MAGA agenda for Republicans … he thinks everyone in America should pay taxes,” Biden said on Thursday.
Scott’s plan says that “all Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount,” which the White House has bashed as a move to require everyone to pay taxes.
The fundraising event had about 100 attendees and raised $1 million for the DNC and the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund, according to a DNC official.
Following the event, Biden attended a rally at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md.
Biden is expected to head to pivotal swing states in the next couple of weeks to continue his pre-midterm tour. On Tuesday, he will go to Pennsylvania for an event focused on crime prevention and then he will travel to Ohio on Sept. 9 for an event focused on American manufacturing.
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| 2022-09-21T02:29:09Z
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(The Hill) — Some Democrats running in competitive reelection races in November are still reluctant to attach themselves to President Joe Biden, even as he and the White House have been buoyed by a few weeks of good news.
Biden has in recent weeks racked up a series of major legislative victories, and he’s seen his poll numbers rebound slightly from all-time lows earlier in the summer. But that has yet to translate to enthusiasm among Democrats to embrace him on the campaign trail.
There have been some signs of that changing as primary season comes to a close, and a few experts believe Democrats are better off embracing Biden in the wake of his recent hot streak.
“Democrats can’t possibly think that Republicans won’t put them in ads with Biden even if he physically doesn’t appear with him. They’re going to be linked to Biden, so they might as well make the most of it,” said Michael Cornfield, a political scientist and associate professor at George Washington University.
“The benefits I think clearly outweigh the costs,” he added.
During a recent trip to Ohio, Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Nan Whaley both skipped Biden’s event. Neither has appeared alongside Biden on the campaign trail in recent weeks.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who did appear alongside Biden at an event earlier this year, recently sought to distance herself from the president in a campaign ad that states, “She doesn’t work for Joe Biden. She works for you.”
Biden has had limited travel in recent weeks, as he was sidelined by COVID-19 and more recently spent two weeks on vacation. But the president has not appeared alongside Senate candidates this summer in key races in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Arizona.
A Democratic strategist argued that incumbents and candidates will appear with Biden when it makes the most sense for their campaign strategy.
“I think every candidate is going to look at it from his or her perspective in a very different manner and, particularly, if my demographic to win the race, for example, is white college-educated women and I’m playing on a Roe v. Wade-related issue, it may make sense to bring the president in as a rallying cry,” the strategist said.
The president has been something of a political drag in recent months, as rising costs of gas, housing, food and other goods helped sink his approval rating to a low average of 37 percent as recently as July 21, according to an average of polls from RealClearPolitics.
But momentum has started to shift, as Biden saw a flurry of congressional action in late July and early August, paired with declining gas prices and a successful counterterrorism mission that killed a top al Qaeda leader.
Biden’s poll numbers have started to rebound: A Yahoo News-YouGov poll released Wednesday found the president’s approval rating at its highest level since May, though it still sits at 40 percent.
Xochitl Hinojosa, former communications director at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), argued that Democrats should be using Biden on the campaign trail, considering the wins he has delivered.
“Because of the leadership of President Biden and Democrats in Congress, Democratic candidates have a long list of accomplishments to run on, whether it’s a strong economy, policies that lower costs, infrastructure investments and historic climate investments,” she said. “Democrats should be doing everything to tout and embrace that agenda, including utilizing President Biden and his Cabinet on the campaign trail.”
With the president’s brand starting to bounce back, a few Democrats have begun to signal they are willing to embrace Biden as campaign season heats up.
“He’s a great man. He’s a great president. I can’t wait for him to get down here. I need his help. I want his help. He’s the best I’ve ever met,” Rep. Charlie Crist told CNN on Wednesday after clinching the state’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
Maryland Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wes Moore is set to join Biden on Thursday at a DNC event in Montgomery County, Md.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who is in one of the most closely watched Senate races, gave a lukewarm endorsement of the president coming to visit him on the campaign trail.
“I will welcome anybody that comes to Arizona, travel around the state at any time as long as I’m here, if I’m not up in Washington in session, and talk about what Arizona needs,” Kelly said Sunday on CNN.
A Democratic operative described Biden’s lack of appearances with lawmakers as systematic and part of a strategy ahead of November.
“Joe Biden is old school. He knows the value of campaigning for you or against you, whatever helps you win. The goal is to win, not to massage egos,” the operative said.
Some administration officials have appeared with lawmakers to promote the Inflation Reduction Act at events around the country, which tend to draw very little attention compared to events with the president.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack participated in a roundtable discussion with Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo)— who is facing a tough reelection race— in Grand Junction, Colo., last week. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 rival of Biden’s, has also appeared in recent days with officials in Florida, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Biden is expected to ramp up his travel after Labor Day to tout the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act, though the White House has yet to preview where he is going or who he might appear with.
But strategists expect the White House to carefully calibrate where Biden can be most useful in announcing new funding and how he can benefit the party with just two months until the midterms.
“I think Joe Biden at the end of the day is going to be all about, how do I keep a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate?” one Democratic strategist said. “If I can help, I’ll be there. If I can’t help, I won’t be there.”
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| 2022-09-21T02:29:17Z
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Actor Ben Savage is running for a seat on the city council in West Hollywood, Calif., saying he wants to “restore faith” in local government with “reasonable, innovative and compassionate” solutions to the city’s problems.
Savage, who starred as Cory Matthews on the ABC sitcom “Boy Meets World” from 1993 to 2000, says on his campaign website that he is an 18-year resident of the city, union member and concerned citizen who wants to produce results for West Hollywood.
“We need to increase and expand access to all the great opportunities West Hollywood affords, by ensuring that every member of the community has the tools they need to succeed,” he said.
Savage’s website states that his priorities include enhancing community safety by providing law enforcement with the resources they need to protect community members while increasing funding for community safety partners like health services and clinical case workers.
He said he wants to fight to support renters’ rights to keep them in their homes despite rising prices and to expand housing services that the city offers.
“West Hollywood is known all over the world as a warm and supportive city,” the website states. “We value diversity and community above all. But as housing costs rise, we are failing to live up to those values.”
Savage also emphasized that he is not part of “the political machine” and does not have an interest in serving interest groups. He said the city needs new leaders to tackle the issues it is facing.
Savage reportedly has some prior experience in the political realm as he interned for former Sen. Arlen Specter (D) of Pennsylvania in 2003 while studying political science at Stanford University.
Savage’s campaign did not immediately return a request from The Hill for further comment.
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| 2022-09-21T02:29:25Z
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(The Hill) – Chris Stirewalt, a former political editor at Fox News, said that a U.S. senator wanted him fired after the network made the decision to call Arizona for President Biden on election night in 2020.
“I never said that’s why they fired me. A lot of people said that’s why they fired me. I don’t care, they don’t owe me a job. Fox News doesn’t owe me a job. That’s OK. I had a great time at the network, I’m proud of all the work I did, I’m proud of the work that I did with other people. The news division of Fox was great when I was there,” Stirewalt said during an appearance on CNN this week.
The former top editor at Fox said he did not make the call himself but was rather “part of a decision desk team that made a call.”
“Lordy day, did people get very angry about that,” he continued. “I had one U.S. senator call for my firing and say we were engaged in a cover-up. I thought, ‘Are there ballots under the table that I haven’t looked at? What are you talking about?’”
Stirewalt was apparently referencing comments made by Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) just days after the election saying he and other “knuckleheads” at the network should be fired.
The Arizona race call, which was made first by Fox, infuriated former President Trump and his allies on the night of the election.
Biden won the state with the help of Maricopa County, a highly populated area that includes Phoenix. Since the election, Arizona has also been the subject of controversy after various members of the GOP have called for election recounts.
Stirewalt was later laid off by the network in what it said was a post-election restructuring.
“As we conclude the 2020 election cycle, Fox News Digital has realigned its business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era,” Fox said at the time. “We are confident these changes will ensure the platform continues to deliver breakthrough reporting and insightful analysis surrounding major issues, both stateside and abroad.”
Earlier this year, Stirewalt was hired by startup cable channel NewsNation, which is owned by The Hill’s parent company, Nexstar Media, to serve as its top political editor.
He also testified before the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and is currently promoting a new book about his life and career in politics and media.
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| 2022-09-21T02:29:33Z
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Google in a letter to lawmakers on Thursday said it would clearly identify facilities that provide abortions to ensure people seeking the procedure are not misled by anti-abortion clinics.
Mark Isakowitz, the vice president for government affairs and public policy for the U.S. and Canada at Google, said in a letter to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) that the company will include labels like “Provides abortions” and “Does not provide abortions” that the company has verified at the top of advertisement search results.
The change could help prevent women from seeking the procedure at clinics that oppose abortion or crisis pregnancy centers, which work to convince people against having the procedure.
The announcement comes in response to a letter Warner, Slotkin and other members of Congress sent to the CEO of Google in June to urge him to prevent misleading abortion search results.
The lawmakers said in the letter that 37 percent of Google Maps results and 11 percent of search results for “abortion clinics near me” and “abortion pill” in states with abortion trigger bans were for anti-abortion clinics.
A Google spokesperson told The Hill that the company has been working for months to find more useful ways to display results that show the specific services that businesses offer.
The spokesperson said the update that Google is introducing will help users find locations that offer the services they search for or broaden their results so they can see more options. The company will confirm that certain places provide a service through regularly calling them directly and collaborating with “authoritative” data sources.
“When people turn to Google to find local information, we aim to help them easily explore the range of places available so they can determine which are most helpful to them,” the spokesperson said.
The updates will affect how Google shows search results and maps to give people additional context about what they are viewing, according to a Google spokesperson.
The company will include the note “Might not provide abortions” when it is unable to verify information.
Google will also allow users to expand their search radius if the most relevant results are not nearby.
Warner said in a release that the changes are not about restricting speech but providing results that accurately address a search.
“I welcome the changes that Google has announced today so that women seeking abortion services aren’t directed towards fake clinics that traffic in misinformation and don’t provide comprehensive health services,” he said.
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| 2022-09-21T02:29:41Z
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Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said Thursday that he plans to debate independent Senate candidate Evan McMullin as the two vie for the Utah seat in November’s general election.
“I’m glad that you finally committed to debate me, Mike. Utahns deserve a chance to hear from both of us. Our campaign met the deadline—the ball is in your court now,” McMullin wrote on Twitter, referring to a Monday deadline he said was set by the state’s Debate Commission.
Lee defeated his Republican challengers in the GOP primary for the seat earlier this year and has been leading McMullin in some polling, but the sitting senator and the independent challenger have yet to go head-to-head in debate.
As reported in local outlet KUTV, in the lead-up to the primary Lee attended a Utah GOP-sponsored debate but skipped one hosted by the non-partisan Utah Debate Commission, where an empty podium stood on the debate stage in his place.
“I look forward to debating Evan McMullin on the important issues facing our country. My team has been working with the Debate Commission to secure a date, and I can assure you we will come up with a time that works,” Lee wrote on Twitter Thursday when McMullin confronted him about the Debate Commission’s upcoming deadline.
Independent McMullin, who made a third-party bid for the presidency in 2016, was backed by Utah Democrats earlier this year in a rare move aimed at ousting the Republican incumbent.
Lee, endorsed by former President Trump, has held the Senate seat since 2011. The Hill has reached out to Lee’s campaign and the Utah Debate Commission for comment.
Lee is “slow-walking debate negotiations” in the face of “a neck-and-neck reelection challenge” from McMullin, a spokesperson for McMullin’s campaign told The Hill in a statement.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report last week changed its rating for the Utah Senate race from “Solid R” to “Likely R.” Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the election handicapper from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, amended its “Safe Republican” rating to “Likely Republican” after the June primaries.
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| 2022-09-21T02:29:49Z
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(The Hill) — Expect a Trumpier U.S. House of Representatives next year.
House Republicans are not only forecast to win control of the lower chamber in November’s midterm elections, they’re also poised to bring with them a roster of new arrivals who have embraced former President Donald Trump and his false claims of fraud surrounding his 2020 defeat.
A number of Trump loyalists have bumped off more moderate Republicans in the summer primaries — a list that grew longer on Tuesday with conservative victories in Florida and New York — while a number of other centrists are stepping into retirement.
The combination foreshadows a power shift in the House GOP that has the potential to complicate any bipartisan compromise with President Joe Biden while creating headaches for Republican leaders who will face pressure to demonstrate their governing chops in a new majority.
“I believe that [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy [Calif.] would have a rough time of it,” said David Mayhew, a political scientist at Yale University.
Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, defeated pro-impeachment Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in a Washington GOP primary earlier this month with the help of an endorsement from Trump. Running as an “America First” Republican, he railed against the “establishment” and publicly said that McCarthy, the House GOP leader, should not be Speaker.
And he’s hardly alone.
In the most recent round of primaries, winners in safe Republican House seats include former Trump appointee to the Pentagon Cory Mills, who has said that the 2020 election was “rigged.” Mills would replace outgoing Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.).
New York State GOP Chairman Nick Langworthy, who heavily touted his previous support from Trump in the primary despite not getting a formal endorsement for the race, also won a primary in a safe GOP district on Tuesday. Rep. Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.) ended his reelection bid for that seat due to blowback to his support for an assault weapons ban.
One of the starkest signs that incoming House Republicans will be friendlier to the former president is that Mills and Langworthy were considered the less extreme candidates in their races.
Langworthy defeated Carl Paladino, a gaffe-prone Trump supporter who was endorsed by Trump allies Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), and Elise Stefanik (N.Y.). And Mills faced Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, who was also supported by Gaetz and Greene and accused Mills of being a “RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in name only.”
Sarah Chamberlain, president and CEO of the Republican Main Street Partnership, which supports “governing Republicans” who are willing to work across the aisle, pointed to the defeats of Paladino and Sabatini to argue that loyalty to Trump may not be a defining feature of incoming Republicans.
“When the members sit around a table, Donald Trump is not what they discuss. They discuss Joe Biden and getting things done to help the American people,” Chamberlain said of the candidates supported by her group. “They’re not against them by any means. They voted for him. But he is not a topic of conversation.”
Still, several of the candidates highlighted as “Young Guns” by the National Republican Congressional Committee have also expressed skepticism about the 2020 election, even if they did not make loyalty to Trump a key part of their candidate pitch this year.
Derrick Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL seeking to replace retiring Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but has said he never entered the Capitol and has since distanced himself from the events of that day.
Contributing to the likely power shift, many House Republicans who were critical of Trump or did not overtly embrace him will not be returning in 2022.
Eight of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack either declined to run for reelection or lost their primaries. Others, like Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) and Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.), lost in primaries against other Trump-backed members after being put up against each other due to redistricting.
Meanwhile, Trump allies like Gaetz and Greene sailed through their primaries.
The House Freedom Caucus, the group of hard-line conservatives, is likely to grow. A PAC affiliated with the group, the House Freedom Fund, is supporting Trump-endorsed newcomers Anna Paulina Luna in Florida, Bo Hines in North Carolina, and Jim Bognet in Pennsylvania.
If history is any guide, Republican leaders will have a delicate line to walk if they win back House control with a more conservative majority.
GOP leaders embraced the Tea Party movement in the late aughts, which provided the burst of energy leading directly to their House takeover in 2010. But it was those same conservative majority-makers — and eventual Freedom Caucus founders — who fought their own leadership over everything from government spending to the proposed impeachment of President Obama.
The far-right pressure pushed former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) into retirement, prevented McCarthy from rising to the Speakership in 2015 and was a thorn in the side of Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) during his short stint with the gavel.
Some congressional experts predict the new wave of Trump loyalists will create similar headaches for GOP leaders next year — unless leadership jumps on board.
“Donald Trump was the first Republican candidate for president who truly understood what the Tea Party was all about. The Paul Ryans of this world thought it was about small government. Wrong! It was a populist uprising,” said Bill Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Trump got it right; everybody else got it wrong. And so he has now elevated that big Trump party, which is socially conservative but economically inclined to big government that serves their interests.
“These are not libertarians; they’re anti-libertarians in all sorts of ways,” Galston added. “And that’s the Republican Party now.”
The influence of aggressive, Trump-loving House members and the number of headaches they create for GOP leadership next year may depend on how successful Republicans are in House races overall in this year’s midterms. Many of the newcomer GOP candidates in competitive races trying to unseat Democrats are more centrist, and largely do not talk about the former president.
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a super PAC aligned with McCarthy, has also swooped in to support incumbent members who fought off more extreme challengers.
The CLF deployed a last-minute $50,000 in phone calls to support Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) on Tuesday as he fended off a surprisingly strong challenge from far-right, anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer, who has been banned from multiple social media platforms.
It also helped centrist Republican Rep. David Valadao (Calif.), who voted to impeach Trump, and Rep. Young Kim (Calif.) advance to the general election as they faced more conservative challengers.
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) — Morning anchor Jezzamine Wolk and the Cares Krewe Driven by Chevyland has been hitting local spots to surprise members of the community by taking care of some necessities for them.
On a recent stop, they headed to Piggly Wiggly in Shreveport. There, they met a local woman who is taking care of her 88-year-old mother.
The Cares Krewe made sure to get her favorite Blue Bell ice cream for her. Stay tuned to see where we head next.
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| 2022-09-21T02:30:12Z
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In the six weeks since Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home was raided by the FBI, the ex-president and his allies have come up with all manner of bullshit re: why it was perfectly reasonable for him to take highly classified documents from the White House and refuse to give them back, despite repeated requests to do so from their rightful owner, i.e. the US government. Said bullshit has included things like:
- The boxes got packed in a hurry and no one really knew what was in them.
- “Everyone” brings their “work” home and Trump was no different.
- Trump loves scrapbooking and he was going to use the documents for this completely innocent purpose.
- Federal agents planted the documents at Mar-a-Lago as part of a setup.
- People steal classified documents all the time and it’s never been a big deal until now.
- Melania Trump, and not Donald, was the one who took them, and she should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. (This one is a joke, but if it came down to it, you know that he wouldn’t hesitate for a second to throw his third wife, and several of his children, under the bus.)
But there’s one excuse in particular that’s been widely trotted out by Trump and his pals: that the former president declassified the documents the Feds seized from his house and therefore did nothing wrong, rendering him a victim in all this. The problem with that defense is that (1) more than a dozen ex–White House staffers told CNN that it’s not true and (2) when it comes to the laws Trump may have broken, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the documents were declassified or not. But just for yuks, let’s say it’s true that Trump declassified much of what the FBI agents uncovered at Mar-a-Lago and that having done so could serve as his get-out-of-jail-free card. If that were the case, the ex-president and his legal team would have no problem telling the special master assigned to the case exactly which documents it applied to, right? Apparently, not so much. Possibly because—and we know this might come as a shock given that it’s about famously honest person Donald Trump—it’s a total lie.
In a Monday filing, lawyers for Trump pushed back on a request from the special master—senior US district judge Raymond Dearie, a.k.a. the guy Team Trump personally requested for the case—to disclose “specific information regarding declassification” to the court. Why the bashfulness?
In their filing, Team Trump claimed that they should not have to reveal details about Trump’s (alleged) declassification because such information may be used as a defense in the event of an indictment. And while one can understand why Trump’s attorneys would want to be prepared for criminal charges, not everyone is buying it.
“Why won’t Trump lawyers tell Judge Dearie whether Trump declassified the docs? It’s because the lawyers don’t want to lie and be disbarred and subject their client to a criminal false statement charge,” Andrew Weissmann, former general counsel for the FBI, tweeted on Tuesday.
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| 2022-09-21T02:30:17Z
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The 155 at-risk cats that were flown from overpopulated animal shelters in Florida to Massachusetts and New Jersey earlier this month were adopted as part of NBC Universal Local’s Clear The Shelters campaign.
The flight took off on Aug. 2, the cats received any necessary medical care and were then put up for adoption at Northeast Animal Shelter and MSPCA-Angell.
Each cat has now found a forever home.
On Aug. 30, at the close of NBC’s Clear The Shelters, another 50 dogs will be flown from Louisiana to New Jersey’s Morristown Airport. The dogs will receive medical care before being put up for adoption at St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center.
Clear The Shelters is an annual campaign to promote animal adoption and monetary donations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico during the month of August.
The flights are in partnership with Greater Good Charities‘ Good Flights program, The Animal Rescue Site and Hill’s Pet Nutrition.
Clear The Shelters is an annual effort with NBC and Telemundo-owned and affiliated stations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. The animal adoption campaign first launched in 2015 and has helped more than 700,000 pets find homes.
You can find more information about participating animal shelters, rescues and local adoption events on ClearTheShelters.com or the Spanish-language site DesocuparlosAlbergues.com.
You can also follow Clear The Shelters on Twitter and Instagram to stay up-to-date on this year’s pet adoption and donation news:
- Twitter @ClearTheShelter
- Instagram: cleartheshelters
- Hashtags: #ClearTheShelters & #DesocuparLosAlbergues
To learn more about Clear The Shelters 2022 and search for adoptable pets in your area, visit cleartheshelters.com. You can also donate to your local animal shelters and rescue groups by visiting clearthesheltersfund.org.
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| 2022-09-21T02:30:20Z
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A frequent argument from individuals who believe in reproductive freedom is that the politicians proposing, passing, and enforcing laws restricting what Americans can and cannot do with their own bodies should have to pass a ninth-grade biology class before doing so. While it wouldn’t solve everything—even an anti-choice zealot could, conceivably, read up on how all this works—it would go far in terms of eliminating people who, for instance, think “the female body has ways” to stop pregnancy as a result of rape and that an ectopic pregnancy can be “reimplant[ed].” Or that emergency contraception has anything, whatsoever, to do with fentanyl. Which at least one conservative hoping to be elected to higher office apparently does.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas last month, Matt DePerno, who is running for Michigan attorney general, was asked if there is any law in the state preventing people from using Plan B. “What’s Plan B?” DePerno responded, according to audio obtained by Heartland Signal. After being informed that it’s a form of emergency contraception, DePerno declared that such things must be stopped.
“You gotta figure out how to ban the pill from the state,” DePerno said. Asked if he had any ideas about how to do so, he answered: “You have to stop it at the border. It would be no different than fentanyl…. The state has to ban it, and it should be banned. But it’s just an issue of how do you enforce it; how do you make sure that it stops? That’s your problem.”
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Plan B is a type of emergency contraception designed to prevent pregnancy. Fentanyl is an opioid used for pain management that make up the majority of deaths by overdose in the United States. As Heartland Signal notes, the former has nothing to do with the latter, or US borders, and “is a legal and safe medication that millions of people use.” Last year, GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose face greets you when you look up the word “ignorance” in the dictionary, claimed on the House floor: “Contraception stops a woman from becoming pregnant. The Plan B pill kills a baby in the womb once a woman is already pregnant.” In fact, Plan B merely prevents ovulation and fertilization; it does not end a pregnancy that has already implanted. Unfortunately, many Republicans are idiots who either do not understand this or willfully misconstrue the facts for political gain.
In June, when the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that the court should think about reversing the rulings that protect contraception, same-sex marriage, and same-sex sexual activity.
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| 2022-09-21T02:30:23Z
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MARSHALL, Texas (KTAL/KSHV) – A crowded Marshall adoption center is working to find homes for pets, and a local organization is lending a helping hand.
August is National Clear the Shelters Month, a national campaign working to help pets find their furever homes. The Executive Director of the Marshall Pet Adoption Center, Shelly Godwin, says it can be challenging for pets to find their furever homes.
“It is a throwaway society, and animals are dumped here a lot, and it’s not the animals’ fault. They need a chance to have a loving home, “said Godwin.
The Marshall Pet Adoption Center takes in all animals, mainly cats and dogs. Unfortunately, the shelter only has 37 kennels for dogs which can cause overcrowding within the facility.
“We do have people that bring in their animals that owners surrender. So, striving to be a low kill or no-kill, the shelter just stays full until we get them adopted.”
Lucky for the shelter, a local organization has stepped up to make it easier for families to adopt.
“We do have Pearson Dodge that has offered to pay part of the adoption fee, which we were able to adopt them out for 20 dollars,” said Godwin.
The facility previously hosted free events at the center to clear their shelters and prevent future overcrowding. Other events help new owners take care of adopted pets and make it more affordable.
“We have done a spay/ neuter clinic where we gave away vouchers to get them spayed or neutered at no cost to the owner. We had a vaccine clinic where that was at no cost to the owners or animal.”
Godwin says fostering could be a great option for those who want to help clear the shelters but do not want to invest fully in a pet. The Marshall Pet Adoption Center offers their foster parents medical care, food, and supplies. Foster parents are only responsible for a safe, clean, and loving environment.
“A way to help us is to foster animals to keep puppies like this out of our shelter facility. We can have sick puppies come through any time, and puppies are susceptible to all kinds of diseases.”
The center is always looking for donations. You can drop off items such as bleach, laundry soap, puppy pads, dawn dish soap, pet food, pet formula, and small heating pads at the center at 2502 E. Texas Street in Marshall.
Those wanting to foster an animal can reach out to Jana Hernandez at 903-689-2760 or visit their website: FriendsofMarshallAnimals.org
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| 2022-09-21T02:30:26Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (Loving Living Local)- Enoch Stomp Vineyard and Winery discusses their annual grape stomp event.
The annual Grape Stomp was held on August 20th at the Enoch Stomp Vineyard and Winery’s main location in Harleton, Texas. The event allows participants to have a complete wine-making experience, including harvesting their own grapes and making their own wine to take home. Guests also have the opportunity to add on an actual grape stomping experience where participants will work in pairs in a grape stomping competition.
The competition entails couples working together to stomp grapes and collect the juice. While one teammate stomps, the other collects with the two switching positions halfway through. The couple with the largest volume of grape juice at the end of the allotted time is declared the grand champion.
Don’t miss Enoch Stomp’s upcoming events including a women’s gathering called, Life Together- Belonging. Their website describes it as “a day of exploring the kind of belonging that heals your heart and feeds your soul (without removing your individuality or it becoming one more thing at which you succeed or fail).” The event will include dining, singing, teaching, playing & reflecting.
Visit Enoch Stomp’s website and Facebook page for more information on events, wine tastings, new locations, and event rental space. You can also contact Enoch Stomp at (903) 240-1587 or info@enochsstomp.com. Enoch Stomp is located at 871 Ferguson Rd (CR 4312), Harleton, TX 75651
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| 2022-09-21T02:30:40Z
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(Loving Living Local) – Nova’s Heart and Cornerstone Veterinary Hospital is helping us Clear the Shelters to serve pets of the homeless, Veterans, disabled, and low-income.
Nova’s Heart is a local non-profit organization that provides food, collars, leashes, and vaccinations. Vaccinations are given every Friday from 9 am to 12 pm for cats and dogs. If you are in need of these services please arrive before 11:30 am.
Dr. Caleb Killian is an outreach veterinarian with Cornerstone Veterinary Hospital that works closely with Nova’s Heart. “I go down once a month and help do a rabies clinic on site to help them, you know because rabies is a vaccine that the animals have to have legally yearly, so I help provide that for them, ” stated Dr. Killian.
Rabies clinic and vaccinations are on the 4th Wednesday of every month, administered by Dr. Caleb Killian unless otherwise posted on their Facebook page. Times are from 11 am to 1 pm but it is advised that you arrive as early as possible but no later than 12:30 pm. They do not make appointments.
Nova’s Heart office is in Hope House at 762 Austen Place in Shreveport. Hours of operation: Wednesday and Thursday 9 am – 12:30 pm and Friday 9 am-12 pm. Nova’s Heart is not a shelter but does work closely with local shelters.
Nova’s Heart always welcomes donations and volunteers to help pets in crisis. For more information call 318-900-8887 or email them at novashearts@yahoo.com.
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| 2022-09-21T02:30:48Z
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(NewsNation) — Faced with inflation, some consumers have chosen to hold back discretionary purchases, but Starbucks drinkers have remained loyal.
Coffee sales at grocery stores performed well at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, spiking in mid-March. By September, Americans had reduced buying in supermarkets by 15%, according to a report from Reuters at the time.
In 2021, coffee outperformed other spaces in the dining sector for much of the year, but foot traffic halted in step with the omicron surge, the retail analysis company Placer reported.
Demand for Starbucks has remained steady, and consolidated net revenues were up 9% to a quarterly record $8.2 billion.
“This is a company that buys a lot of ingredients so they’re able to negotiate a very good deal,” said Bruce Clark, an associate professor of marketing at Northeastern University. “In fact, in a time of supply chain disruptions, they may actually have better access to supplies than some others.”
Interim CEO Howard Schultz said during a recent quarterly earnings call that despite inflation, “… we are not currently seeing any measurable reduction in customer spending…” attributing the company’s success to customer loyalty and engagement.
The coffee chain hasn’t been immune to growing costs and raised its prices about 5% within the past year, Schultz reported in the call.
Demand is likely to remain strong as the company prepares to launch a seasonal favorite.
The Pumpkin Spice Latte has become a cultural harbinger of the fall and a boon for Starbucks — one that’s likely to withstand penny-pinching brought on by inflation, Clark said.
“My sense is it may well be recession-proof,” Clark said. “… People are going to still buy them. I think the big question is whether people are going to buy them in the same amount and frequency that they might have done in the past.”
What some analysts reference as a “pumpkin-spice economy” generates between $350 and $500 million in annual sales, Clark said. That includes pumpkin-flavored coffee from Starbucks and other coffee shops, baked goods, alcoholic drinks, and pumpkin-spice-flavored chicken sausage.
The average cost of a Starbucks tall (small) latte in the U.S. is $2.75, according to an analysis by LendingTree company Value Penguin. Prices vary, though. At the world’s largest Starbucks in Chicago, a latte runs between $7.50 and $8.25.
“They are seeing some supply increases, but clearly not enough to break the bank,” Clark said. “For a latte, that’s an expensive drink, the dollar profit margin on a latte will be high.”
For some, lattes are an “affordable luxury” that people are willing to pay for, even during economic hardship.
“There is also evidence that sweets tend to do well in tough economic environments — candy, chocolate, things like that,” Clark said. “And there’s a lot of sugar in lattes so I think there are a lot of reasons to expect that the Pumpkin Spice Latte will hold up pretty well in the presence of inflation and economic uncertainty.”
“There are a lot of emotions and feelings tied up in Pumpkin Spiced Latte coming into the fall,” Clark said.
Not all favor the “PSL,” but the usual polarized takes on pro- versus anti-pumpkin-spice are likely to bring in business, Clark said.
“It’s a way of generating news,” he said. “It’s a way of bringing traffic into restaurants late in August, when restaurant traffic may be pretty low. People are still on vacation. (They) hope to bring more people to the store. (They) hope while they’re in the store, they’ll buy more stuff.”
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| 2022-09-21T02:30:55Z
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The Movement for Black Lives launched a new climate change initiative Thursday, uniting more than 200 Black environmental leaders and organizations nationwide who have pledged to find equitable climate solutions centering on Black Americans and communities.
The Black Hive initiative builds on the movement’s 2021 Red, Black, and Green New Deal and reintroduces its Black Climate Mandate that outlines the urgency for a Black climate agenda and investment in equitable strategies that protect Black Americans specifically.
The announcement, first shared with The Associated Press, comes in the wake of a Supreme Court decision limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and the recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Numerous studies have found Black and other communities of color have borne the brunt of climate and environmental impacts for decades. Black Hive leaders said structural racism, the legacy of enslavement and socioeconomic factors such as redlining, segregation and poverty have made it more likely that Black communities are often located near toxic sites or directly affected by climate change.
“The climate crisis is happening because of corporate greed, government negligence, the divestment of solutions and the investment into the harmful institutions like the fossil fuel industry, that are harming our people,” said Valencia Gunder, national co-lead of The Black Hive. “It’s time for America to address the anti-Black racism that happens here.”
Gunder said she’s already seen the impacts of climate change in her home state of Florida. She’s been doing climate justice work in communities, focusing on the impacts of rising seas, residential displacement, and housing and food security issues. She said farmers in South Florida have told her they’ve started to see saltwater intrusion damaging crops.
“The climate crisis is probably the most important issue that we can work on,” Gunder said. “If we do not hurry up and pay attention and get to resiliency, I believe that we’re going to start seeing more destruction, more harm or death, more illness.”
The Movement for Black Lives is a national network of more than 150 leaders and organizations created to build a broad political home for Black people to organize across the country and within their communities. The movement has expanded beyond policing to include issues such as climate change and environmental justice. The collective is calling on people to take its Black climate and environmental justice pledge and commit to advancing The Black Hive’s Black Climate Mandate that’s expected to be updated this year.
The Black Hive leaders say they plan to offer resources, data and technology, communications and disaster response support to local communities and Black-led organizations. The initiative is focusing on several areas: water, energy, land, labor, economy and reparations, democracy, health, and global Black diaspora solidarity. Participants also plan to focus on grassroots organizing and community education to raise awareness.
For California organizer Aleta Alston-Toure′, the climate initiative feels especially timely.
Advocates like Alston-Toure′ have questioned recent climate efforts led by the federal government, including the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law this month by President Joe Biden. Its proponents have stated billions of dollars in climate and environment investments will flow to communities nationwide that long have been plagued by pollution and climate threats. But advocates say it’s not bold enough in addressing climate issues affecting Black Americans, and they criticize provisions in the bill that support fossil fuel expansion.
“These solutions are Band-Aids,” said Alston-Toure′, who is a member of the Parable of the Sower Intentional Community Cooperative spanning several states. “There’s no solution if Black (communities) and Indigenous nations, especially the Gulf South, have to suffer in order to have Band-Aid solutions for the wider public. We want to be taken serious and know that our votes matter because this is a lynching of our communities, and we have to be heard.”
In June, 14 environmental justice organizations began to receive money under the Justice40 initiative — a Biden administration pledge to improve the environment in disadvantaged communities and help them prepare for climate change. The initiative promises to funnel 40% of all investments in climate and environment to communities that live with environmental burdens such as diesel soot, lead water pipes and lack of access to green spaces.
But Alston-Toure′ said communities need to be able to trust that money from these new initiatives will actually go directly toward Black-led organizations. She said too often the majority of funding goes to organizations or individuals not rooted within affected communities.
A study last year by the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School found that between 2016 and 2017, 12 national environmental grant makers awarded $1.34 billion to organizations in the Gulf and Midwest regions — but only $18 million, or 1.3%, was awarded to groups dedicated to environmental justice.
Last year, the Donors of Color, a philanthropic group dedicated to pushing for racial equity in funding environmental projects nationwide, launched a pledge drive challenging the nation’s top climate funders to shift 30% of their donations toward environmental efforts led by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and other people of color.
Alabama resident the Rev. Michael Malcom, founder and executive director of The People’s Justice Council, said he’s hopeful the Movement for Black Lives’ new climate initiative will focus efforts on communities long ignored and will bring real change.
“We often suffer in silence in the South,” Malcom said. “We often suffer from industrial pollution, illegal land use and in even legal but unwanted land use and our communities. We have the flooding that happens in our communities, we experience the industrial pollution in our communities. Those Black and brown and Indigenous communities need a voice and somebody to be able to speak for them. And who better to represent those than communities of faith. We are addressing climate change and we’re speaking the language of our communities.”
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AP writer Drew Costley in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
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Stafford, based in Detroit, is a national investigative race writer for the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kat__stafford.
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| 2022-09-21T02:31:11Z
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SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — A pipeline operator said Thursday that it has reached a settlement with Southern California tourism companies, fishermen and other businesses that sued after a crude oil spill off the coast last year near Huntington Beach.
Amplify Energy Corp., which owns the pipeline that ruptured and faces a criminal charge for its oversight, said in a statement that claims have been settled in the class-action lawsuit filed by businesses affected by the October spill of about 25,000 gallons (94,600 liters) of crude into the Pacific Ocean.
The company did not say how much the businesses would be paid but said its insurance policies will cover the cost of the settlement, which would still need to be approved by a federal court.
“Although we are unable to provide additional detail at this time, we negotiated in good faith and believe we have come to a reasonable and fair resolution,” Martyn Willsher, Amplify’s president and chief executive, said in the statement.
The pipeline rupture sent blobs of crude washing ashore in surf-friendly Huntington Beach and other coastal communities.
While less severe than initially feared, the spill about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) offshore shuttered beaches for a week and fisheries for more than a month, oiled birds and threatened wetlands that communities have been striving to restore.
Attorneys for the businesses that sued said in a statement that the settlement includes monetary relief but they didn’t provide details. The agreement doesn’t apply to the operators of ships accused of dragging anchors in the harbor and causing damage to the pipeline months before the spill.
“All rights to continue pursuing claims against the ship related entities are expressly reserved by both the Class Plaintiffs and the Amplify entities,” the statement said.
The settlement also doesn’t resolve Houston-based Amplify’s claims against an organization that helps oversee marine traffic.
Amplify contends that two ships during a January 2021 storm dragged their anchors across the pipeline that carried crude from offshore oil platforms to the coast.
Amplify also faces a criminal charge related to the pipeline leak.
U.S. prosecutors charged Amplify and two of its subsidiaries with illegally discharging oil and claimed the companies failed to respond to eight leak detection system alarms over a 13-hour period that should have alerted them to the spill. Amplify has said workers believed they were false alarms.
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| 2022-09-21T02:31:19Z
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TOKYO (AP) — The operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant said Thursday it is further postponing the start of the removal of highly radioactive melted fuel from its damaged reactors because of delays in the development of a remote-controlled robotic arm.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings had originally planned to begin removing melted fuel from the Unit 2 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant last year, 10 years after the disaster triggered by a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.
That plan was postponed until later this year, and now will be delayed further until about autumn next year because of additional work needed to improve the performance of the robotic arm, TEPCO said.
The giant arm, jointly developed by Veolia Nuclear Solutions of Britain and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has been transported to Japan and is being adjusted at a testing facility south of the Fukushima plant.
The delay won’t affect the overall decommissioning at the plant, which is expected to take 30-40 years, TEPCO said. Experts have said the completion target is too optimistic.
During the accident, an estimated 880 tons of highly radioactive nuclear fuel in the three damaged reactors melted and fell to the bottom of their primary containment vessels, where it hardened, most likely mixed with broken parts of the reactor and the concrete foundation. Its removal is by far the toughest challenge of the decommissioning process.
TEPCO has made progress in assessing the condition of the fuel in the reactors in recent years by sending remote-controlled robots inside the primary containment vessels. But data and images provided by the probes are still partial, and experts say it’s too early to imagine when or how the cleanup will end.
The continuing need to cool the fuel remaining in the reactors has resulted in massive amounts of treated but still radioactive used cooling water that is being stored in about 1,000 tanks on the grounds of the plant.
The government has announced a plan to start releasing the stored water into the sea after further treatment and dilution in the spring of 2023, a plan that has been fiercely opposed by local residents, the fishing community and neighboring countries.
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| 2022-09-21T02:31:27Z
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CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will accelerate the world’s shift to renewable energy because of price shocks in oil and gas, a U.S. climate envoy said Thursday.
U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Rick Duke was speaking at an Australian National University forum after meetings with Australian government officials on bilateral cooperation in transitioning to net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.
Duke described the Russian invasion that began six months ago as “one of the biggest geopolitical drivers at the moment” for a global shift toward renewable energy.
“What has sometimes been lost in people’s understanding of the reverberations on that front is that when you look at what countries are actually doing in response, it’s going to accelerate the energy transition,” Duke said.
“The European Union has tripled down on its efforts to deploy renewables and heat pumps and to electrify its vehicle fleet and otherwise respond to this crisis,” he added. “That’s going to take time … but the pace is quickening because of the conflict.”
Meanwhile, Australia plans to reduce its heavy reliance on solar panels manufactured in China, a Russian ally, by diversifying its trading partners as the Australian government scales up its transition to renewables.
Kushla Munro, who heads the government’s International Climate Division, said Australia was focusing on India in developing an international collaboration on the production of solar panels and green hydrogen.
Australia had also prioritized green energy technology partnerships with Japan, South Korea and the United States to avoid the supply chain constraints that have arisen through the pandemic, Munro said.
The Australian government elected in May has increased Australia’s 2030 emissions reduction target to 42% from the previous administration’s goal of 26% to 28% below 2005 levels.
The United States is aiming for a 50% to 52% reduction by the end of the decade.
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| 2022-09-21T02:31:42Z
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BEIJING (AP) — Asian stock markets followed Wall Street higher on Friday ahead of a speech by the Federal Reserve chair that investors hoped would shed light on plans for more interest rate hikes.
Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul advanced. Shanghai was little-changed. Oil prices rose.
Investors focused on Jerome Powell’s speech at the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole meeting for signs of when the U.S. central bank, trying to cool inflation that is running at multi-decade highs, might raise rates again and by how much.
Traders worry the Fed’s four rate hikes this year, plus increases by central banks in Europe and Asia, might derail global growth. Some expect the Fed to reverse course and start cutting rates in 2023 due to signs the U.S. economy might be cooling.
“The Fed could start thinking about a pause in rate hikes, potentially for the end of the year,” said Thomas Costerg of Pictet in a report. “However, it is still too early to talk about rate cuts.”
The Shanghai Composite Index shed less than 0.1% to 3,244.98 while the Nikkei 225 in Tokyo rose 0.6% to 28,643.15. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong gained 0.5% to 20,065.69.
The Kospi in Seoul added 0.1% to 2,480.46 and Sydney’s S&P-ASX 200 surged 1% to 7,118.20.
India’s Sensex opened up 0.4% at 59,031.50. New Zealand, Bangkok and Jakarta declined while Singapore rose.
Global markets have swung between optimism about stronger corporate profits and unease about possible recession risks.
On Wall Street, the S&P surged 1.4% to 4,199.12 for its biggest daily increase in nearly two weeks.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1% to 33,291.78. The Nasdaq composite climbed 1.7% to 12,639.27.
Also Thursday, the government reported the U.S. economy didn’t contract by as much as previously thought during the spring. It shrank 0.6% on an annualized basis, the government said, less than the previous 0.9% estimate.
The Fed’s Jackson Hole meeting in Wyoming, which attracts economists from around the world, has been the setting for market-defining announcements in the past.
Investors are hoping for clarity from Powell after Fed officials said they still supported rate hikes despite hopes inflation might be peaking.
In energy markets, benchmark U.S. crude gained 80 cents to $93.32 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $2.37 on Thursday to $92.52. Brent crude, the price basis for international trading, advanced 78 cents to $99.24 per barrel in London. It lost $1.88 the previous session to $99.34.
The dollar gained to 136.89 yen from Thursday’s 136.46 yen. The euro edged up to 99.71 cents from 99.69 cents.
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| 2022-09-21T02:31:50Z
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JACKSON HOLE, Wyoming (AP) — When officials of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City sought a location for an annual economic symposium in 1982, they chose Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a simple reason: It had fly-fishing.
Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman at the time, was known to enjoy the pastime, and it was hoped that the opportunity to do some fishing would draw Volcker away from Washington, D.C.’s late August heat. The ploy worked, and the Fed has held a conference there in late August ever since.
Now, though, warmer waters in Jackson Lake and the Snake River it empties into have led the Park Service to urge anglers to restrict their fishing to the morning hours. Catch-and-release fishing, the most common practice here, is harder on the fish when water is warmer, and the fish are also harder to catch later in the day.
It is just one example of how the consequences of climate change are now in plain view to Fed officials during their annual summer symposium in Jackson Hole. Wyoming’s Teton County has been afflicted by the same long-term drought that has lowered rivers and reservoir levels throughout the West.
Some water activities typically enjoyed by visitors to the Jackson Lake Lodge, where Fed officials are convening, have been canceled this summer. The Colter Bay Marina has been closed because of low water levels, an economic blow to the small businesses that rent motorboats and other equipment.
Many academic economists and central bankers from around the world attend the Fed’s conclave in Jackson Hole, a valley nestled amid the majestic Teton mountain peaks. The signs of climate damage are among the ways in which the region’s challenges are evident alongside the idyllic setting. The nearby town of Jackson is also struggling with soaring home prices, labor shortages and widening economic inequality.
Jackson Lake, visible from the lodge that hosts the Fed’s symposium, is just 36% full. That is nearly as severe as last summer, when drought conditions were even worse and water levels reached one of the lowest levels in 30 years.
Rain has been better this year, though it was so heavy in June that it caused major flooding in nearby Yellowstone Park, closing sections for the park for weeks. The shutdown has thrown many wildlife guides and other park employees out of work, said Cody Pitz, a local coordinator for the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group.
Chair Jerome Powell and the rest of the Fed are embroiled in a public debate over just how far the central bank should go to take account of climate issues in its policymaking. The Fed is under pressure from environmental activists to consider climate change in how it regulates banks. Many activists argue that the financial system is at risk because, among other things, rising waters could increasingly flood real estate and force developers to default on property loans.
Some such groups, including the Sunrise Movement and 350.org, are holding protests near the lodge and have called on the Fed to stop supporting the fossil fuel industry. During the pandemic, the Fed unveiled a lending program to bolster medium-sized businesses that critics charged was made available to oil and gas drillers, though few loans were made overall and the program was temporary.
Yet the Fed has also absorbed criticism from congressional Republicans for the modest steps it’s taken to incorporate climate change into its regulatory oversight. GOP senators, including those on a committee that oversees the central bank, argue that the issue is not part of the Fed’s purview.
Last year, though, the Fed declared that climate change “poses significant challenges for the global economy and financial system, with implications for the structure of economic activity, the safety and soundness of financial institutions and the stability of the financial sector more broadly.”
And at a congressional confirmation hearing in January, Powell declared, “Our role on climate change is a limited one but it is an important one, and it is to assure that the banking institutions that we regulate understand their risks and can manage them.”
In early 2021, the Fed became the last major central bank to join the Network for the Greening of the Financial System, an international group that focuses on global warming and financial regulation.
In the meantime, Jared Baeker, executive director of the Jackson-based Snake River Fund, pointed out that it’s unusual for the lake to become so low by August. In the past, the water level typically bottomed out closer to October.
But snow packs in the Teton Mountains, he said, are smaller and are melting earlier, leaving less water later in the summer. The damage will likely increase and require more action by state, local and federal authorities, he said.
“We’re a climate-dependent economy,” Baeker said, “whether it’s skiing in the winter or boating and fly fishing in the summer. Without a doubt, policy is important there.”
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| 2022-09-21T02:31:58Z
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DESERT CENTER, Calif. (AP) — The main highway from Los Angeles to Phoenix was damaged by a flash flood that washed out part of the road through the Southern California desert in the latest bout of punishing monsoonal thunderstorms that have hit the region this summer.
The newest round of flooding started Wednesday evening, damaging a roadway that was part of a detour past a repair project along eastbound Interstate 10 near the small community of Desert Center, about 165 miles (265 km) east of Los Angeles.
Traffic in both directions was halted initially, but westbound lanes for motorists heading from Arizona to California reopened later.
All eastbound traffic was diverted until the California Department of Transportation managed to reopen one lane of the highway that was being repaired.
Officials recommended that people heading from Southern California use Interstates 8 or 40, which are major detours.
Photos posted by Caltrans showed water rushing through a deep gouge in the pavement of the highway. Flooding also affected other roads in the region, including State Routes 177, 78 and 62.
A flash flood in the same area in July 2015 washed out a bridge on the eastbound side of I-10 and eroded the ground under the westbound bridge.
The interstate was closed for nearly a week for repair of the westbound bridge, which then carried traffic on single lanes in each direction. The eastbound side did not reopen until September.
The National Weather Service said more flooding was possible through Thursday throughout a large swath of Southern California’s mountains and deserts.
Flash floods earlier this summer badly damaged roads in Death Valley National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and on the southern side of Joshua Tree National Park.
Officials called the Aug. 5 deluge in Death Valley historic. Hundreds of visitors were initially stranded by floodwaters and debris-covered roads. It took about two weeks for the park to reopen its most popular areas.
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| 2022-09-21T02:32:05Z
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DETROIT (AP) — California will require all new cars, trucks and SUVs sold in the state to run on electricity or hydrogen by 2035 in an ambitious move away from gasoline-powered vehicles and the pollution they emit.
The requirements come in phases starting in 2026, and it will take 13 years for them become fully effective. But there are many challenges to meeting them.
EVs now cost substantially more than gas-powered vehicles. There are shortages of precious metals needed for their batteries. The U.S. has little battery manufacturing capacity.
But a lot can change in 13 years. Here’s what we know about the problem areas and what’s being done about them:
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WILL AUTOMAKERS BE ABLE TO MAKE ENOUGH ELECTRIC VEHICLES?
More than likely. During the first half of this year, electric vehicle sales accounted for about 15% of California’s new vehicle market. New vehicle sales in the state normally run around 2 million per year. That’s roughly a 1.5 million difference that has to be made up by 2035. But almost every day, automakers are announcing new EV models, battery factories and assembly plants. Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Hyundai-Kia, Stellantis and VinFast have announced plans for 10 U.S. battery plants.
“New plants are coming in and old plants are being converted,” said Sam Fiorani, vice president of AutoForecast Solutions. “The plans are in place for a large amount of vehicles being ready for the U.S. and global markets.”
The big ifs, though, are whether there will be enough precious metals, such as lithium, to make the batteries, and whether EV prices will come down quickly enough. Laurie Holmes, senior manager of government affairs for Kia, told California officials Thursday that the industry could have difficulty meeting sales targets. She urged the state to support incentives for consumers to buy EVs and to help build out a charging system.
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CAN THE ELECTRIC GRID HANDLE THE LOAD?
The California Energy Commission expects electric vehicles to add only a small amount of power use in the next 10 years. The commission estimates that 3.7 million light-duty electric vehicles will be in use in the state in 2030, and they will account for only about 2.6% of electricity use during peak hours. David Reichmuth, a senior engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said EV charging can be timed to off-peak hours, especially during the day when wind and solar power are more available. Utilities will be able to send messages to cars to start or stop charging depending on electricity demand, he said.
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WON’T ELECTRIC VEHICLES BE TOO EXPENSIVE FOR MANY PEOPLE?
That’s possible, although prices are coming down, and they are expected to get lower as costs are spread out among more vehicles and new battery chemistries are developed that don’t use many expensive precious metals. Currently most U.S. EVs are targeted at higher-income luxury or pickup-truck buyers and start at $40,000 or more, beyond the reach of many. But prices are starting to come down. For instance, General Motors says it will offer a small Chevrolet SUV with a starting price tag of around $30,000 that’s expected to get close to 300 miles (500 kilometers) per charge. The federal government next year will offer $7,500 tax credits for EVs made in North America, bringing purchase prices down. And California is offering cash, rebates and special financing for low-income buyers. Also, EV buyers will save on fuel and maintenance costs.
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DO EVS REALLY POLLUTE LESS, GIVEN MANUFACTURING AND MINING OF METALS FOR BATTERIES?
Multiple studies, including some by the Massachussets Institute of Technology, say yes. While there is pollution from mining, EVs are so much cleaner than gas vehicles on the road that it only takes a short time for them to make up for the mining. A study released this summer by the Union of Concerned Scientists looked at lifetime emissions, including the manufacturing process.
“Altogether, the lifetime emissions for an electric car or and electric pickup are less than half that of a gasoline vehicle,” Reichmuth said. The gap between gas and electric will grow as more electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind and solar, he said.
“There’s nothing that we’re going to do when it comes to aggressively promoting electrification that will be worse for the planet than burning fossil fuels,” said Margo Oge, chair of the International Council for Clean Transportation and a former top U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official.
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WILL OTHER STATES FOLLOW CALIFORNIA?
Currently 17 other states have adopted California’s greenhouse gas emissions requirements, most on the coasts. In total they account for about 40% of all U.S. new vehicle sales. The state of Washington has already started the process to follow the EV sales requirements, and others are expected to. It will take the other states longer to go through the process, and many don’t have the electric vehicle demand or charging infrastructure that California does.
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Ronayne reported from Sacramento, California.
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| 2022-09-21T02:32:13Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Fewer Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as the labor market continues to stand out as one of the strongest segments of the U.S. economy.
Applications for jobless aid for the week ending Aug. 20 fell by 2,000 to 243,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
The four-week average for claims, which evens out some of the week-to-week volatility, rose by 1,500 to 247,000.
The number of Americans collecting traditional unemployment benefits fell by 19,000 the week that ended Aug. 13, to 1.42 million.
First-time applications generally reflect layoffs and are often seen as an early indicator of where the job market is headed.
Hiring in the United States in 2022 has been remarkably strong even as the country faces rising interest rates and weak economic growth.
U.S. employers added 528,000 jobs in July, according to the Labor Department, more than double what forecasters had expected. The unemployment rate dipped to 3.5%, tying a 50-year low reached just before coronavirus pandemic slammed the U.S. economy in early 2020.
But there are other challenges. Consumer prices have been surging, rising 8.5% in July from a year earlier — down slightly from June’s 40-year high 9.1%. To combat inflation, the Federal Reserve has raised its benchmark short-term interest rate four times this year.
On Friday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell will deliver a speech that could shed more light on how high or how fast the central bank may raise interest rates in the coming months.
Higher borrowing costs have taken a toll. The economy contracted in the first half of the year — one measure suggesting the onset of a recession. But the strength of the job market has been inconsistent with an economic downturn.
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| 2022-09-21T02:32:21Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.6% annual rate from April through June, the government said Thursday in an upgrade from its initial estimate. It marked a second straight quarter of economic contraction, which meets one informal sign of a recession.
Most economists, though, have said they doubt the economy is in or on the verge of a recession, given that America’s job market remains robust, with strong hiring, low unemployment and widespread openings. Still, inflation is near a four-decade high and is punishing consumers and businesses. And the Federal Reserve’s aggressive efforts to tame inflation through steep interest rate hikes are raising the risk of an eventual recession.
In its revised estimate Thursday, the Commerce Department calculated that the nation’s gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic output — contracted last quarter, though less than the 1.6% annual decline in the January-March period. In its previous estimate for the April-June quarter, the government had estimated that the economy had shrunk at a 0.9% rate.
Consumer spending, which accounts for nearly 70% of U.S. economic activity, grew at a 1.5% annual pace last quarter, faster than Commerce initially estimated but down from 1.8% from January through March.
By contrast, government spending and business investment declined. And inventories tumbled as businesses slowed their restocking of shelves, shaving 1.8 percentage points from GDP.
Rising interest rates hammered the housing market. Home construction plunged 16.2%.
In its drive to curb inflation, the Fed has raised its benchmark interest rate four times this year by increasingly large increments. By raising borrowing rates, the central bank is making it costlier to take out a mortgage or an auto or business loan. The idea is that consumers and businesses will borrow and spend less, thereby helping cool the economy and slow inflation.
In the meantime, signs of economic weakness are growing. The rise in borrowing costs has weakened the housing market, in particular. Sales of both new and existing homes are down sharply, and the pace of home construction in July sank to its lowest point since early last year. Similarly, retail sales were flat last month, with inflation and higher loan rates forcing many households to spend more cautiously.
Under Chair Jerome Powell, the Fed is aiming for a “soft landing,” whereby the economy slows enough to reduce hiring and wage growth without causing a recession and lowers inflation back to the Fed’s 2% annual target. But by tightening credit even while the economy has slowed, the Fed is heightening the risk that its rate hikes will trigger a downturn. The surge in inflation and fear of a recession have eroded consumer confidence and fanned public anxiety about the economy.
But the job market remains resilient. Employers are adding a robust average of 470,000 jobs a month, and unemployment is down to 3.5%, tying a pre-pandemic 50-year low.
“The economy remains a puzzle with economic growth still negative, but job layoffs remain surprisingly low,” said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at the research firm FWDBONDS LLC. “The recession everyone knows is coming isn’t here yet.”
In recent weeks, inflation pressures have begun to slow modestly, driven by a steady drop in gas prices from their lofty highs, along with lower measures of overall inflation. In July, consumer prices were 8.5% more than they were a year earlier, down from a 9.1% year-over-year jump in June. And on a monthly basis, prices were unchanged from June to July.
Still, the costs of many necessities, notably food and rent, have shown little sign of moderating and continue to squeeze millions of households.
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| 2022-09-21T02:32:28Z
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A coalition of environmental groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday over its refusal to regulate some older coal ash dumps, claiming they are polluting air and groundwater.
A lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington D.C. seeks to compel the agency to review and revise regulations it says are “inadequate to protect human health and the environment” from the solid waste produced by coal-burning power plants.
The EPA first began regulating coal ash disposal in 2015, prompted by the 2008 collapse of a six-story earthen dam outside a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tennessee. The disaster released more than a billion gallons of coal ash sludge onto 300 surrounding acres (about 121 hectares), knocking homes off their foundations and fouling the Emory River.
When EPA was crafting its coal ash regulations, many of those concerned about the possible health effects of the ash hoped the agency would declare it to be hazardous waste. That didn’t happen, but EPA did create special rules for its disposal. They included location restrictions, liner requirements to prevent groundwater contamination and groundwater monitoring to detect leaks.
Not all coal ash disposal sites were included in the new regulations, however. EPA specifically exempted landfills that stopped receiving new waste before the rule went into effect. Since then, many of the regulated landfills that require groundwater monitoring have subsequently reported unsafe levels of arsenic and other chemicals in nearby groundwater. The lawsuit posits that older, unregulated landfills must also be polluting and should be regulated.
In addition, the contamination from the older landfills could be masking problems at newer landfills that are often on the same property, the lawsuit states. That’s because the operators of the regulated landfills don’t have to address groundwater contamination if they can show that it is coming from another source.
Neither the TVA nor the EPA responded to a request for comment on Thursday morning.
The lawsuit spotlights Bull Run power plant in Clinton, Tennessee, which is also run by TVA, the nation’s largest public utility.
The site contains three separate but adjacent coal ash landfills. One closed in 1992. The second closed in 2015 — just before the EPA regulations took effect. The third opened in 2015 and is an active landfill. Even though the groundwater at the new landfill shows significantly high levels of boron, sulfate and other chemicals, TVA does not have to take action because an engineering report attributes the contamination to “pre-existing groundwater conditions.”
One of the plaintiff groups is Tennessee-based Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment. Member Todd Waterman said in a telephone interview that he has seen friends who helped clean up the Kingston coal ash spill sicken and die. Now he is worried about what the ash at the Bull Run plant could be doing to his drinking water.
“I’m deeply concerned for my community,” he said in a phone interview about the plant scheduled to shut down next year. “I don’t want TVA to just walk away from that plant and leave all that contamination in place.”
Other plaintiffs include the Hoosier Environmental Council in Indiana, the Indiana State Conference and the LaPorte County Branch of the NAACP, Clean Power Lake County in Illinois, and several national groups including the Sierra Club and Earthjustice, which filed the suit.
The EPA is required to review and, if necessary revise, regulations like those for coal ash disposal every three years, something it has failed to do, according to the lawsuit. Plaintiffs are asking the judge to order a review of the regulations, especially the exemption for older coal ash landfills. They estimate there are close to 300 landfills exempt from regulation in 38 states.
“Regulations addressing these landfills would prevent exposure to deadly coal ash constituents, protect drinking water sources and aquatic ecosystems, and lead to much needed cleanups nationwide,” the lawsuit states.
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| 2022-09-21T02:32:36Z
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JACKSON HOLE, Wyoming (AP) — A half-hour drive or so from the resort where the high priests of international finance — leading economists and central bank officials — have convened in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to discuss the world’s economic challenges, Ash Hermanowski oversees the distribution of about 1,200 free meals a day.
At a food bank called Jackson Cupboard, Hermanowski hands out meals from a commercial garage after being forced from a previous site by a malfunctioning sprinkler. The food bank couldn’t afford any other place in town.
Just across the street, The Glenwood, a collection of townhomes that will sell for millions, is nearing completion. “Unparalleled luxury,” its website says, in a “truly relaxing oasis.”
It’s the “ultimate irony,” Hermanowski said. “The staff and I, we talk about it all the time. We all struggle to live here, and they’re building high-end residences. That dichotomy exists all over town, but people refuse to see it.”
As the Federal Reserve’s annual economic symposium gets under way Thursday at a lodge in Grand Teton National Park, some of the very problems Fed officials are grappling with — high inflation, soaring rental costs and home prices and wide economic inequalities — are starkly evident near the idyllic mountain setting.
On Friday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell will deliver a speech that could signal how high or how fast the central bank may raise interest rates in the coming months. Powell’s remarks will be scrutinized by Wall Street traders and economists and could potentially cause sharp swings in financial markets.
In its drive to tame the worst inflation bout the nation has endured in four decades, the Powell Fed has embarked on its fastest series of rate hikes since the early 1980s. The Fed is trying to slow the economy just enough to cool inflation without causing a recession — a notoriously delicate task.
Inflation is particularly high in the town of Jackson and the surrounding Teton County, which, even before the pandemic erupted two years ago, was the wealthiest and most unequal place in the nation. (Jackson Hole is the name of the broader valley.) The state of Wyoming has calculated that the cost of living in the county at the end of 2021 was 68% higher than in the rest of the state — with housing costs 130% higher.
At the food bank, Hermanowski says, demand has escalated from a year ago as surging food and gas prices have sapped the budgets of their clients. Roughly 85% of the food bank’s recipients have a job, often more than one, said Sharel Lund, executive director of one22, a nonprofit that includes Jackson Cupboard.
Like many resort towns, Jackson has always been expensive. But the pandemic turbocharged the disparities that have widened the gap between the wealthy and everyone else. Real estate prices soared as many affluent families, seeking to escape crowded cities, moved into the Jackson area or spent more time at vacation homes they already owned.
With many office professionals able to work remotely, the area’s natural beauty became an alluring draw. Wyoming’s low-tax status has also proved appealing to high-income earners.
Jackson, a town of about 25,000 people year-round, still retains its aura as an old Western town, with its archways made from elk antlers around the town square. The square is lined with a “Cowboy Bar” and an old-timey “Five and Dime” shop.
Yet wedged in among such outlets are symbols of the increasingly luxe Jackson: High-end jewelry shops and a Swarovski crystal store that is selling a bald eagle figurine for $9,600.
“We definitely see both sides of it here,” said Hannah Cooley, executive director of Hole Food Rescue, a nonprofit that redistributes leftover food from restaurants and bakeries. “You have the ultra-wealthy with their massive houses. And then you have three immigrant families crammed into a one-bedroom apartment.”
Already-high home prices and rents in Jackson have jumped further since the pandemic, just as they have nationally, a particular hardship for people who work as housekeepers, chefs and waiters at resorts. The median price for a home: $3 million, twice what it was five years ago. The average apartment rent in Teton County jumped 12.4% last year, to $2,780, according to state government data.
Jonathan Schechter, a member of Jackson’s Town Council, says that according to the most recent IRS data, the average income in Teton County in 2019 was $312,442, highest in the nation and nearly 50% above the second-highest, Manhattan.
April Norton, director of the Jackson/Teton County Affordable Housing Department, points to a major obstacle to home construction: 97% of the county’s land is federally owned and can’t be developed. Compounding the squeeze, retiring workers who bought homes at affordable prices decades ago are now selling them for eye-popping prices that many current workers, even higher-income professionals, can’t afford.
Norton’s in-laws recently retired from jobs as an engineer and accountant in Jackson. Having built their own home in the 1970s, they will eventually be able to sell it for a price far above what current engineers or accountants could afford. A neighbor just sold a home for $8 million.
The county is trying multiple approaches to address the shortage of affordable housing. They include building homes available only to people who work locally and with caps on price appreciation. Such “deed-restricted” homes have still sold for more than $700,000, evidence of the intense demand and limited supply.
Still, a county report shows there is a waitlist of roughly 1,500 families seeking affordable housing, up from 1,100 last year.
The housing crunch has exacerbated worker shortages that are plaguing the county, a problem being felt by employers across the nation. Norton said the school system lost 60 teachers last year, in part because of a lack of housing. Many workers, including nurses and services workers, are stuck commuting from places like Victor, Idaho, a roughly 45-minute drive over the 8,500 foot Teton pass, which is treacherous for much of the winter.
“Retention of staff is the No. 1 challenge for businesses here,” said Anna Olson, president of the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce. Some businesses, she said, are buying housing and providing it to workers at below-market rents. There’s also a tax initiative on the ballot this November, which, if approved, will provide about $100 million to support more housing development.
As more wealthy people have moved to Jackson, they have often sought out landscapers, nannies and other service workers, Norton said, adding to the demand for jobs and intensifying the shortage of affordable housing.
On Wednesday, the local newspaper, the Jackson Hole News & Guide, featured eight pages of help-wanted ads but only a half-page of listings for housing. Many were for temporary winter rentals, because residents often leave the area to escape the cold.
One two-bedroom condo was asking $5,250 a month.
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| 2022-09-21T02:32:44Z
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LANCASTER, Ca. (AP) — Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated $44 million to the Oregon-based mentoring organization, Friends of the Children, which supports children at risk of entering the welfare system by pairing them with a longtime mentor.
The unrestricted gift, announced Thursday, provides $15 million to the organization’s national headquarters and splits $29 million in direct donations to 12 of the organization’s chapters from Tampa Bay to Detroit to Los Angeles.
Terri Sorensen, the CEO of Friends of the Children, said Scott sent word through intermediaries about why she’d chosen her organization.
“She said that they were doing this because they really hoped more people would find out about Friends of the Children,” said Sorensen, adding that she worked with The Bridgespan Group as part of the vetting process for several months before the amount was finalized.
That reflects what Scott has often said about her donations, writing in a 2020 Medium post that she and her team rigorously study organizations, in part, “to pave the way for unsolicited and unexpected gifts given with full trust and no strings attached.”
“Because our research is data-driven and rigorous,” Scott wrote, “our giving process can be human and soft.”
Sorensen recalled the “surreal” moment in June when she learned of Scott’s gift. She was visiting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where there was limited cell phone service, and had to drive around to get a signal to take the call.
“I was actually in a ditch when I got the word,” she said.
Scott’s donation nearly doubles the organization’s overall resources, since the national network’s budget for 2022 was $50 million. Founded in 1993, Friends of the Children pays a professional mentor to befriend and support children and their families for 12 years starting in kindergarten.
In 2020, the latest year federal figures are available more than 631,000 children passed through the foster care system. Often families who come in contact with the foster care system have encountered some kind of trauma and have, for whatever reason, not been able to get support at a less critical moment, Sandra Gasca-Gonzalez, a vice president at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said.
The foundation previously supported Friends of the Children and Gasca-Gonzalez said she hopes one of the outcomes of philanthropic support is to produce evidence and research so that it can qualify for evidence-based government funding.
“The ones that wrap around the whole family are the ones that are really showing some promise,” she said.
In the past eight years, the network expanded from having five chapters to 26, with the help of a $4 million grant in 2016 from the Corporation for National and Community Service, a U.S. government agency. That grant was meant to help the organization expand its program and study the impact it had on children living in poverty.
The chapters plan to use Scott’s donation to pay higher wages to mentors, who they call “friends,” and expand to serve more children, Sorensen said, though she emphasized that each chapter is run independently.
The national headquarters will add staff to increase the administrative support like grant writing and accounting they provide to chapters and establish an impact fund for chapters seeking grants.
The gift is the latest from Scott to be made public and extends the pattern of her giving to other organizations that provide mentorship and support to children like Junior Achievement USA, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
Like nearly all of her more than $12 billion in giving since 2019, Scott’s donation to Friends of the Children was unrestricted and Sorensen said they intend to spend the funds within five years. Scott’s large gifts have challenged other wealthy donors and foundations to assess their own giving strategies.
Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, donate in relative secrecy. Giving as individuals and not through a foundation means their donations are known only when the recipients disclose them or through her occasional blog posts. She’s written previously that she doesn’t respond to press inquiries in an effort not to overshadow the work of the organizations to which she donates.
Los Angeles, which has one of the highest number of children in foster care than anywhere in the country, is one of the chapters of Friends of the Children that will receive the gifted funds. The organization has two locations there, including one that opened in 2019 in Antelope Valley, located about an hour north of the city. That office won funding from the county mental health department to divert children at risk of being separated from their parents or guardians from entering foster care.
“We’re getting reports from there, the parents and their caregivers, that not only do they have hopes and dreams for their children, but they have their own hopes and dreams and don’t feel so alone by having a friend by their side,” Sorensen said, referring to the mentor assigned to the family.
Their chapters now partner with a range of local organizations to identify children most at risk of being involved in the welfare system and to match them with a long term mentor.
“Perhaps the parents experienced foster care, didn’t graduate from high school, have been incarcerated. Let’s get to those families before they enter the system and keep them out,” Sorensen said. “So that’s really where we like to be on the side of prevention.”
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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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| 2022-09-21T02:33:00Z
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea has signed a 3 trillion won ($2.25 billion) contract with a Russian state-run nuclear energy company to provide components and construct turbine buildings for Egypt’s first nuclear power plant, officials said Thursday.
The South Koreans hailed the deal as a triumph for their nuclear power industry, although it made for awkward optics as their American allies push an economic pressure campaign to isolate Russia over its war on Ukraine.
South Korean officials said the United States was consulted in advance about the deal and that the technologies being supplied by Seoul for the project would not clash with international sanctions against Russia.
According to South Korea’s presidential office and trade ministry, the state-run Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power was subcontracted by Russia’s Atomstroyexport to provide certain materials and equipment and construct turbine buildings and other structures at the plant being built in Dabaa. The Mediterranean coastal town is about 130 kilometers (80 miles) northwest of Cairo.
Atomstroyexport, also called ASE, is a subsidiary of Rosatom, a state-owned Russian nuclear conglomerate. The company has a contract with Egypt to deliver four 1,200 megawatt reactors through 2030. Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power’s part of project is from 2023 to 2029.
A senior aide of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said the negotiations were slowed by “unexpected variables,” mainly Russia’s war on Ukraine and the U.S.-led sanctions campaign against Moscow over its aggression.
Choi Sang-mok, Yoon’s senior secretary for economic affairs, said South Korea provided an explanation to the United States in advance about its plans to participate in the Dabaa project and that the allies will maintain close consultation as the work proceeds. As part of U.S.-led sanctions against Moscow, South Korea has ended transactions with Russia’s central bank and sovereign wealth funds and banned exports of strategic materials to Russia.
Neither Choi nor officials from South Korea’s trade ministry elaborated on how the crisis in Ukraine and the sanctions on Moscow affected the negotiations between Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power and ASE.
Choi stressed that South Korea’s involvement in the project would not clash with international sanctions against Russia.
“Any kind of issue can be met by various uncertainties, but those have all been resolved as of now, and that’s why we were able to finalize the agreement,” he said.
Yoon’s office expressed hope that South Korea’s participation in the Dabaa project would help the country gain a foothold in future nuclear projects across Africa and also improve its chances to export to countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Saudi Arabia.
Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power had been engaging in negotiations with ASE as the preferred bidder for the turbine-related project since December, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February.
Go Myong-hyun, a senior analyst at Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said the deal wouldn’t have been possible without an export approval by the United States as the components provided by Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power likely include U.S.-originated technology.
Current sanctions against Moscow also do not include specific restrictions related to nuclear energy and the Biden administration would have no interest in disrupting a crucial project for Egypt, which it sees as a key partner in the region, Go said.
While South Korea’s involvement in the Dabaa project wouldn’t immediately be a problem between the allies if the Americans signed off on it, things could change depending on how Russia’s war on Ukraine goes and whether Washington expands its export controls against Moscow, Go said.
Yoon’s office said the Dabaa project is South Korea’s biggest export of nuclear power technology since 2009, when a South Korean-led consortium won a $20 billion contract to build nuclear power reactors in the United Arab Emirates.
Yoon, a conservative who took office in May, has pledged to boost South Korean exports of nuclear power technology, which he says were dented under the policies of his liberal predecessor, Moon Jae-in, who sought to reduce the country’s domestic dependence on nuclear energy.
Yoon in a statement on Facebook said the deal reaffirms South Korea’s “advanced technology and safeness and strong supply chains” in the nuclear power industry. His government has set a goal of exporting 10 nuclear power reactors by 2030.
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| 2022-09-21T02:33:17Z
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GENEVA (AP) — Swiss pharmaceuticals company Novartis said Thursday that it plans to spin off its generics subsidiary Sandoz, which generated nearly $10 billion in revenue last year.
The Basel-based company, which makes a vast array of drugs including cancer treatment Gleevec and Diovan for hypertension, says it wants to focus on its core innovation business that is built around therapeutics and technology such as gene and cell therapy.
Sandoz was one of two Swiss companies that merged more than a quarter-century ago to form Novartis, and the brand later became a division focused on generic drugs.
The planned 100% spinoff will allow shareholders to have stakes in both companies after it’s completed as expected in the first half of next year, Novartis said.
The company says Sandoz, based on reporting in March, would be Europe’s biggest generics company by sales, which came in at $9.6 billion last year.
After gaining about 1% after the announcement, shares of Novartis slipped nearly half a percentage point to 80.45 Swiss francs ($83.51) on the Swiss Six Exchange in early afternoon trading.
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| 2022-09-21T02:33:25Z
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BOSTON (AP) — Venezuelan migrants flown to the upscale Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his transportation secretary Tuesday for engaging in a "fraudulent and discriminatory scheme" to relocate them.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, alleges that the migrants were told they were going to Boston or Washington, "which was completely false," and were induced with perks such as $10 McDonald's gift certificates.
"No human being should be used as a political pawn," said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, which is seeking class-action status in the lawsuit filed on behalf of several migrants who were aboard last week's flights and Alianza Americas, a network of advocacy groups.
DeSantis' office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit, which also names Secretary of Transportation Jared W. Perdue as a defendant.
The lawsuit alleges that migrants were induced to cross state lines under false pretenses, a line that some Democratic officials are using to urge a federal investigation.
On Monday, Javier Salazar, the sheriff of Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, opened an investigation into the flights, but the elected Democrat did not say what laws may have been broken. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, whose district includes San Antonio, have asked the Justice Department to begin a probe.
Guesswork was rampant among government officials, advocates and journalists Tuesday about DeSantis' next move, consistent with the element of surprise that he and another Republican governor, Greg Abbott of Texas, have sought to achieve by busing and flying migrants across the country to Democratic strongholds with little or no notice.
Asked Tuesday about speculation that DeSantis may send migrants to his home state of Delaware, President Joe Biden said: "He should come visit. We have a beautiful shoreline."
DeSantis declined to confirm speculation, based on flight-tracking software, that more migrants were on the move. He again defended his decision to fly about 50 Venezuelans to Martha's Vineyard, saying their decisions were completely voluntary and, without evidence, that they were in awful condition when Florida got involved.
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| 2022-09-21T02:33:34Z
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LONDON (AP) — A cost-of-living crisis in Britain is about to get worse, with millions of people paying about 80% more a year on their household energy bills starting in October.
The U.K. energy regulator on Friday announced the latest price cap, which is the maximum amount that gas suppliers can charge customers per unit of energy. It means people will pay 3,549 pounds ($4,188) a year for heating and electricity.
Scores are already struggling to make ends meet as inflation soared to 10.1% last month — the highest in 40 years — and the rapidly spiraling costs of energy and food are certain to hit the poorest the hardest.
The government is facing widespread calls to do more to offer relief, but no new measures are expected before the Conservative Party chooses a new prime minister to replace Boris Johnson.
Here’s a look at the rising energy costs in the United Kingdom:
HOW STEEP IS THE RISE?
Annual energy bills for the average household paying by direct debit have already risen by a record 54% so far this year. Bills had been capped at 1,971 pounds ($2,320) a year, compared with about 1,200 pounds last winter.
Under the revised price cap announced Friday, average household energy bills will jump to 3,549 pounds a year starting Oct. 1. They will go still higher when the price cap is updated again in January, expected to exceed 4,000 pounds.
U.S. bank Citi forecast that the huge energy cost increases could drive U.K. inflation to 18% next year. The Bank of England predicts a recession starting later this year.
Charities and public health leaders warn that the rocketing bills will be a “catastrophe” for poorer people heading into winter, as growing numbers are forced to make impossible choices between heating their homes and putting food on the table.
The energy regulator, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, said the quarterly update is meant to mitigate volatility in the energy market, allowing energy suppliers to better manage their risks so there’s no sudden cost hikes for consumers.
WHY ARE ENERGY PRICES RISING?
Global oil and gas prices have been rising sharply since last year as economies worldwide recovered from the coronavirus pandemic and demand for energy surged. Russia’s war in Ukraine created a full-on energy crisis as Moscow reduced or cut off natural gas flows to European countries that rely on the fuel to power industry, generate electricity and heat and cool homes.
Shrinking supplies, higher demand and fears of a complete Russian cutoff have driven natural gas prices to record highs, further fueling inflation that has squeezed people’s ability to spend and raised the risk of a recession in Europe and the U.K.
“The market shows no sign of finding a new equilibrium,” Rystad Energy analyst Lu Ming Pang said. “Market sentiment is a mixture of price record fatigue with quiet acceptance that this new normal is here to stay.”
Although Britain only imports a small percentage of its gas from Russia, the U.K. relies more on gas than its European neighbors because it has less nuclear and renewable energy. It also does not have as much capacity to store gas, forcing it to buy on the short-term spot market that sees greater volatility in prices.
WHAT IS THE GOVERNMENT DOING ABOUT RISING ENERGY PRICES?
Officials say they have set aside a package of support worth 37 billion pounds to help with the cost of living. All households will receive 400 pounds off their energy bills this winter, and millions of low-income people will get a further 650 pounds.
The measures have been widely criticized as inadequate, but no new policy is expected until after Sept. 5, when the Conservatives announce who they have chosen for a new leader.
Some, including the opposition Labour Party, have called for officials to significantly increase financial support for people and to freeze the energy price cap. Labour proposed to pay for it by extending the government’s temporary tax on the windfall profits of oil and gas companies.
Neither Liz Truss nor Rishi Sunak, the two politicians vying to become the next prime minister, appear to back such a plan.
Some critics say the U.K.’s fully privatized energy market — which can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher’s liberalization drive in the 1980s — is partly to blame for the crisis.
Giovanna Speciale, chief executive of the Southeast London Community Energy group, which helps people in need with their household bills, said the energy market is “fundamentally broken.”
Receiving “400 pounds, or 1,200 pounds in government support is not going to help very much — these are just sticking plasters,” Speciale said. “What we need to address is systemic problems. Because the system is entirely private, there’s very little that the government can do to intervene in this.”
HOW DOES THE UK COMPARE WITH EU NEIGHBORS?
Energy prices are rising in other European countries, too, but people in some countries have not seen the same level of rocketing bills as the U.K.
In France, gas prices are frozen at October 2021 levels, and the freeze has been extended until the end of the year following a government decree announced in June. Low- and middle-income households also receive 100 euros ($99.60) to buy gas and electricity.
In Germany, average electricity prices for households rose up to 38% over the past year. A new levy to prop up energy companies buying more expensive natural gas would add several hundred euros for an average household per year. But the government is temporarily lowering taxes on natural gas from 19% to 7% to offset those costs and has approved one-off cash subsidies.
Italy also has seen increasing calls for an energy price cap amid parliamentary election campaigns. This month, the government earmarked 8.4 billion euros to help low-income households and businesses offset the increase in energy costs, following relief it previously approved.
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AP reporters Jade Le Deley in Paris, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed.
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| 2022-09-21T02:33:32Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Peloton shares are on a wild ride this week, running up 20% Wednesday on a new partnership with Amazon only to erase those gains at the opening bell Thursday after quarterly losses for the connected exercise equipment maker topped $1.2 billion.
The loss, in a quarter loaded with restructuring and other charges, means that the company’s annual loss for the fiscal year were an astronomical $2.8 billion.
Losses are growing faster than expected and sales slumped 28% compared with last year when many people were still sheltered at home and staying out of gyms.
Peloton Interactive Inc. is a company in transition, attempting to achieve reliable free cash flow growth with sales falling and competition growing. Peloton’s early roaring success drew in competitors who peeled away customers by selling cheaper bicycles and exercise equipment. High-end gyms also jumped into the game, offering virtual classes that once were Peloton’s biggest draw.
The company’s fourth quarter loss was $1.24 billion, or $3.68 per share, far greater than the per-share loss of 71 cents Wall Street had anticipated, according to FactSet, and about four times last year’s quarterly loss of $313.2 million.
Revenue slid from $936.9 million, to $678.7.
“When you look at our financial performance in Q4, I suspect what you see will be a function of where you sit,” said CEO Barry McCarthy in a prepared statement. “The naysayers will look at our Q4 financial performance and see a melting pot of declining revenue, negative gross margin, and deeper operating losses.”
McCarthy said the company is making significant progress and pointed to new leadership, better supply contracts and potentially lucrative partnerships.
On Wednesday Peloton bikes and accessories went up for sale on Amazon.com, breaking with a direct-to-customers model that the company has employed since its founding.
Wall Street was clearly back in the naysayer camp Thursday, sending shares of Peloton down 20%.
It’s been a tumultuous year for Peloton and a difficult restructuring. The company’s co-founder stepped down in February acknowledging that he had overestimated Peloton’s growth potential and handed the reins to McCarthy.
Peloton was a star on Wall Street during the pandemic. Shares surged more than 400% in 2020 amid COVID-19 lockdowns that made its bikes and treadmills popular among customers who pay a fee to participate in interactive workouts.
The company has shifted its focus to its interactive programming, relying more on subscription revenue. In the most recent quarter, subscriber revenue was $383 million, outpacing $296 million in equipment sales.
But transitioning the company’s focus from hardware to software is costing Peloton a lot of money.
Peloton burned through $412 million in cash in the most recent quarter. It burned through $650 million in the second and third quarters.
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| 2022-09-21T02:33:40Z
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MIAMISBURG, Ohio (WXIN) — A toy sold at Walmart stores nationwide up until July is being recalled because it can tip forward when a young child is riding it.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission said the recall involves Blue’s Clues Foot to Floor Ride-on toys. This toy is made with plush light blue fabric with spots and is in the shape of the iconic Nickelodeon dog Blue.
The ride-on toy has four wheels with handlebars tucked behind the dog’s ears. It’s intended for toddlers 18 months to 3 years old.
The recall was initiated after Huffy Corporation received 19 reports of children falling forward while they were riding the toy. 18 facial injuries have been reported.
The recalled model number is 55061 with the date codes of 15221,15921, 19921, 21021, 22321, 23721, 26821, 28821 or 29421. The date code and model number are on the label located under the body of the product near the sound unit and battery door.
Anyone with the recalled toy should put away from children immediately. They can contact the firm for a free kit with instructions to install a new stop bar on the toy.
Anyone with questions can contact Huffy Corporation at 800-872-2453 from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday, or by sending an email to service@huffy.com.
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| 2022-09-21T02:33:48Z
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NEW IBERIA, La. (KLFY) — Three people, including a former Delcambre Police officer and a current Iberia Parish jailer, has been arrested for their involvement in the rape of a five-year-old child, according to Kaplan Police Chief Joshua Hardy.
Former Delcambre Police Officer Christopher Moorehart, 29, of Erath, faces five counts of first-degree rape of a juvenile, four counts of felony cruelty to a juvenile, one count of malfeasance in office, two charges of intimidation, and one count of child pornography. He was arrested and booked into the Vermilion Parish Jail on Aug. 12, and his bond was set at $350,000.
Iberia Parish Jail Control Officer Shelly Lynn Friou, 29, of New Iberia, faces charges of abuse of children, obstruction of justice, accessory after the fact to first-degree rape, accessory after the fact to felony sexual cruelty to a juvenile, and malfeasance in office. She was booked into the Vermilion Parish Jail on Aug. 24 with a bond set at $25,000 and has since bonded out.
The mother of the abused child, Kimberly Healy, 23, of Kaplan, faces five counts of principal to first-degree rape of a juvenile, four counts of principal to felony child cruelty, and one count of child pornography. She was arrested and booked into the Vermilion Parish Jail on Aug. 13, and her bond was set at $250,000.
Hardy said detectives learned Moorehart allegedly raped Healy’s five-year-old child on multiple occasions while the two were dating. Healy, despite knowing the alleged acts were taking place, never reported the crimes, said Hardy. After Moorehart and Healy broke up, Moorehart began a relationship with Friou.
“Once [Friou] learned about the situation, she told [Moorehart] that she would keep his secret,” Hardy told News 10. “Once the two broke up months later, which was later last week, [Friou] contacted detectives.”
Hardy said Moorehart was arrested while on duty after he allegedly threatened another person who said they would report him for his alleged crimes. Delcambre Police Asst. Chief Brady Segura confirmed to News 10 that Moorehart was fired from the department on Aug. 15 after four months on the job.
Iberia Parish Sheriff Thomas Romero confirmed that Friou has been placed on administrative leave without pay after her arrest. Friou has worked in the Iberia Parish Jail since July 19, according to Romero.
No further arrests are expected, said Hardy.
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| 2022-09-21T02:33:56Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – A Shreveport man is facing life in prison following his conviction Wednesday on second-degree murder and other charges related to a shooting at a hotel on Hollywood Ave.
The Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office announced the guilty verdict in a news release Thursday.
According to court records, 19-year-old Derion Deshun Jamison was found guilty Wednesday of the July 19, 2020 shooting at the Country Inn Suites Hotel near the Shreveport airport.
Prosecutors said that the victims and their family members were visiting Shreveport from Rayville to visit Splash Kingdon Water Park. The group returned to their hotel when one of the victims was approached by a girl who asked him about his tattoos.
Jamison was present at the time and started arguing with the victim; the argument did not turn violent.
A short time later, another member of the visiting group crossed paths with Jamison. The two had a brief conversation about the earlier argument. After the discussion, the two came to an agreement, shook hands, and went their separate ways. At that time, Jamison commented to the victim, 22-year-old Ha’Shoun Collins, that he felt disrespected. He pulled out a 9mm handgun and fatally shot Collins in the chest.
Jamison then shot the man he had the initial argument with, as well as Collins’ brother. Both men survived and were able to identify Collins as the shooter.
Ballistic evidence confirmed that the gun found in the car Jamison used to flee the police was the gun that shot the three men.
Jamison’s sentencing is scheduled for September 12, 2022. He is facing a mandatory life sentence without parole, probation, or suspension of sentence for the second-degree murder conviction.
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| 2022-09-21T02:34:04Z
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(NewsNation) — President Joe Biden fulfilled a long-standing campaign promise Wednesday to the more progressive side of the Democratic Party when he announced he would be providing student debt relief that experts say could benefit as many as 40 million people.
“Using the authority Congress granted the Department of Education, we will forgive $10,000 in outstanding federal student loans,” said Biden, who also announced federal Pell Grant recipients will receive up to $20,000 in student debt forgiveness.
This gives Biden and Democrats an item to check off as they campaign in the coming midterm elections. But the debt forbearance was immediately criticized by conservatives as an irresponsible federal government giveaway and by progressives as not going far enough.
But lost in the conversation of debt forgiveness is a larger issue. That’s the increase in the cost of college tuition over the past 30 years, which has a lot of people asking a much tougher question: Is a college degree even really worth it anymore?
A headline from CNBC notes that “college costs have increased by 169% since 1980, but pay for young workers is up by just 19%.”
According to a report from Georgetown University, more and more people are asking the same question asked by a New York Times columnist in a column that was published this week: “Some colleges don’t produce big earners. Are they worth it?”
The column relies heavily on a report from the center-left think tank Third Way, which looked at all available data for higher education institutions. It found that more than half of college enrollees were not earning more than a high school graduate six years after they began their studies. There was an increase 10 years later, but only 29%
Biden’s loan forgiveness appears to be a decent idea on the face of it, especially for those, obviously, who owe on student loans. But for some, it seems more as though the U.S. is addressing a symptom instead of trying to solve the actual underlying problem of skyrocketing college tuitions.
Michael Itzkowitz, a senior fellow of Higher Education at Third Way and author of the study, appeared on NewsNation’s “Dan Abrams Live” on Wednesday to weigh in on the issue.
“We do know that the number one reason why students attend college year after year is for greater employability and to have a financially secure future. So we’re starting to see more and more people ask, you know, what is the actual return that I’m getting for these tens of thousands that I’m paying for a college credential?” Itzknowitz said.
Why is the cost of college going up? Itzkowitz points to state disinvestments, specifically in public institutions.
“As states invest less, ultimately, we do see tuition and net costs that students are paying go up. We’ve also seen the proliferation of for-profit colleges, and some of them to offer good returns, but they do disproportionately offer poor returns,” Itzkowitz said. “So it’s really important that students look at the net costs or the costs that they’re going to be paying out of pocket relative to the earnings that they can actually obtain.”
Itzkowitz says another step the Biden administration took Wednesday is committing to publishing a list of institutions that may not have a good return on investment or may leave students with unmanageable debt. But it’s unclear how this will get into the hands of parents and students.
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| 2022-09-21T02:34:12Z
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BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — A former LSU student speaks out about the lawsuit she filed along with others in federal court against a large number of state and local officials for failing to prevent sexual assaults on college campuses.
“I came to LSU wanting to be a Tiger through and through, right? Obviously, that did not happen,” said former LSU student Mayumi Dickerson. “My mom and my dad dropped me off at LSU with the understanding that I was going to be protected… you send your kid off to college thinking that there is a system in place to help you, to help you grow and mature, and that didn’t happen here.”
Her team of attorneys stood by her side at the Louisiana State Capitol. They said with school starting they wanted to sound the alarms once again.
“If the University of Louisiana System and LSU is not the worst, it’s definitely in the top tier,” said Attorney Bakari Sellers. “There is a cancer and a problem in Louisiana with the way that women are treated, with the way that abuse victims are treated and with the fact that their voices are not heard.”
“For over six years, these survivors were the victims not only of assault but of systemic failures which a 2015 Louisiana law was designed to combat,” according to a statement from the Strom Law Firm. “The law, Act 172, was expressly designed to prevent sexual abuse on college campuses by mandating communication, cross-training and coordination between Louisiana’s public post-secondary institutions and law enforcement.”
The suit names the following persons and entities as defendants:
- The Lousiana Board of Regents
- The LSU Board of Supervisors
- University of Louisiana System Board of Supervisors
- Lafayette Consolidated Government
- Lafayette Police Department
- Former Lafayette Police Chief Thomas Glover
- UL-Lafayette President Dr. Joseph Savoie
- LSU President William F. Tate IV
- Former LSU President F. King Alexander
- Former LSU President Tom Galligan
- Louisiana Tech President Les Guice
- Other police chiefs in the jurisdictions of Jane Does 1-100
In Dickerson’s case, her alleged attacker was able to transfer from school to school, allegedly leaving a trail of victims in his wake.
“This has been a rough seven years, just knowing that no one has been held accountable, that universities can just pass on the problem from university to university and the assailant can get the degree that I have been struggling to get.”
BRProud reached out to LSU for comment and they replied that they don’t comment on pending litigation.
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| 2022-09-21T02:34:20Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Shreveport college students express relief after President Joe Biden released details about a new student loan forgiveness program and an extended pause on repayments.
Wednesday, The Biden Administration announced they would forgive $10,000 of student loan debt. Students at Southern University in Shreveport are more than excited about this announcement.
SUSLA student Tremendous Baker said she appreciates the action the administration is taking with regard to the loans.
“It really helps me a lot, being the single mother that I am and having two kids that I have to put through college and be going to school myself. It’s really going to benefit me a whole lot.”
Individuals who earn less than $125,000 a year will receive $10,000 of loan debt forgiveness, and those who received Pell Grants will get double that amount.
For many, the debt relief won’t wipe away their entire loans; however, most students welcome any help that they can get.
“I’m just appreciative for whatever I can receive to get some help on it because it’s a lot of people that’s really struggling with this, and times are really hard right now,” said Baker.
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| 2022-09-21T02:34:26Z
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DENVER (AP) — On the last day of voting in Colorado’s June primary, a poll worker sent to wipe down a voting machine found a concerning error message on its screen: “USB device change detected.”
The machine, used to mark ballots electronically, was taken out of use, and an investigation was launched. The message raised concerns that a voter had tried to tamper with it by inserting an off-the-shelf thumb drive.
The incident heightened concerns among election officials and security experts that conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election could inspire some voters to meddle with — or even attempt to sabotage — election equipment. Even unsuccessful breaches, like the apparent one in the county south of Colorado Springs, could become major problems in the November general election, when turnout will be greater and the stakes higher — causing delays at polling places or sowing the seeds of misinformation campaigns.
Activists who promote the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump have been traveling the country peddling a narrative that electronic voting machines are being manipulated. They have specifically targeted equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems, which has filed several defamation lawsuits and said that post-election reviews in state after state have shown its tallies to be accurate.
“This is yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company and diminished the credibility of U.S. elections,” company spokesperson Stephanie Walstrom said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Despite no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation in the 2020 election, the voting machine conspiracies have sunk in with a wide swath of Republican voters. Many of them have berated county commissions throughout the country, seeking to ditch voting equipment in favor of hand-marking and hand-counting all ballots.
The incident in Pueblo County highlights a troubling reality, that any voter propelled by conspiracy theories could try to tamper with voting machines.
“You get people motivated and activated, and who knows what they are going to come up with to fight machines they don’t trust,” said election technology expert Kevin Skoglund.
While it’s difficult to stop such vigilante attempts, experts say the nation’s election infrastructure is well-positioned to detect them quickly, as the Colorado county was able to do. Not only does election security involve layers of defenses, but a majority of the country now uses hand-marked paper ballots. That means an accurate tally can be reached in case something does go wrong and the results questioned.
Perhaps more concerning is what could happen during the time election officials are investigating a suspected attack and working to validate the results. That’s when people can exploit the uncertainty and sow doubt about the election outcome.
“We’ve got so many layers of security and protections that have built over years,” said Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. “The bigger threats are outside infiltration, as opposed to the machines themselves, and that’s what we’re trying to prepare for — because that’s the greatest system of unknowns.”
False claims by Trump and his allies that the 2020 presidential election was rigged have been widely debunked and discredited, with no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation substantiated nearly two years after the election. Numerous judges, some appointed by Trump, dismissed lawsuits filed after the election, while Trump’s own attorney general said the Justice Department found no fraud that would have changed the results.
Lies about the 2020 election have led to security breaches at some local election offices, including one in Mesa County, Colorado. Authorities in a handful of states are investigating whether officials provided access to their voting systems to conspiracy theorists.
Those concerns are adding to worries about the physical security of the machines, which should never be left unsecured. At polling places, the workers are trained to keep a close eye on equipment and flag anything suspicious.
Election officials also use locks and tamper-evident seals, so it becomes apparent if someone has tried to access voting equipment. Trigger alerts make machines inoperable if someone tries to tamper with them, which is what happened in Colorado on June 28.
Late in the afternoon, poll workers at the Pueblo County vote center heard noises coming from a voting booth. When a poll worker went to investigate and clean the machine, they saw the error message and notified a supervisor. Law enforcement and state election officials were immediately told of the incident.
What triggered the error message is part of the security protocols that protect voting machines.
Election officials can take measures to ensure that unauthorized devices don’t infect voting equipment. They can configure their systems to recognize only proprietary devices, such as USB drives from the voting system manufacturer, or employ a system that allows connections only with devices containing a pre-authorized digital signature.
If someone attempts to insert any unauthorized USB device, an error message appears, and the machine won’t work unless someone with administrator-level access overrides it.
In the Pueblo County case, the tamper-evident seal on the voting machine appeared to be disturbed. The case remains under investigation, and prosecutors are reviewing evidence.
This year, Colorado lawmakers broadened the definition of tampering with election equipment and strengthened the penalty for it. Formerly a misdemeanor offense with a penalty of up to 364 days in jail, it is now a felony punishable by up to three years in prison.
“Lies about America’s elections are causing security risks,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. “Any actor who tries to subvert the will of the people should be held responsible under the law.”
Federal officials have been working with those on the state and local levels to improve their security defenses since voting systems were designated as “critical infrastructure” after the 2016 election — along with banks, dams and nuclear power plants.
State and local election officials who weren’t already doing so have added locks, video camera surveillance of equipment storage locations and door access cards to limit those who can enter secure areas. Other security steps include limiting access to voting equipment to only those who need it and ensuring that sensitive systems are not connected to the internet.
“I have high confidence that jurisdictions are putting the necessary tools in place to be able to prevent and detect any kind of nefarious activities,” said Kim Wyman, who leads election security efforts at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
In Pueblo County, election officials are preparing for every possibility during the November general election. Gilbert “Bo” Ortiz oversees elections as the clerk and recorder in Pueblo County, which Trump narrowly won in 2016 but lost four years later.
Ortiz sees a bit of irony in efforts by those who question the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, whether it’s flooding his office with record requests, demanding recounts or attempting to tamper with equipment.
“All they are doing is proving the integrity of our system,” Ortiz said.
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Cassidy reported from Atlanta.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the 2022 Midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections
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This story has been corrected to update the name of the spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems.
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – The City of Shreveport released a statement assuring retired employees that changes to the healthcare plan will not cause them to lose their chosen providers.
City officials released a statement to clear up misunderstandings around employee and retiree health care coverage.
The city’s statement came after Willis-Knighton officials presented objections at city council meetings raising questions about how the new healthcare plans would affect retirees treated by Willis-Knighton doctors.
“The City of Shreveport values its employees and retirees, and that’s why the current administration is working to ensure that they have affordable and quality healthcare coverage that doesn’t limit access to their trusted providers. Nothing has been established that takes control away from the employee to select Willis-Knighton Health System for their healthcare needs. The City of Shreveport has used the general fund to pay for the increase in healthcare costs for more than a decade,” Mayor Adrian Perkins said in a statement.
“Instead of passing on that financial burden to employees and retirees, the city absorbed those costs. Since contributions have not kept pace with rising healthcare costs, the City of Shreveport and the Healthcare Trust Fund Board had to find a way to manage a 13 million deficit.”
The press release continues to outline measures the city has taken in the past to prevent passing rate increases on to the insured during the pandemic.
“After coming through the worst of the pandemic last year, the city took on an additional $5.3 million in healthcare costs to prevent increasing rates. At that time, they informed city employees and retirees that the city could no longer afford to take on those costs, and changes would be coming for the 2023 enrollment period.”
According to the city, two insurance carriers, Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield Louisiana, presented options for networks, and the Healthcare Trust Fund Board considered them both. Blue Cross Blue Shield Louisiana’s plan costs $1.6 million less than Aetna’s offer. With that information, the Healthcare Trust Fund Board voted unanimously to provide the Blue Cross Blue Shield Louisiana option for 2023.
“The city must consider its financial obligations and liabilities and cannot continue absorbing the increasing cost of healthcare coverage with the general fund,” Perkins said. “The city must follow best practices and industry standards in all aspects of city government operations.”
The statement concludes with the city expressing that the Healthcare Trust Fund Board will decide on proposed tiers and plans in the future. The city will share how much each option costs with employees, and no healthcare system will be excluded.
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| 2022-09-21T02:34:43Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – More than two-thirds of the 8,600 jobs available in Northwest Louisiana are in the healthcare sector, according to the latest data from the Louisiana Workforce Commission.
Hospitals have reported record numbers of employees retiring or taking on new professional endeavors. This trend was amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic and has left hundreds of nursing, physician, and medical sector support jobs open for hire.
The same data, updated daily, show there are nearly 14,000 people actively looking for work in the region. It all makes for a more competitive job market, but with the majority of the openings in healthcare, it’s even tougher for those without the necessary qualifications and experience.
There are opportunities for those seeking part-time employment, however. Retail sales consist of more than 1,000 potential job openings in the area. While local hospital systems top the list of employers with the most job openings, Caddo Parish Schools is in the top five, along with the corporation that owns Burger King and Popeye’s.
Which employers are hiring near me?
Louisiana Workforce Commission’s HiRE website lists the following businesses in the Shreveport area as the employers with the most job openings.
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What jobs are available near me?
Jobs in the medical profession lead the region with more than 7,000 open positions. The leading occupations overall are:
- Registered Nurses
- Licensed Practical Nurses
- Physicians
- Food prep workers
- Retail sales
Some formal education, training, or certification are required to fill most of the available jobs, but hundreds only require a high school diploma or GED.
If you are not currently qualified for jobs in the healthcare industry, there are also opportunities for job training and certification programs that can prepare job seekers for high-earning jobs in the area.
The state’s jobless report for July shows that the state unemployment rate is at a historic low of 4.5%. The rate is a little higher in Caddo Parish at 5.3%. Bossier had the lowest unemployment at 3.4%.
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| 2022-09-21T02:34:50Z
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BOSSIER PARISH, La. (KTAL/KMSS) — An exotic bird that escaped from a shop in Benton is back home safe after it was rescued from a tree outside of the Bossier Parish Courthouse on Tuesday.
The Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office says the colorful young macaw, Teko, went missing during the rainstorm from Missy Carter’s shop in Benton on Saturday. Carter put out an urgent plea on Facebook about Teko being missing, and her sister, Jessica McGee said she saw him nestled in some trees in Haughton on Monday.
Teko was spotted by someone at the Bossier Parish Courthouse on Tuesday. Carter went to the courthouse with Lilo, another one of her exotic birds to help lure Teko from the trees. Even with the help of Lilo, her beloved bird stayed perched in the tree and would not come down. Instead of coming down, Teko would take flight and fly towards Carter but then land in a nearby tree.
“He doesn’t know how to come down from the tree right now,” Carter told BPSO.
After an hour of Carter trying to get Teko from the trees, some assistance from the courthouse maintenance crew brought her a ladder and she was able to reach him. Carter said she is happy that her bird is safe and that she can finally take him home.
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| 2022-09-21T02:34:58Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – A Shreveport native who served time at Angola as a teen says sending juvenile offenders to the Louisiana State Penitentiary is not the best solution to the security and leadership failures at a New Orleans-area youth center that have allowed escapes and chaos inside the facility.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards announced plans in July to send juveniles from the troubled Bridge City Center for Youth offenders to Angola, but those plans are on hold after youth advocates galvanized and sued the state to halt the process, citing not enough specific information about why Angola was chosen or which juveniles would be transferred.
The judge in the case has ordered the state to provide a detailed plan to the court by Sept. 2, and a federal trial is set to begin on Sept. 6.
Terrance Winn, now 48, served 30 years of a life sentence at Angola following his conviction as a teen for murder and attempted murder. He is not involved in the lawsuit, but he knows firsthand what awaits a young person who is sent to an adult prison and believes there must be a better way.
“A better option would be to transfer them to another juvenile jail that has tougher security in place.”
Following his release from Angola in 2020, Winn launched PIPES, a non-profit dedicated to ending the cycle of violence that sends local youth to prison and helping juveniles facing criminal prosecution. He also recently traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to share his personal experience as a juvenile in the criminal justice system in an address to the United Nations.
Winn says the biggest issue facing his organization and others like it is access to funding.
“There is funding that’s needed to teach these kids a better way of thinking, a better way of responding to adversaries and handling conflict. And those coming out (of jail), we’ll be in a better position to train them to readjust and reacclimate themselves to a progressive society. We’ll be able to teach and support them with fundamentals. We’ll also be able to help them a lot more with job placement.”
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Winn says contrary to what local leaders or government officials may say about crime prevention programs, they can work if given the chance and the support they need to reach the kids who are most at risk before they end up in the system.
“We can really get into the heart of our city. We can really help kids that are at a disadvantage or are on the cusp of going to juvenile facilities or the kids that are right in the area of being tried as an adult and losing their lives.”
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| 2022-09-21T02:35:07Z
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TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — A couple’s honeymoon was cut short this summer after the husband left his new wife to solicit a prostitute, authorities in Florida said.
The suspect, a 34-year-old male, was among the 176 people arrested for alleged sex crimes following a monthslong prostitution sting in Hillsborough County, according to Sheriff Chad Chronister.
During his honeymoon, the man answered an ad from an undercover detective posing as a prostitute, Chronister said Thursday at a news conference.
“He got married. He got married and he was on his honeymoon,” Sheriff Chronister said. “His new bride falls asleep, and he decides he’s going to respond to an ad that one of our [undercover officers] had placed to go have sex that evening. So he leaves, and comes to the hotel and wishes to purchase sex.”
Chronister said the man was arrested “immediately.”
“I know we all probably have questions about how long this marriage lasted, but I think the only question here, with it ending so quickly, as a wedding guest — was it too late to get the gifts that they gave returned back to them?” Chronister said.
The investigation, which netted 176 arrests in total, was launched in April by deputies within the Human Trafficking Squad of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. The squad focused its investigation on men soliciting adult prostitutes and also those looking for sex with underage victims. The sheriff’s office said most of the sting suspects were facing charges related to solicitation of prostitution.
Among the 176 arrested, the sheriff’s office said it had arrested ten “Johns” who had inappropriate conversations or shared inappropriate pictures and videos with undercover detectives who they thought were minors.
Detectives also found two missing teens who traveled from Massachusetts to Tampa with two of the suspects. One was found with an adult, sleeping in a vehicle at a grocery store, and the other was found at a hotel with one of the alleged traffickers.
“We believe these two individuals, these two men are responsible for trafficking many more women,” Chronister said. “I’m not able to say more without jeopardizing it [the investigation].”
The teens, ages 16 and 17, were taken into protective custody and will be reunited with their parents. All three suspects were arrested, Chronister said.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office launched its Human Trafficking Squad in June 2021. To date, the sheriff’s office credits the squad with 380 arrests and the rescue of eight victims.
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| 2022-09-21T02:35:16Z
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PETALUMA, Calif. (KRON) — A Petaluma woman never left her house for more than two years, not even after her mother died inside their Windsor Drive home and the corpse remained in the living room, police told KRON4 Thursday.
“Based on statements made, detectives believe she has not left the house, other than to go to the mailbox, since the beginning of March of 2020. All her living essentials were ordered online and having them delivered to the home. This included daily meal deliveries,” Petaluma Police Department Lt. Jeremy Walsh said.
Petaluma police officers found the woman’s mother dead inside a living room Tuesday morning and launched a “suspicious death” investigation. “Given the condition of the decedent being … in the advanced stages of decomposition, it appeared she had been deceased for over a year,” PPD wrote.
PPD officers were first alerted to check on the home’s residents by a concerned neighbor who noticed 20-30 packages stacked up on the porch. Neighbors said no one answered the door when they knocked.
“Upon arrival, officers also made numerous attempts to contact the resident which were unsuccessful. Given their observations, coupled with the information obtained by the reporting party, officers were concerned for the welfare of the resident and made the decision to make entry into the home,” PPD wrote.
Officers found the daughter in a bedroom and the corpse in the living room. The woman told police that her mother died of natural causes in April of 2021.
Walsh said detectives are still trying to determine if the daughter committed a crime, such negligence as a sole care provider. Police will retrace the daughter’s “actions or inactions which could have contributed to her deterioration and ultimate death,” Walsh said.
The daughter’s self-isolation began in March of 2020, the same month when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Sonoma County officials to order residents to “stay at home.”
The Sonoma County Health Officer issued a public health order directing residents to shelter in place starting on March 18, 2020. At the time, there were four confirmed and active cases of COVID in the county. “All individuals currently living within the county are ordered to shelter at their homes,” county health officials wrote.
Investigators did not say if the pandemic was a motivating factor for why the daughter never left home for two and a half years.
Police have not released the mother and daughter’s identities. A City Code Enforcement Officer red-tagged the home, deeming it uninhabitable, on Tuesday. The daughter was transported to a hospital for medical evaluation and treatment.
Detectives will review the mother’s medical history, try to find any surviving friends or relatives for interviews, and figure out why exactly her death never reported, Walsh said.
Detectives will also look into financial records to see if any benefits entitled to the mother were being collected and inappropriately used before or after her death.
A man who lives next door told KRON4 that he and his family never saw the mother or daughter since he moved into the neighborhood three years ago. The neighbor said delivery packages frequently piled up by the front door. Another neighbor was in disbelief that police were not called to conduct a welfare check sooner.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Coroner’s Office will perform an autopsy for the mother to determine her official cause of death.
Currently, there are no outstanding suspects or safety concerns in the neighborhood. Anyone who has further information relevant to this investigation is encouraged to email Petaluma Police Department Detective Daniel Boyd at dboyd@cityofpetaluma.org or call him at 707-778-4334.
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| 2022-09-21T02:35:22Z
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — A federal appeals court on Thursday said Arkansas can’t enforce its ban on transgender children receiving gender-affirming medical care.
A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a judge’s ruling temporarily blocking the state from enforcing the 2021 law. A trial is scheduled for October before the same judge on whether to permanently block the law.
Arkansas was the first state to enact such a ban, which prohibits doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18 years old, or from referring them to other providers for the treatment. There are no doctors who perform gender-affirming surgery on minors in the state.
“Because the minor’s sex at birth determines whether or not the minor can receive certain types of medical care under the law, Act 626 discriminates on the basis of sex,” the court’s ruling Thursday said.
The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law on behalf of four transgender youth and their families, as well as two doctors who provide gender-confirming treatments.
“The Eighth Circuit was abundantly clear that the state’s ban on care does not advance any important governmental interest and the state’s defense of the law is lacking in legal or evidentiary support,” Chase Strangio, deputy director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said in a statement. “The state has no business categorically singling out this care for prohibition.”
Arkansas argued that the restriction is within the state’s authority to regulate medical practices.
Republican Attorney General Leslie Rutledge will ask the full 8th Circuit Court of Appeals to review the ruling, said spokeswoman Amanda Priest, adding that Rutledge was “extremely disappointed in today’s dangerously wrong decision by the three-judge panel.”
The 8th Circuit covers Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and the Dakotas. The ruling on Arkansas’ law comes after the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that covers Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia ruled last week that gender dysphoria is covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Experts and advocates have said that decision could help block conservative political efforts to restrict access to gender-affirming care.
Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed Arkansas’ ban last year, and GOP lawmakers overrode him. Pediatricians, social workers and the parents of transgender youth said the measure would harm a community already at risk for depression and suicide. Hutchinson has said he would signed such legislation if it only focused on gender-confirming surgery.
On Thursday, he called Arkansas’ ban the “most extreme law in the country” and urged lawmakers to scale it back next year “with a more narrow focus to protect our children.”
“No other state has passed such a law that interferes with a parent making health care decisions for minor children based upon a doctor’s recommendations when the recommendations are based upon generally accepted medical guidance,” Hutchinson, who leaves office in January, said in a statement.
Multiple medical groups, including the American Medical Association, oppose the ban and have said the care is safe if properly administered. The Justice Department has also opposed the ban as unconstitutional.
An attorney for the ACLU told the appeals panel in June that reinstating the restriction would create uncertainty for families.
A federal judge in May blocked a similar law in Alabama. A Tennessee ban that was enacted last year on transgender treatments for youth, which is limited to providing gender-confirming hormone treatment to prepubescent minors, remains in effect.
In Texas, child welfare officials have been blocked from investigating three families of transgender youth over gender-confirming care the minors have received. A state judge is considering whether to prevent additional investigations.
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| 2022-09-21T02:35:38Z
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – The Arkansas Attorney General announced a guilty plea from Billy T. Smith Wednesday, who immediately resigned his position as mayor of Glenwood, Arkansas.
In pleading, Smith admitted to a Class A misdemeanor of theft of property and abuse of office. Smith will pay $3,000 in restitution along with a $250 fine, the Attorney General stated.
The charge came from an August 2021 investigation that found Smith had hired a private company to transport asphalt millings valued at $4,000 from a nearby highway resurface project. The Attorney General stated the millings were used to repave Smith and his son’s driveways.
According to the affidavit filed in the case, millings removed from a state highway are considered government property.
Smith had been arrested, taken into custody, and charged with felony theft of property and abuse of office, both class D offenses, in February. He surrendered to Attorney General’s special agents at the county jail at that time.
The pleading was heard in Pike County Circuit Court.
Smith had been elected mayor of Pike County city in 2019.
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| 2022-09-21T02:35:45Z
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Arkansas politicians are speaking out after the federal appeals court blocked the state from enforcing its ban on children receiving gender reassignment medical care.
Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 8th United States Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court’s earlier ruling temporarily blocking Arkansas ACT 626. The 2021 act, titled “The SAFE Act,” prevented healthcare professionals from providing or referring someone under 18 to “gender transition procedures.”
An October trial will take place to determine if the block, based upon the 14th Amendment, should be permanent.
The state attorney general had earlier appealed the district court ruling and will appeal the Thursday ruling.
A statement from a spokesperson for the state attorney general’s office shortly after the Thursday ruling said the office “plans to seek review by the full Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.”
Arkansas politicians had opinions about the Thursday ruling.
Senator Tom Cotton issued a statement referring to the medical treatments using “experimental drugs and surgeries” and the influence of liberal policies on government.
“Our legislature voted to protect kids from experimental drugs and surgeries that could permanently damage their health and well-being. By blocking this law again, the court has kept the fate of Arkansas’s children in the hands of liberal activists who support ‘sex-changes’ for children.”
Sen. Tom Cotton
Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who had originally opposed the SAFE Act, calling it a “vast government overreach” at the time, encouraged new legislation with a narrower focus.
“I vetoed this bill because I had concern it was too broad and would not be upheld in court.”
Gov. Asa Hutchinson
“Act 626 is the most extreme law in the country. It is important that we approach laws like this carefully. I am absolutely against sex change operations for minors.”
“I encourage the legislature in January to put together legislation with a more narrow focus to protect our children.”
Arkansas was the first state to prohibit doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment or surgery to those under 18.
In March 2021, the Arkansas Senate approved the act banning gender confirming treatments for children.
In April 2021, the general assembly overrode Hutchinson’s veto. This made Arkansas the first state to prohibit doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment or surgery to children under 18.
The act was due to go into effect July 28, 2021
Once the act passed the legislature, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the state to strike down the bill. The act was then sent to a federal appeals court, resulting in Thursday’s ruling.
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| 2022-09-21T02:35:53Z
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CRAWFORD CO. Ark. – The sheriff in Crawford County has come out with a video statement days after a viral video of an arrest by two of his deputies and another officer set off a social media firestorm.
Crawford County Sheriff Jimmy Damante release a video Thursday of his position on, and his department’s response to, the arrest of Randal Worcester Sunday.
Video of the arrest by Deputy Levi White, Deputy Zack King and Mulberry Police Department Officer Threll Riddle appeared to show the apparent beating of Worchester. It has since gone viral and become an international news story.
In his statement Thursday, Damante indicated the viral video has created problems for his department.
“Viral videos create a lot of heat but little light,” he said. “Social media chatter is full of self-proclaimed experts on the use of force.”
Social media has created additional problems, the sheriff said.
“Employees of our office have been subject to online harassment and threats,” Damante said.
Police dashcam leading up to violent Arkansas arrest will not be released — for now
Damante spoke about Worcester, who he classified several times as a “violent criminal,” and what his department was doing in response to the Sunday arrest.
The video begins with Damante outlining Worcester’s actions that day, including “slamming that deputies head into the concrete causing a dangerous concussion.”
“[Worcester is] a violent criminal with a history of assaulting police,” Damante said.
He then explained his department’s response, including placing its two officers involved in the arrest on administrative leave. His department is conducting an investigation of the incident, which will not interfere with other investigations, he said.
The video Thursday seems to soften the tone from Damante in regards to the officers involved in the arrest. Speaking to reporters earlier in the week, the sheriff said everything in the case was concerning to him.
Worcester, who was booked into the Crawford County Detention Center Sunday, was released on bond Monday.
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| 2022-09-21T02:36:01Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – A recent legislative audit shows one in every ten charter schools in Louisiana do not meet state guidelines for enrolling enough students from low-income families.
Under those guidelines, the number of low-income students from charter schools must reflect the population of the community in which it is located. The Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s office says the reason for this is that some schools focus on high test scores in order to keep their charter renewed while ignoring enrollment requirements.
“We have the incentive on the one hand that gets you renewed and allows you to continue operating your school which is academic achievement,” said Senior Research Methodologist Courtney Stevenson. “And then alternatively you have the other incentive that is kind of working in opposition to that, which is enrolling more economically disadvantaged students. That one doesn’t really have a lot of weight in law as far as consequences go.”
Schools cannot lose their charters for failing to meet the state enrollment guidelines, but they can if they fail to meet academic standards, leaving little incentive for schools to enroll more students from low-income families.
“If schools aren’t meeting the academic enrollment rate, that really isn’t taken into consideration when that charter school is renewed,” said Performance Audit Manager Gina Brown.
“When a charter school is looking to get renewed, the enrollment really isn’t of that much importance as opposed to the test scores, which we’ve showed are kept high by certain schools who are keeping enrollment down.”
The audit also found that 16.8% of Louisiana charter schools have fallen short of the state’s requirement over these past six years. Nine schools did not meet requirements in one of the six years. Of those nine schools, three did not meet the requirement during any of those six of those years.
While there are some schools still consistently missing the mark on meeting enrollment requirements, the auditors say there has been an improvement over the past five years. The audit showed that in 2021, the percentage of missed enrollment requirements dropped to 10.3%, a far cry from the last time an audit was conducted in 2017 when that percentage was more than 22%.
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| 2022-09-21T02:36:08Z
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BATON ROUGE, La (BRPROUD) — Attorney Ben Crump and Nancy Davis, the woman who was denied an abortion in Louisiana addressed the media on Friday morning to discuss potential legal action regarding Louisiana abortion laws.
Davis’ fetus is diagnosed with Acrania, a rare fetal abnormality that is characterized by the absence of a skull. Acrania is a lethal condition causing the fetus to be stillborn or to die within the first week of life. Davis learned about the diagnosis around ten weeks of pregnancy and was advised by her doctors to get an abortion.
After Davis agreed to the abortion, she was denied for the procedure due to the fetus still having a heartbeat.
“They told me I had to carry my baby to bury my baby,” said Davis.
Attorney Crump is calling on Governor Edwards and Louisiana lawmakers to call a special session to address ‘the catastrophe’ and make sure the state laws are clear.
Davis, who is currently 15 weeks pregnant will travel out of state to get the procedure.
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| 2022-09-21T02:36:16Z
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Uvalde school shooting survivor Mayah Nicole Zamora threw the ceremonial first pitch at the Houston Astros game versus the Minnesota Twins in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday, August 23.
Carlos Correa, a former Astros player who recently signed with the Twins, brought Zamora to the game through his Correa Family Foundation (CFF). The nonprofit generally works to financially assist children battling cancer.
10-year-old Mayah was shot multiple times during the shooting at Robb Elementary School, spent 66 days in the hospital, and underwent over 20 surgeries, according to the CFF.
“Although these past few months have been the most difficult of her young life, Mayah’s incredible courage and bravery have helped her persevere,” said CFF in a statement. “We are so proud of you.”
The foundation also announced that numerous donors helped secure funding for the Zamora family to build a new home.
(Credit: Houston Astros via Storyful)
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| 2022-09-21T02:36:25Z
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LISSIE, Texas (Nexstar) — Months of triple-digit temperatures and little rain across Texas are affecting the livelihoods of rice farmers. For Tim Gertson, it’s costing him thousands.
“The consequence to me personally is around the tune $150,000 to $200,000 in lost profit,” Gertson said. “As droughts worsen and get more intense, the consequences for rice farming is when there starts to be more of demand on that natural resource on water.”
As of July 1, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) cut farmers in its supply areas off from water this season. It’s part of its water management plan to help with the preservation of water.
“So, what happens when we get cut off for our second crop water is we’re unable to grow the portion of our crop that we can grow the most efficiently, and the most profitable,” Gertson said.
Luckily for Gertson, he gets some of his water from a well on his property to help grow crops. But, that’s not always enough to get the job done and isn’t something that’s sustainable for all farmers since building a well is so expensive.
Now, as Gertson tries to figure out how to use less water to grow his crops, he grapples with the reality that there are other things that will make his job much harder in the years to come.
“We don’t have extra water, we don’t have extra natural resources, that water is already spoken for,” Gertson said. “It may be sitting there in the lake and looking really pretty, but we already have to fight over it. So, to bring new businesses into a state that’s already struggling greatly with natural resources is irresponsible.”
Gertson said they’re always trying to figure out ways to use less water to grow rice, like new methods that require a shorter growing season or even permanently reducing acres where they’re planting crops.
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| 2022-09-21T02:36:32Z
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Intel Corp. will break ground Sept. 9 on its planned $20 billion Ohio semiconductor facilities with President Joe Biden in attendance, the company and the the White House said Thursday.
When the company’s two factories, known as fabs, open in 2025, the facility will employ 3,000 people with an average salary of around $135,000. Building the fabs is expected to require 7,000 construction workers.
Total investment could top $100 billion over the decade with six additional fabs, Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger has said. It’s Ohio’s largest ever private economic development project.
Biden will speak on “rebuilding American manufacturing” through recently passed laws boosting the semiconductor industry and U.S. infrastructure, the White House said.
Expanding semiconductor manufacturing domestically took on new urgency during the pandemic and as most production has shifted overseas. The U.S. share of the worldwide chip manufacturing market has declined from 37% in 1990 to 12% today, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, and shortages have become a potential risk.
To win the project, Ohio offered California-based Intel roughly $2 billion in incentives, including a 30-year tax break. Intel has outlined $150 million in educational funding aimed at growing the semiconductor industry regionally and nationally.
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| 2022-09-21T02:36:40Z
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PARIS (AP) — EU lawmakers have a new, post-Brexit reason to be annoyed with the U.K.: British sewage overflows seeping into the English Channel and the North Sea.
Heavy rainfall after weeks of dry weather overwhelmed parts of Britain’s sewage system last week, causing untreated wastewater to be discharged into rivers and seas. The problem is a long-running issue in Britain, where regulators are investigating possible permit violations by six major water companies and environmental groups allege the firms have failed to make needed repairs.
This is mainly a problem for the U.K., where people were warned to stay away from dozens of beaches last week, raising concerns about public health and the damage to wildlife. The activist group Surfers Against Sewage reported 654 alerts of sewer overflows spilling sewage into bathing waters this summer from 171 locations in England and Wales.
But three French members of the European Parliament sent a letter to the European Commission on Wednesday warning that the sewage could also threaten bathing waters, fishing grounds and biodiversity in the European Union.
“The English Channel and the North Sea are not dumping grounds,” said Stephanie Yon-Courtin, a member of the European Parliament’s fishing committee and a local lawmaker in Normandy.
“We can’t tolerate that the environment, the economic activity of our fishers and the health of our citizens is put into grave danger by repeated negligence of the United Kingdom in the management of its sewage water,” she said.
The lawmakers asked the Commission “to use all the political and legal means in its possession” to find a solution, accusing the U.K. of violating its post-Brexit trade deal with the EU. They said while the U.K. is no longer held to EU environmental standards, it is still a signatory to the U.N. convention on maritime rights and obligated to protect shared seawater.
The European Commission said it had not contacted London so far about the complaints. “We will take further the matter as appropriate,” Commission spokeswoman Dana Spinant said Thursday.
Britain’s Conservative government has rejected the criticism, saying it has strengthened water quality regulations since Brexit.
“Unhelpful and ill-informed comments like this shouldn’t distract from the work we are doing to further protect our rivers and sea,” said Steve Double, the U.K. water minister. “We have already made it law for water companies to reduce the frequency and volume of sewage discharges, and our upcoming Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan will require water companies to deliver the largest infrastructure program in water company history.”
But last week the opposition Liberal Democrats released a report alleging that wastewater discharges weren’t being properly recorded because many of the required monitoring devices either weren’t working properly or hadn’t been installed yet.
While U.K. water companies are barred from dumping untreated wastewater in normal circumstances, they are allowed to make such releases when heavy rains threaten to overwhelm sewage treatment plants. Environmental groups allege some companies exploit this exception to save money and avoid upgrading their systems.
During the Brexit breakup negotiations, the EU repeatedly expressed fears that the UK would ditch the bloc’s stringent environmental standards and yield to business pressures for a more deregulated system that could put their shared environment in danger.
The trade agreement that took effect in 2021 after Britain left the EU contains no specific provision on how to deal with storm water overflows.
Water UK, which represents water and wastewater companies, said its members were investing 3 billion pounds to tackle overflows as part of a national program to improve the environment between 2020 and 2025. It acknowledged “an urgent need for action to tackle the harm caused to the environment by spills from storm overflows and wastewater treatment works.”
“Water companies can’t do this alone, which why we’re also calling for government, regulators, water companies, agriculture and other sectors to come together as soon as possible to deliver a comprehensive national plan,” the water industry group said.
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Follow all AP stories on the environment at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
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| 2022-09-21T02:36:48Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. lawmakers are anxious to hear from Twitter’s former security chief, who has alarmed Washington with allegations that the influential social network misled regulators about its cyber defenses and efforts to control fake accounts.
Leaders of several congressional panels are poring over the disclosures by respected cybersecurity expert Peiter Zatko, and calls on Capitol Hill for investigations are mounting. Zatko is due to testify next month at a Senate hearing.
In addition to informing Congress, Zatko filed a complaint last month with the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among Zatko’s most serious accusations is that Twitter violated the terms of a 2011 FTC settlement by falsely claiming that it had put stronger measures in place to protect the security and privacy of its users.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., called on the FTC to investigate.
“These troubling disclosures paint the picture of a company that has consistently and repeatedly prioritized profits over the safety of its users and its responsibility to the public,” Blumenthal wrote to FTC Chair Lina Khan.
Twitter has said Zatko’s complaint is “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.”
Zatko also accused the San Francisco-based company of deceptions involving its handling of “spam,” or fake, accounts, an allegation that is at the core of billionaire tycoon Elon Musk’s attempt to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter.
The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Wednesday that Zatko will testify at a hearing on Sept. 13 — the same day Twitter’s shareholders are scheduled to vote on the company’s pending buyout by Musk. The Twitter board is recommending approval of the buyout.
A trial on Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk to force him to go through with the acquisition is scheduled for October.
The Judiciary Committee’s chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and its senior Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a joint statement Wednesday that if Zatko’s claims are accurate, “they may show dangerous data-privacy and security risks for Twitter users around the world.”
They said the panel “will investigate this issue further with a full committee hearing … and take further steps as needed to get to the bottom of these alarming allegations.”
The SEC is questioning Twitter about how it counts fake accounts on its platform. In June, the securities regulators asked the company about its methodology for calculating the number of false or spam accounts and “the underlying judgments and assumptions used by management.” The numbers are key to Twitter’s business because it uses them to attract advertisers, whose payments make up a little more than 90% of its revenue.
Twitter, with an estimated 238 million daily active users, said last month that it removes 1 million spam accounts daily.
Senior members of the Senate Intelligence and Commerce committees, as well as the House Energy and Commerce panel, also have publicly signaled their engagement on the issue. The Senate Intelligence Committee is planning a meeting with Zatko to discuss his allegations, a spokeswoman said, adding, “We take this matter seriously.”
With the midterm elections looming in early November, many lawmakers may wish to appear before TV cameras expressing concern about online privacy, an issue that resonates with consumers. That means camera lights glaring and outrage thundering from elected representatives as a lone whistleblower stands and takes the oath behind a table ringed by a photographers’ mosh pit — a scene that would mirror former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen’s testimony late last year.
“If Twitter whistleblower (and head of security) Peiter Zatko left you asking, ‘How could it possibly be this bad???,’ you’re not alone,” Haugen tweeted Thursday. “Twitter’s problems aren’t unique, and we should worry.”
Haugen’s far-reaching condemnation of Facebook and her allegation that it prioritized profits over safety of the platform were buttressed by a trove of internal Facebook documents. Zatko’s complaint, by contrast, appears to stand alone, though there may be references to other documents in the unredacted version of the complaint. The Associated Press has been able to view only a redacted version.
Other possible witnesses at congressional hearings could include former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and current CEO Parag Agrawal.
Zatko’s attorneys have said that in late 2021, after Twitter’s board was given “whitewashed” information about security problems, Zatko escalated his concerns, “clashed” with Agrawal and board member Omid Kordestani, and was fired two weeks later.
The Twitter debacle has raised hopes among some lawmakers that it could give a boost to comprehensive data-privacy legislation, which has been stalled for years but recently cleared a key House committee — bringing it closer than ever to final passage. It has been held up in the Senate, however.
Rep. Frank Pallone, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and its senior Republican, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, issued a joint statement saying the panel “is actively reviewing the Twitter whistleblower disclosure and assessing next steps.”
“There are still a lot of unknowns and questions that need to be answered,” they said. “Many of these allegations, if true, are alarming and reaffirm the need for Congress to pass comprehensive national consumer privacy legislation to protect Americans’ online data.”
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Follow Marcy Gordon at https://twitter.com/mgordonap
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| 2022-09-21T02:36:55Z
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MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Facebook parent Meta says it has removed a network of accounts linked to the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group it banned in 2018.
Meta said on Thursday that it recently uncovered and removed about 480 Facebook and Instagram accounts, pages and groups linked to the Proud Boys. That brought the total number of Proud Boys assets it has removed to around 750 this year, it said.
Although the group has been banned from Meta’s platforms, the company said it has seen repeated attempts by its members at evading the ban. People behind the efforts are not identifying themselves as Proud Boys openly, creating front groups and using Facebook or Instagram to steer people to other, less moderated platforms, it said.
Such tactics are commonly used by extremist groups and those spreading misinformation as they try to evade social media companies’ crackdowns.
While the Proud Boys and other extremist groups have at times found homes on smaller internet platforms that cater to right-wing audiences, none come close to the reach of Meta’s properties, where they can recruit members more easily.
The former leader of the Proud Boys and other members of the group were charged this summer with attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.
Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and four others were charged with seditious conspiracy for what authorities say was a plot to forcibly oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
The seditious conspiracy indictment alleges that the Proud Boys held meetings and communicated over encrypted messages to plan for the attack in the days leading up to Jan. 6. On the day of the riot, Proud Boys members carried out a coordinated plot to storm past police barricades and attack the building with a mob of Trump supporters, the indictment says.
The trial is scheduled to start on Dec. 12.
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| 2022-09-21T02:37:04Z
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DOVER, Del. (AP) — A Delaware judge ordered both Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to turn over more information to opposing lawyers in their tussle over Musk’s agreed-to-then-abandoned $44 billion deal to acquire the social platform.
Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick on Thursday ordered Twitter to provide Musk’s attorneys more data regarding the company’s estimates that less than 5% of the accounts on its platform are fake. The judge also rejected Musk’s attempts to shield details about analyses he used in his attempt to terminate the deal.
That work was done by data scientists who examined live-feed information from Twitter about public user accounts to test the company’s daily-user counts.
Musk claims that Twitter has failed to provide enough detail about the number of fake accounts on its platform, and argues that up to 30% of Twitter’s “monetizable daily active users,” or mDAU, could be spam or bot accounts. Twitter says the mDAU metric helps it measure the number of accounts on its platform that advertisers can target, thus making them “monetizable.”
Musk, the world’s richest man, agreed in April to buy Twitter and take it private, offering $54.20 a share and vowing to loosen the company’s policing of content and to root out fake accounts. Twitter shares closed Thursday at $41.05.
Musk indicated in July that he wanted to back away from the deal, prompting Twitter to file a lawsuit to force him to carry through with the acquisition.
The judge rejected more comprehensive data requests from Musk’s attorneys as “absurdly broad,” noting that a literal reading of the request would require Twitter to produce “trillions upon trillions of data points” reflecting all data collected on roughly 200 million accounts over three years.
But McCormick did order Twitter to produce information on 9,000 accounts that were reviewed in connection with company’s fourth-quarter audit, a data subset that has been described as a “historical snapshot.”
McCormick also ordered Twitter to turn over documents regarding other metrics, regardless of whether they expressly address mDAU. Musk’s attorneys have suggested that a comparison of Twitter’s mDAU with other metrics, such as “User Active Minutes,” could support their theory that the company has fraudulently misled investors and securities regulators about the scope of activity on its platform.
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| 2022-09-21T02:37:12Z
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(The Hill) – Google, in a letter to lawmakers on Thursday, said it would clearly identify facilities that provide abortions to ensure people seeking the procedure are not misled by anti-abortion clinics.
Mark Isakowitz, the vice president for government affairs and public policy for the U.S. and Canada at Google, said in a letter to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) that the company will include labels like “Provides abortions” and “Does not provide abortions” that the company has verified at the top of advertisement search results.
The change could help prevent women from seeking the procedure at clinics that oppose abortion or crisis pregnancy centers, which work to convince people against having the procedure.
The announcement comes in response to a letter Warner, Slotkin, and other members of Congress sent to the CEO of Google in June to urge him to prevent misleading abortion search results.
The lawmakers said in the letter that 37 percent of Google Maps results and 11 percent of search results for “abortion clinics near me” and “abortion pill” in states with abortion trigger bans were for anti-abortion clinics.
A Google spokesperson told The Hill that the company has been working for months to find more useful ways to display results that show the specific services that businesses offer.
The spokesperson said the update that Google is introducing will help users find locations that offer the services they search for or broaden their results so they can see more options. The company will confirm that certain places provide a service by regularly calling them directly and collaborating with “authoritative” data sources.
“When people turn to Google to find local information, we aim to help them easily explore the range of places available so they can determine which are most helpful to them,” the spokesperson said.
The updates will affect how Google shows search results and maps to give people additional context about what they are viewing, according to a Google spokesperson.
The company will include the note “Might not provide abortions” when it is unable to verify the information.
Google will also allow users to expand their search radius if the most relevant results are not nearby.
Warner said in a release that the changes are not about restricting speech but providing results that accurately address a search.
“I welcome the changes that Google has announced today so that women seeking abortion services aren’t directed towards fake clinics that traffic in misinformation and don’t provide comprehensive health services,” he said.
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TEXARKANA, Ark. (KTAL/KSHV) – The ‘Be Like CJ’ Foundation is holding a back-to-school clothing drive in Texarkana this weekend.
The organization will give out clothing, shoes, and school supplies to families in need on Sunday, Sep 28th.
The ‘Be Like CJ’ Foundation honors the memory of CJ, who passed away following an ATV accident last year.
“CJ cared for people, he cared for young people, he cared for older people. He just had a heart for people, and it didn’t matter how big of a star he was on the field or on the court. He wanted to make a difference in young people’s lives,” said CJ’s mom Marie Ferdinand-Harris.
The clothing drive will happen at the Recreation Center at 1 Legion Street in Texarkana, Arkansas, from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
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| 2022-09-21T02:37:27Z
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(KTLA) – The proprietor of the fictional Peach Pit diner from “Beverly Hills, 90210” has died. He was 85.
Actor Joe E. Tata passed away on Wednesday night. His daughter Kelly Katharine Tata made the announcement via an update on the GoFundMe page she created in October 2021. Tata previously wrote that her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2018.
“My father and I are forever grateful for the love and support of family, friends, and fans,” she wrote, adding that the remaining funds raised from the campaign will be donated to the Alzheimer’s Association. “Please continue to keep us in your prayers as I grieve the loss of my best friend.”
His former “90210” costar Ian Ziering took to Instagram to honor express his condolences.
“Joey was truly an O.G., I remember seeing him on the ‘Rockford Files’ with James Garner years before we worked together on ‘90210,’” he reminisced. “Though the Peach Pit was a ‘90210’ set, it often felt like the backdrop to the ‘Joe E Tata show.'”
He said Tata was “generous with his wisdom as he was with his kindness.”
From 1990 to 2000, Tata starred as Nat Bussichio in the ’90s teen drama. While he’s known for that role by many, he had quite a resume.
He played various roles on hit television series like “Batman,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” “Magnum P.I.,” “Hillstreet Blues,” and more.
Tata returned to the diner in 2008 for the “90210” reboot.
His final role was on the ABC Family show “Mystery Girls.” This was around the time his health “took a turn for the worse,” his daughter wrote. That was in 2014.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — Two Bulgarian police officers were killed early Thursday as they tried to stop a bus containing migrants who had entered the country illegally, a senior interior ministry official said.
The incident occurred at 5 a.m. (0200 GMT) in the Black Sea city of Burgas after the bus refused to stop at two consecutive border police checkpoints, Stanimir Stanev told reporters.
The bus with Turkish registration plates was carrying 47 migrants whose nationality has not been disclosed.
The bus had entered a residential area when the police officers halted their car across the road in front of it. The bus rammed the police vehicle, then drove over the top of it before smashing into a bus stop.
The two officers in the car were killed instantly. No other injuries were reported and an investigation into the case has been launched.
So far, no charges against the driver have been brought, but district prosecutor Georgi Chinev called the driver’s actions a “conscious, purposeful act”.
Bulgaria, a Balkan country of 7 million, is located on a major route for migrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan to Europe. Only a small number of them plan to stay in the EU’s poorest member, using Bulgaria instead as a transit corridor on their way westward.
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| 2022-09-21T02:37:43Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Two Florida residents have pleaded guilty in a scheme to peddle a diary and other items belonging to President Joe Biden’s daughter to the conservative group Project Veritas for $40,000, prosecutors said Thursday.
Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’ office said.
“Harris and Kurlander sought to profit from their theft of another person’s personal property, and they now stand convicted of a federal felony as a result,” Williams said in a statement.
Harris’ lawyer, Sam Talkin, said she “has accepted responsibility for her conduct and looks forward to moving on with her life.” Kurlander’s lawyer, Florian Miedel, declined to comment.
Harris, 40, of Palm Beach, and Kurlander, 58, face the possibility of up to five years in prison when sentenced.
While authorities didn’t identify Ashley Biden or the organization that paid, the details of the investigation have been laid out in court filings and public statements from Project Veritas.
Ashley Biden was moving out of a friend’s Delray Beach, Florida, home in spring 2020 when she stored the diary, tax records, a digital device with family photos, a cellphone and other items there, prosecutors said in a court filing.
They said Harris then moved into the same room, found the items and got in touch with Kurlander, who enthused in a text message that he would help her make a “ton of money” from selling it, adding an expletive before “ton.”
That September, he contacted Project Veritas, which asked for pictures of the material and then paid for the two to bring the diary and photos to a New York luxury hotel, prosecutors said.
Project Veritas staffers met with Kurlander and Harris in New York and agreed to pay an initial $10,000, saying more money could come if they retrieved more of Ashley Biden’s items from the home, partly in order to authenticate the diary, according to the court filing.
Back in Florida, Kurlander texted Harris a blunt assessment of what Project Veritas would make of the acquisition, prosecutors said.
“They are in a sketchy business and here they are taking what’s literally a stolen diary and info … and trying to make a story that will ruin” Ashley Biden’s life and possibly affect the impending presidential election, he wrote, according to the court papers. He added that the two needed “to tread even more carefully” and get “anything worthwhile” out of the house where it was stored, according to the court papers.
Prosecutors said Kurlander and Harris took Ashley Biden’s stored tax documents, clothes and luggage as Kurlander pressed Project Veritas in a message to commit to a bigger payout: “We are taking huge risks. This isn’t fair.”
A Project Veritas staffer soon flew to Florida, the employee shipped the items to New York and the group paid Harris and Kurlander $20,000 apiece, prosecutors said.
Project Veritas identifies itself as a news organization. It is best known for conducting hidden camera stings that have embarrassed news outlets, labor organizations and Democratic politicians.
“Project Veritas’s news gathering was ethical and legal” in the diary affair, the group said in a statement Thursday. The organization said earlier that it turned the journal over to law enforcement after receiving it from “tipsters” who maintained that it had been abandoned in a room.
“A journalist’s lawful receipt of material later alleged to be stolen is routine, commonplace and protected by the First Amendment,” Project Veritas added Thursday.
Neither Project Veritas nor any staffers have been charged with a crime.
The FBI searched the group’s New York offices and the homes of some of its employees as part of the investigation. A court in New York appointed a former federal judge to review material that was seized in those searches, so as to ensure that investigators couldn’t look at material protected by journalistic or attorney-client privileges.
Generally, media organizations aren’t culpable for receiving material that might have been stolen, if they weren’t involved in the theft. But there can be criminal liability for orchestrating theft and then knowingly paying for stolen material.
“There is no First Amendment protection for the theft and interstate transport of stolen property,” the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in a court filing last year.
O’Keefe has said that Project Veritas ultimately could not confirm that the diary belonged to Ashley Biden and did not publish information from it.
He added that there was “no doubt Project Veritas acted appropriately at each and every step.”
Ashley Biden, a social worker, is the daughter of the president and of first lady Jill Biden. His eldest daughter and his first wife were killed in a 1972 car accident.
___
Associated Press writer Michael R. Sisak contributed from Philadelphia.
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| 2022-09-21T02:37:51Z
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LUANDA, Angola (AP) — Angolans are anxiously watching the vote counting in their election race between the ruling MPLA party and the opposition UNITA.
With 86% of votes counted, the MPLA has the lead with 52% of the votes and UNITA has 43%, according to preliminary results announced Thursday morning by the National Electoral Commission. Smaller parties have received the remaining votes.
This is the opposition party’s best showing in 30 years. But many supporters of UNITA — the Union for the Total Independence of Angola — assert that their party should be in the lead and charge that the official results are not accurate.
According to many experts, the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known by its Portuguese acronym MPLA and in power for 47 years, holds an unfair advantage as it controls virtually all aspects of the election process.
The mood is calm but anxious in Luanda, the seaside capital on the Atlantic Ocean, where many voters openly say they voted for the opposition. Angola is Africa’s second-largest producer of oil and has rich diamond deposits, but the majority of the southern African country’s 34 million people remain in poverty, according to the U.N. With unemployment above 30%, many people say they want to see change.
“I voted early and I voted for a change,” said Gelmo Santos, 49, who works as a driver and held up his finger stained with violet ink as proof that he cast his ballot.
Benedito dos Santos, 29, said he also decided to vote for change.
“This is the right time to show which direction the youngsters want for this country,” said dos Santos, a fish seller in Luanda.
Such vocal support for the opposition is unusual in Angola, which for many years was a one-party state ruled by the MPLA. Since 1992 the southern African country has been a multi-party democracy and many voters, especially those under 30, say they want to see change.
Both parties are former rebel movements that fought Portuguese colonial rule. The MPLA won power with backing from the Soviet Union and established Marxist rule when Angola became independent in 1975. UNITA fought a bitter civil war against the MPLA, with support from the U.S. and apartheid-ruled South Africa.
In a negotiated truce, the MPLA agreed to multiparty elections held in 1992. UNITA furiously rejected the MPLA’s win and the country was plunged back into civil war that only ended in 2002.
Since then, UNITA has transformed itself from a rebel group into a political party, particularly under the new leadership of Adalberto Costa Junior, who didn’t fight in the civil war. Costa Junior has succeeded in gaining support from other opposition politicians and intellectuals.
UNITA legally challenged its loss in the 2017 election but the courts ruled in favor of the MPLA.
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| 2022-09-21T02:38:15Z
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LONDON (AP) — The moving vans have already started arriving at Downing Street as Britain’s Conservative Party prepares to evict Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The debate over what mark he left on his party, his country and the world will linger long after he departs in September — if, indeed, he really is gone for good.
Johnson led Britain out of the European Union and won a landslide election victory before his government collapsed in a heap of ethics scandals. During his final appearance in Parliament as prime minister in July, he summed up his three years in office as: “Mission largely accomplished.”
Many political historians take a harsher view.
“Winston Churchill said that ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,’” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “I’m pretty sure Johnson does too, but I doubt he’ll find it’s as kind to him as it was to his hero.”
Johnson cultivated a buffoonish public image, but he has had a serious impact on his country. He bears much of the credit, or blame, for Britain’s departure from the EU, a momentous decision whose consequences will play out for years.
“The one certain thing you can say is that his legacy is Brexit,” said Steven Fielding, professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “You can’t take that away from him — it’s just a question of whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
Johnson’s backing for the “leave” campaign in Britain’s 2016 referendum on EU membership was vital to its victory. He had a popular appeal that no other campaigner could match. When wrangling in Parliament over the departure terms brought down Prime Minister Theresa May three years later, Johnson succeeded her with a vow to “get Brexit done.”
He led the Conservatives to a huge election victory in 2019 and took Britain out of the EU the following year. But the long divorce feels far from “done.” Relations with the EU have soured amid unresolved disputes over trade rules for Northern Ireland.
New customs and regulatory barriers are also hindering trade between Britain and the 27 EU nations. The benefits of Brexit touted by Johnson and other supporters — a chance to rip up onerous EU rules and create a more dynamic economy — have not yet materialized.
Johnson’s promises to redistribute investment and opportunity to neglected regions of Britain also remain unfulfilled. His successor — either Foreign Secretary Liz Truss or former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak, who are competing in a Conservative Party leadership contest whose outcome will be announced Sept. 5 — inherits a deflating economy and a cost-of-living crisis sparked by such factors as Brexit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Margaret MacMillan, emeritus professor of international history at Oxford University, said Johnson has left the United Kingdom weakened both economically and constitutionally.
“The Union is weaker, the status and future of Northern Ireland in question, and relations with the EU, which is still Britain’s major trading partner, (are) no better, if not worse, than when he became prime minister,” she said.
The other defining event of his premiership was COVID-19, which landed Johnson in intensive care in April 2020 and has left more than 180,000 people in Britain dead.
Johnson hesitated before imposing a nationwide lockdown in March 2020; experts later said acting a week earlier would have saved thousands of lives. Britain went on to have three long lockdowns, a deep economic slump and one of the highest death tolls in Europe. But the U.K.’s vaccine program, led by a task force of scientists and businesspeople, is widely regarded as a major success.
Victoria Honeyman, associate professor of British politics at the University of Leeds, said the verdict on Johnson’s pandemic record is in the eye of the beholder.
“His supporters would argue that his actions were beneficial and justified,” she said, “while his critics would argue that the actions were the bare minimum.”
Apart from Brexit, Johnson’s main international cause has been Ukraine. He has been one of the most prominent allies of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Britain has backed up the rhetoric with billions in military and humanitarian aid to help the country resist Russia’s invasion. The support has made Johnson a popular figure in Ukraine, though critics say any other British leader would have followed the same policy.
Johnson’s domestic policy achievements were few. His administration was chaotic, wracked by factionalism and constantly in crisis mode, as a lifelong record of bending and breaking rules finally caught up with him.
He brazened out public anger at lockdown-breaching parties in Downing Street during the pandemic, for which he was fined by police. But his appointment to a key job of a politician who had been accused of sexual misconduct proved a scandal too far for Conservative lawmakers, who forced him out.
Critics said it was a long-overdue comeuppance for a politician who debased British politics with his populist disregard for ethics and the truth.
“The tragedy is that whoever replaces Johnson will inevitably be someone who tolerated his mendacity, corruption and incompetence for years,” Cambridge University history professor Richard Evans wrote in the New Statesman. “The mess Boris Johnson has left behind will take a long time to clear up.”
But another Cambridge historian, Robert Tombs, said Johnson might one day be seen as “a much underrated politician” — especially if he publishes his own account of his time in office.
“The overriding theme will be that, though afflicted with human frailties, he was right when it mattered,” Tombs wrote on the Spiked website.
Johnson, 58, has tried to sound philosophical about his exit. “Them’s the breaks,” he said with a shrug as he announced his resignation on July 7. But he has made clear that he does not want to leave, blaming a “herd” mentality among Conservative colleagues for the “eccentric” decision to oust him.
He remains a member of Parliament, and some Conservatives believe he could try to return as leader if his successor falters.
Fielding said such a comeback would be almost unprecedented in British history.
“You’d think in a sane and rational political culture that would be impossible,” he said. “But that’s not what Britain is at the moment.”
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| 2022-09-21T02:38:22Z
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UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Even though Uvalde’s school police chief is now gone, Mario Jimenez doesn’t feel any safer about sending his 10-year-old son back to class for the first time since his teacher was shot at Robb Elementary School.
“There were a lot more officers that were there and they should take responsibility for their own actions,” Jimenez said.
The firing of embattled Uvalde school Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who for more than 70 minutes during the May 24 massacre made no attempt to confront a gunman firing an AR-15-style rifle inside a fourth grade classroom, did not satisfy or reassure many Uvalde residents nervously facing a fast approaching school year.
The restlessness illustrates the depths of the broken trust in Uvalde between residents and law enforcement more than three months after the slaying of 19 children and two teachers in one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history. The demands are constant: more firings, more security, more gun restrictions. But even then, some are unconvinced that any change is enough.
The first day of school in Uvalde is Sept. 6 and a big question is how many students will return.
Jimenez is putting his son back in the district, this time with an iPhone so he can track his location and have him phone for help if needed. His son’s teacher, Elsa Avila, was wounded in attack.
“He just runs up to her, hugs her and starts to cry because he knows that she is okay,” Jimenez said. “Everyday all he does is ask about how everybody else is doing even though his mental state is horrible.”
Ronnie Garza, a Uvalde County commissioner, has five grandkids returning to class next month — three to Uvalde schools and two to a private school. He has noticed a reluctance from parents to reenroll their children in the district and said many families are switching their children to the local private Catholic school.
Virtual schooling is another option, but a new Texas law passed during the pandemic caps the number of students who can learn at home to 10% of a district’s enrollment. The Uvalde school district has not requested a waiver, according to the Texas Education Agency.
The district is installing higher fences, more security cameras and spreading more than 30 state troopers on campuses across the small South Texas town. To some families, that provides little peace of mind; the Texas Department of Public Safety had more than 90 troopers, many heavily armed, who were at Robb Elementary as the massacre dragged on.
“They were on campus that day and they also didn’t do anything, so I don’t know how much comfort that brings to us,” said Kimberly Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter, Lexi, was among the students killed.
She has four other children between the ages of 8 and 18, the youngest of whom was also at Robb Elementary and now may do school virtually this year.
“They failed me, they failed us. I don’t know that I will ever be the same after this as far as law enforcement,” she said.
Arredondo’s dismissal Wednesday followed months of pressure from Uvalde residents and investigations that revealed how nearly 400 law enforcement officers on the scene waited outside for more than an hour before they took down the 18-year-old gunman. Signs carried by parents into a heated school board meeting ahead of Arredondo’s firing included one that read, “If you did not do your job, turn in your badge.”
But it is not clear whether any officers besides Arredondo will have to do so over a fumbled response that Col. Steve McCraw, the head of the state police force, has called “an abject failure.” Only one other officer, Uvalde Police Lt. Mariano Pargas — who was the city’s acting police chief on the day of massacre — is known to have been placed on leave for their actions during the shooting.
An investigation into Pargas’ actions is ongoing. Texas DPS also launched an internal review over the response by its troopers after a damning report by lawmakers revealed that the lengthy inaction by law enforcement went beyond Arredondo and local police.
It is not clear when either review will finish.
“Every officer that was in there that did nothing, we are going to go after them too,” said Donna Torres, a Uvalde resident who since the shooting has demanded accountability at school board and city council meetings.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called Arredondo’s dismissal “the first step for accountability.” Abbott’s first comments after the shooting praised the law enforcement response but said days later he had been misled, a reversal that laid bare the conflicting and at times inaccurate statements by authorities in the days after the tragedy.
“This is a good start, but there is more work to be done,” Abbott said in a statement. “There must be accountability at all levels in the response at Robb Elementary School.”
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Weber reported from Austin, Texas.
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For more AP coverage of the Uvalde school shooting: https://apnews.com/hub/uvalde-school-shooting
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| 2022-09-21T02:38:31Z
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Derek Chauvin has been moved from a Minnesota state prison where he was often held in solitary confinement to a medium-security federal prison in Arizona, where the former police officer convicted in George Floyd’s killing may be held under less restrictive conditions.
Chauvin was taken Wednesday from a maximum-security prison in a Minneapolis suburb, where he often spent most of his day in a 10-by-10-foot cell, to the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
The Tucson facility houses 266 inmates, both male and female, as part of a larger complex that includes a high-security penitentiary and a minimum-security satellite camp.
Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Randilee Giamusso declined to detail the circumstances of Chauvin’s confinement, citing privacy, safety and security concerns.
Experts said earlier that Chauvin was likely to be safer in the federal system. It typically houses less-violent inmates, and he’d be less likely to mix with inmates he had arrested or investigated as a Minneapolis police officer.
“It’s dangerous to be an officer in any prison,” former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger said after Chauvin was sentenced last month. “It’s even more dangerous in state prison because of the nature of the inmate population. There are gangs, for example. And police officers just don’t do well there. Those risks are reduced in a federal prison.”
The federal prison system does house many high-profile inmates, but it is also plagued by gangs and chronic violence. The entire federal prison system was put on a nationwide lockdown in January after two inmates were killed and two others were injured during a gang altercation at a federal penitentiary in Texas.
The Bureau of Prisons has also faced increasing scrutiny of violent incidents and serious misconduct in its ranks. Associated Press investigations have uncovered abuse, neglect and leadership missteps, including rampant sexual abuse by workers, severe staffing shortages, inmate escapes and the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chauvin was sentenced last month in U.S. District Court in St. Paul to 21 years on federal civil rights charges after pleading guilty in an agreement with prosecutors. He was already serving 22 1/2 years for his conviction in state court on murder and manslaughter charges; a condition of the agreement called for the sentences to be served concurrently and in federal prison.
Chauvin, who is white, killed Floyd by pinning the unarmed Black man to the pavement with his knee for 9 1/2 minutes as bystander video captured Floyd struggling to breathe and crying out for help. Floyd was suspected of passing a counterfeit bill at a nearby grocery store.
Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, touched off a firestorm of protests around the world and refocused attention on police brutality and racism.
U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson suggested when sentencing Chauvin that he be placed near family who live between Iowa and Minnesota. But federal officials are not bound by judicial requests.
Last month Magnuson also sentenced ex-Minneapolis police Officer J. Alexander Kueng to three years in prison and former Officer Tou Thao to 3 1/2 years on criminal civil rights charges related to the Floyd killing. They intend to appeal their sentences. Earlier in July, former officer Thomas Lane was sentenced to 2½ years. He’s been ordered to report to a low-security federal prison camp in Colorado later this month.
The three former officers were on trial at the same time three men were in court in Georgia, facing federal hate crime charges in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, who was Black. They were eventually convicted.
Two of the men agreed to plead guilty in the case in exchange for serving their sentences in federal prison, saying they feared for their safety in state prison. The judge rejected the deal in part because Arbery’s family strongly opposed it.
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Find AP’s full coverage of the death of George Floyd at: https://apnews.com/hub/death-of-george-floyd
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This story has been corrected to show the correct spelling of Randilee Giamusso’s name.
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| 2022-09-21T02:38:39Z
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NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Cyprus police have arrested five Syrians on suspicion of people trafficking after a police patrol boat plucked them and 32 of their countrymen from the sea when their rickety boats sank close to the island’s southeastern tip.
Police say the five men aged 46-53 face numerous charges including helping third-country citizens to illegally enter Cyprus for financial gain and transporting people on unsafe craft.
Police spokesman Christos Andreou told state-run Cyprus News Agency that the 37 Syrians — who included seven minors — were collected from the sea early Thursday.
Andreou said the five were placed under arrest after witnesses said they were in charge of their transport to Cyprus. One of the five had previously been deported from the east Mediterranean island nation.
Migrant arrivals to Cyprus from Syria and elsewhere to seek asylum continue in large numbers, mostly through the ethnically divided island nation’s breakaway Turkish Cypriot north.
European Union member Cyprus says the number of asylum-seekers in the first half of this year amounted to 12,000 — equal to the number for all of last year. It says asylum-seekers make up an EU high of 5% of the island’s 915,000 people in the internationally recognized south.
Cypriot law enforcement authorities have been stepping up arrests relating to people trafficking.
According to police statistics, 50 people have been arrested in Cyprus on people trafficking charges in 30 separate cases through the first seven months of this year, about equaling the tallies for all of 2021.
So far this year, 3,459 migrants who had their asylum applications rejected by Cyprus have either been deported or voluntarily repatriated. This year, four people have been sentenced to between three and 10 months in prison for assisting in the illegal entry of others.
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| 2022-09-21T02:38:47Z
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a major buildup of his country’s military forces Thursday in an apparent effort to replenish troops that have suffered heavy losses in six months of bloody warfare and prepare for a long, grinding fight ahead in Ukraine.
The move to increase the number of troops by 137,000, or 13%, to 1.15 million by the end of the year came amid chilling developments on the ground in Ukraine:
— Fueling fears of a nuclear catastrophe, the Zaporizhzhia power plant in the middle of the fighting in southern Ukraine was briefly knocked out of commission by fire damage to a transmission line, authorities said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the plant’s emergency backup diesel generators had to be activated to provide power needed to operate the plant.
“Russia has put Ukraine and all Europeans one step away from a radiation disaster,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.
— The death toll from a Russian rocket attack on a train station and the surrounding area climbed to 25, Ukrainian authorities said. Russia said it targeted a military train and claimed to have killed more than 200 Ukrainian reservists in the attack, which took place Wednesday on Ukraine’s Independence Day.
Putin’s decree did not specify whether the expansion would be accomplished by widening the draft, recruiting more volunteers, or both. But some Russian military analysts predicted heavier reliance on volunteers because of the Kremlin’s concerns about a potential domestic backlash from an expanded draft.
The move will boost Russia’s armed forces overall to 2.04 million, including the 1.15 million troops.
Western estimates of Russian dead in the Ukraine war have ranged from more than 15,000 to over 20,000 — more than the Soviet Union lost during its 10-year war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon said last week that as many as 80,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded, eroding Moscow’s ability to conduct big offensives.
The Kremlin has said that only volunteer contract soldiers take part in the Ukraine war. But it may be difficult to find more willing soldiers, and military analysts said the planned troop levels may still be insufficient to sustain operations.
Retired Russian Col. Retired Viktor Murakhovsky said in comments carried by the Moscow-based RBC online news outlet that the Kremlin will probably try to keep relying on volunteers, and he predicted that will account for the bulk of the increase.
Another Russian military expert, Alexei Leonkov, noted that training on complex modern weapons normally takes three years. And draftees serve only one year.
“A draft won’t help that, so there will be no increase in the number of draftees,” the state RIA Novosti news agency quoted Leonkov as saying.
Fears of a Chernobyl-like disaster have been mounting in Ukraine because of fighting around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia plant. Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling the site.
In the incident on Thursday, the plant was cut off from the electrical grid, causing a blackout across the region, according to authorities. The complex was later reconnected to the grid, a local Russian-installed official said.
It was not immediately clear from Ukrainian energy authorities whether the damaged line carried outgoing electricity or incoming power to operate the plant. But Zelenskyy’s mention of the emergency generators implied that incoming power was affected. Incoming electricity is needed to run the reactors’ vital cooling systems.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine would have faced a radiation accident if the diesel generators had failed to turn on.
He blamed the fire that damaged the transmission line on Russian shelling. But Zaporizhzhia’s Russian-installed regional governor, Yevgeny Balitsky, blamed a Ukrainian attack.
While the incident apparently didn’t affect the reactors’ cooling systems — whose loss could lead to a meltdown — it stoked fears of disaster.
“The situation is extremely dangerous,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said. “I’m receiving reports that there are fires in the forest near the power plant. We still have to examine this issue more.”
Elsewhere on the battle front, the deadly strike on the train station in Chaplyne, a town of about 3,500 in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, came as Ukraine was bracing for attacks tied to the national holiday and the war’s six-month mark, both of which fell on Wednesday.
The deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, did not say whether all of the 25 people killed were civilians. If they were, it would amount to one of the deadliest attacks on civilians in weeks. Thirty-one people were reported wounded.
Witnesses said some of the victims, including at least one child, burned to death in train cars or passing automobiles.
“Everything sank into dust,” said Olena Budnyk, a 65-year-old Chaplyne resident. “There was a dust storm. We couldn’t see anything. We didn’t know where to run.”
The dead included an 11-year-old boy found under the rubble of a house and a 6-year-old killed in a car fire near the train station, authorities said.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces used an Iskander missile to strike a military train carrying Ukrainian troops and equipment to the front line in eastern Ukraine. The ministry claimed more than 200 reservists “were destroyed on their way to the combat zone.”
The attack served as a painful reminder of Russia’s continued ability to inflict large-scale suffering. Wednesday’s national holiday celebrated Ukraine’s 1991 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.
Tetyana Kvitnytska, deputy head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional health department, said those hurt in the train station attack suffered head injuries, broken limbs, burns and shrapnel wounds.
Following attacks in which civilians have died, the Russian government has repeatedly claimed that its forces aim only at legitimate military targets. Hours before the bloodshed at the train station, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu insisted the military was doing its best to spare civilians, even at the cost of slowing down its offensive in Ukraine.
In April, a Russian missile attack on a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed more than 50 people as crowds of mostly women and children sought to flee the fighting. The attack was denounced as a war crime.
In Moscow on Thursday, Dmitry Medvedev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said Western hopes for a Ukrainian victory are futile and emphasized that the Kremlin will press home what it calls the “special military operation,” leaving just two possible outcomes.
“One is reaching all goals of the special military operation and Kyiv’s recognition of this outcome,” Medvedev said on his messaging app channel. “The second is a military coup in Ukraine followed by the recognition of results of the special operation.”
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Follow all of AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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| 2022-09-21T02:38:55Z
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TER APEL, Netherlands (AP) — Dutch aid agencies tended Thursday to hundreds of migrants camped in sweltering heat outside an overcrowded center for asylum-seekers as Dutch authorities investigated the death of a baby in the center a day earlier.
The Dutch arm of Doctors Without Borders deployed medics to the tiny village of Ter Apel in the northeastern Netherlands to give first aid and other assistance. A mobile hospital was expected to arrive Friday, the organization’s national director, Judith Sargentini, said. It is the first time the humanitarian group was called in to assist with a Dutch crisis.
For two nights running, some 700 people have slept outdoors because the asylum reception center with an official capacity of 2,000 does not have space for them and the Dutch government is scrambling to find emergency accommodation.
With temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday, migrants lay listlessly on blankets under four canvas shades held up by wooden poles. Some sheltered in the shadow of a Red Cross station which had Wi-Fi and power for charging their phones.
Others squabbled as they tried to board a bus to a nearby town. Inside a tent, a medic checked people who wanted care. Blue plastic children’s paddling pools were set up as washing stations, and a small row of portable toilets stood near the covered areas.
Sargentini compared the situation to overcrowded migrant camps in Greece.
“These are 700 people sleeping rough: no showers, very bad facilities, no health care from the institutions,” Sargentini told The Associated Press. “And it might not be as crowded as on the Greek isles, but if you come here after a long journey as a refugee, you think you find safety, but you find neglect. And you sleep like this. Even if you are healthy, you’ll get sick here.”
She said two people were hospitalized Thursday — a man who had a heart attack and another who did not have medication for his diabetes.
State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Eric van der Burg told reporters he was “deeply shocked” by the death of the 3-month-old baby. The cause of death was under investigation, he said.
Mohammad Ali, a 34-year-old Syrian who crisscrossed Europe to reach the Netherlands and has been in Ter Apel for about a month, said he was shocked at the conditions there.
“I’m surprised from the bad conditions here because I didn’t hear about it,” he said.
A number of factors have created the crisis in Ter Apel. It can take months or more to process the asylum applications of migrants arriving from so-called “safe countries” who ultimately are not entitled to stay. A housing crisis means refugees often have nowhere to go once they have been granted a residency permit and therefore stay on at asylum-seeker centers.
While many Dutch towns and cities offered places for Ukrainians who fled the war in their country, the welcome mat has worn thin for asylum-seekers from other countries. The majority of people arriving in Ter Apel are Syrians fleeing their nation’s grinding civil war.
“There’s about 60,000 Ukrainians in municipalities that are being housed there, and there you can see it was possible. But when it comes to non-Ukrainian refugees — people here are mostly from Syria, from Turkey, Afghanistan — municipalities still look the other way,” said Sander Schaap of refugee aid group VluchtelingenWerk.
In a sign of growing anger at the situation among residents, a group protested Thursday night near the asylum-seeker center, carrying banners that said “Real Refugees OK, Troublemakers Go Away” and “Enough of the Nuisance.”
The situation in Dutch asylum-seeker centers has gotten so bad that VluchtelingenWerk last week took the government and its asylum agency to court to produce improvements. Nobody from the agency was available for comment Thursday.
Sargentini wants to see change even sooner, but is not optimistic.
“If we can leave tomorrow because of the government taking its responsibility, we will,” she said. “But currently, together with the Red Cross, we are here to give that needed help.”
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Follow AP’s coverage of migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration
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| 2022-09-21T02:39:03Z
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BANGKOK (AP) — A former British ambassador to Myanmar who now heads a business ethics advisory group in the Southeast Asian country has been arrested on charges of violating immigration laws by failing to register her change of address, the military government said Thursday.
Its “Tatmadaw True News Information Team” confirmed in a text message that Vicky Bowman, who served as the British envoy in 2002-2006, was detained for failing to inform the authorities last year when she and her husband moved from their registered address in Yangon, the country’s biggest city, to Kalaw township in Shan state in east-central Myanmar.
It said she was charged under the Immigration Act and the Foreigners Registration Rules. It said Bowman, who has applied for a visa to do business in Myanmar, was charged with breaching visa rules because she did not comply with regulations governing foreigners.
Failure to change the address on her official residence permit registration card makes her liable to six months to five years’ imprisonment, it said. It did not clearly explain what the punishment was for the other alleged offense.
The short statement seemed to imply that failure to properly register her address automatically put her in violation of the Immigration Act. The act has catch-all provisions saying that foreigners are guilty of violating the terms of their visas if they are found to have broken other laws.
Since 2013, Bowman has been heading the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business, which says its goals include the promotion of human rights through responsible business in Myanmar. Phone calls to the organization for comment went answered.
Bowman’s first stint as a diplomat in Myanmar was in 1990-93 as the British Embassy’s second secretary.
The government’s statement said Bowman’s husband, Myanmar artist Htein Lin, was also detained and charged with abetting the failure to register the proper address, and a second charge similar to his wife’s.
Htein Lin is an artist and veteran political activist who was a student when he took part in Myanmar’s failed 1988 uprising against military rule. He was also a political prisoner under a past government.
It said her husband, Myanmar artist Htein Lin, was also detained and charged with abetting the failure to register the proper address, That charge, also under immigration law, carries the same punishment.
A friend of Htein Lin, who asked that her name not be used because of fear of government reprisal, told The Associated Press that the were taken by security forces on Wednesday while they were temporarily staying in Yangon.
A British Embassy spokesperson told The Associated Press in an email that “We are concerned by the arrest of a British woman in Myanmar. We are in contact with the local authorities and are providing consular assistance.” The embassy provided no further details because of privacy concerns.
Myanmar has been under military rule since February 2021, when its army ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The takeover triggered widespread peaceful protests that soon erupted into armed resistance, and the country slipped into what some U.N. experts characterize as a civil war.
According to detailed lists by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), an advocacy group, about 2,239 civilians have died in the military government’s crackdown on opponents and more than 15,216 people have been arrested.
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| 2022-09-21T02:39:07Z
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PEARL, Miss. (AP) — Large fans hummed noisily Thursday to try to dry out the carpet at The Exchange Church, a day after storms rapidly dumped several inches of rain and pushed water into the one-story brick building in central Mississippi.
Bryant May is lead pastor of the Southern Baptist congregation in the Jackson suburb of Pearl. He said it was the second time in four years the church flooded. The church will conduct online services this weekend, and May said he hopes the building will be in working order soon after that.
“The good news in it is that we have a little bit of experience — that’s good news/bad news — so we have a little bit of a game plan on how to attack it,” May said Thursday.
Weather radar showed heavy rainfall Thursday in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and in the Florida panhandle.
Several flash flood warnings were issued, and the Mississippi Department of Transportation reported water covering highways Thursday from the central part of the state down to the Gulf Coast. Flowing water washed away part of a state highway in rural Newton County, between Jackson and Meridian.
The National Weather Service predicted the Pearl River near Jackson, Mississippi, will crest early next week at nearly the level it reached during flooding in 2020. Emergency officials said residents in low-lying areas near the river should prepare for the possibility of evacuating in the next several days.
After Wednesday’s deluge caused creeks to overflow, law enforcement officers carried toddlers out of a flooded day care center in Florence, Mississippi, south of Jackson. The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department posted video on Facebook of deputies walking through brown, knee-deep water to take children to an elevated truck, placing them gently on benches.
Rankin County sheriff’s deputies also helped move more than 40 residents out of a flooded nursing home Wednesday in nearby Brandon.
Tony Banks said Thursday that when he returned to his apartment in the Jackson suburb of Flowood after work Wednesday, the parking lot was knee-deep in water. He said a creek overflowed, flooding some cars and trucks. Banks said he caught a fish near the vehicles.
“He was flopping around in the parking lot and I grabbed his mouth,” said Banks, 35. He said he tossed the bass back into the water.
In Alabama, vehicles traveling along flooded roads created boat-like wakes on low-lying Dauphin Island, a popular beach community off the coast, but police said the water was not deep enough Thursday morning to pose a major threat. Flooding was likely across southwestern Alabama through nightfall, forecasters said, and Mississippi temporarily closed a welcome station on Interstate 10 because of flooding.
A few schools around Mobile, Alabama, dismissed early because of flooding or power outages. The National Weather Service said rain was falling at a rate of as much as 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) an hour along the coast, and roads and parking lots were flooded in Foley on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay.
Joy Lester owns a second-hand store in Pearl, Mississippi, near The Exchange Church. She said she will have to throw away most of the couches, dining room sets and inventory that was soaked by flooding.
“All of this is just a waste. It’s got to go,” Lester said as she surveyed the damage Thursday.
Three Mississippi cities set one-day rainfall records Wednesday, the weather service said. Jackson received just over 5 inches (12.7 centimeters), Meridian received 4.6 inches (11.7 centimeters) and Vicksburg received 2.9 inches (7.4 centimeters).
On Wednesday, Jackson also surpassed its previous record for rainfall for the month of August, at 11.57 inches (29.4 centimeters). The previous record for the month was 11.51 inches (29.2 centimeters) in 2008, the weather service said.
The National Weather Service said flooding was expected near several rivers in central and southern Mississippi. The Pearl River was above flood stage in the Jackson area Thursday and was expected to continue rising. That means streams and creeks are unable to drain into the river, and water could threaten homes and businesses.
___
Associated Press writer Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama, contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T02:39:15Z
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PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron is heading to Algeria for a three-day official visit aimed at addressing two major challenges: boosting future economic relations while seeking to heal wounds inherited from the colonial era, 60 years after the North African country won its independence from France.
The visit comes less than a year after a monthslong diplomatic crisis between the two countries that stirred up post-colonial tensions and as war in Ukraine has reinforced Algeria’s status as a key partner to provide gas to the European continent.
In recent years, Macron has made unprecedented steps to acknowledge torture and killings by French troops during Algeria’s 1954-62 war of independence, in a bid to appease the two countries’ still rancorous relations. Yet the series of symbolic gestures has fallen short of an apology from France for its actions during the war — a longstanding demand from Algeria.
Macron is to meet Thursday with Algerian President Abdelmajid Tebboune at the presidential El Mouradia palace.
In a phone call with Tebboune Saturday, he said the trip will help “deepen the bilateral relationship,” according to the Elysée. He expressed France’s support after deadly wildfires in eastern Algeria.
This is the second time Macron has been to Algeria as president. During a brief stop in December 2017, he called for a “partnership between equals.” Months before that, during a trip to Algiers as a presidential candidate, he called colonization a “crime against humanity.”
Macron, who is the first French president born after the end of Algeria’s brutal seven-year war of independence in 1962, has promised a reckoning of colonial-era wrongs. The country was occupied by France for 132 years.
In 2018, Macron recognized the responsibility of the French state in the 1957 death of a dissident in Algeria, Maurice Audin, admitting for the first time the military’s use of systematic torture during the war. He later made a key decision to speed up the declassification of secret documents related to the war, amid other gestures.
Macron will have a second meeting with Tebboune on Friday in the presence of the French army chief and defense and foreign ministers to discuss peace and stability in the region, after France completed the withdrawal of its troops from Mali earlier this month. Paris still maintains troops in the broader Sahel region, with the heart of the operation moved to Niger.
Coordination with Algerian authorities is crucial as the country shares long borders in the Sahara with Mali, Libya and Niger, which are paths used by smugglers and Islamic extremists, the Elysee stressed.
No energy supply or other big trade contract is expected during Macron’s trip, but the focus will be on future economic relations, according to the Elysee.
Algeria’s status as a key gas supplier for Europe has been enhanced amid fears that Russia could cut off the pipelines. The North African country is the EU’s third-largest gas supplier, representing 8.2% of the 27-nation bloc’s imports in 2021.
Algiers has already started increasing its gas supplies to the continent, mostly via two pipelines that connect the country to Italy and Spain. It signed a $4 billion gas deal with U.S. group Occidental Petroleum, Italian company Eni and French giant Total.
Political scientist Mohamed Saidj told the AP he considers this is the most important visit by a French president since 1975, because it comes after last year’s major diplomatic crisis.
Tensions between the two countries escalated following a French decision to slash the number of visas issued to people in North Africa, including Algeria, because governments there were refusing to take back migrants expelled from France.
Relations further worsened after Algeria recalled its ambassador to France citing alleged “irresponsible comments” attributed to Macron about Algeria’s pre-colonial history and post-colonial system of government. In retaliation, Algeria accused Paris of “genocide” during the colonial era.
Both countries agreed to resume cooperation in December.
The visa situation will be discussed during Macron’s trip, the Elysee said. There are several million Algerian nationals or people of Algerian descent in France.
Last year’s tensions spread in the Algerian public opinion a feeling of hostility toward France, echoed by the authorities’ push to replace the French language at school and in public administration by English.
The Elysee said Macron will also raise human rights issues, in a country where activists criticize an unjust system of governance that views dissidents as criminals and doesn’t allow freedom of speech.
Political analyst Hassan Moali stressed that the visit “should be the occasion to clarify all issues and speak the truth. … France indeed is an economic partner, but the history issue remains key in bilateral relations.”
The French president will go Friday to the Christian and Jewish cemetery of Saint-Eugene in Algiers. He will also visit the Great Mosque.
He will then head to Oran, the country’s second largest city, where he will attend Saturday a show of breakdancing, which will become an Olympic sport in 2024 in Paris.
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AP journalist Barbara Surk in Nice, France contributed.
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| 2022-09-21T02:39:27Z
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BERLIN (AP) — Cases of people hoarding cats, dogs and other living creatures in Germany reached a ten-year high in 2021, the country’s Animal Protection Association said Thursday
The association said it counted 68 cases of hoarding involving 4,218 animals in Germany last year, the highest since it began systematically collecting data a decade ago. Rescued animals are often found in unsanitary conditions and neglected by owners who struggle to care for them, it said.
The biggest share of animal hoarding cases recorded since 2012 involved cats, followed by dogs. Small animals, such as rabbits, constituted the largest group of victims, with more than 10,000 rescued from hoarders over the past decade. The association said instances of horse hoarding after also increased and made up almost 15% of all reported cases in 2021.
Nina Brakebusch, the association’s expert on animal hoarding, said it was unclear whether the threefold increase in recorded cases since 2012 was due to authorities and the public becoming sensitized to the issue, or an actual worsening of the problem.
But Brakebusch said people often begin to hoard animals after their own personal circumstances worsen, such as after the death of a loved one or when they experience financial or psychological distress. The coronavirus pandemic and rising cost of living could be contributing to the problem, she said.
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| 2022-09-21T02:39:35Z
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BERLIN (AP) — A man has gone on trial in Germany accused of firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a group of civilians in Syria eight years ago, killing at least seven people.
The defendant, identified only as Mouafak Al D. for privacy reasons, appeared before a Berlin regional court on Thursday charged with war crimes, seven counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder and three counts of dangerous bodily harm.
Federal prosecutors say the 55-year-old Syrian fired an RPG at people lining up for food aid in the Yarmouk district of Damascus, which is home to a large population of Palestinian refugees.
In addition to at least three deaths, the attack in 2014 wounded at least three people including a 6-year-old child.
The suspect is alleged to have been a member of the Free Palestine Movement, and previously of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Palestine General Command. Between July 2013 and April 2015, the groups exerted control of the Yarmouk refugee camp on behalf of the Syrian government.
Prosecutors claim the defendant sought revenge for the killing of his nephew two days earlier during a gun battle involving members of the Free Syrian Army rebel group.
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| 2022-09-21T02:39:43Z
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ISLAMABAD (AP) — At least 182 people have been killed and hundreds more injured during a month of heavy flooding from seasonal rains in Afghanistan, according to the United Nations and the ruling Taliban.
Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban’s spokesman, said Thursday that more than 250 people were injured as the result of the flash flooding, while more than 3,000 houses were either destroyed or damaged. Mujahid said at least 182 people had been killed.
The heaviest death toll occurred between August 16 and August 21, when 63 people were killed in the flash floods. Thirty others are reported missing and more than 8,200 families are affected across 13 provinces, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Recently in eastern Logar province, villagers in the Khushi district had said that the flooding was unprecedented in the area’s history. There, the deluge has wiped out animals, houses and agricultural lands. People have been driven from their homes to find refuge in the mountains.
In northern Parwan province, the flash floods swept away dozens of homes in the three affected districts.
The local weather department has warned that more rains were expected in the coming days in most of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Heavy rains and flash floods across the country killed 40 people in July and 19 people the month before.
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| 2022-09-21T02:39:51Z
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Diego Luna Says Andor Marks the End of His Star Wars Journey
When Rogue One hit theaters in 2016, Cassian Andor proved to be one of the most standout new additions to the Star Wars canon. When word got out that Diego Luna would reprise his role in a new prequel series airing on Disney+, fans celebrated his return to a galaxy far, far away. Unfortunately, they shouldn’t expect Cassian to embark on any more adventures beyond Andor’s two-season run. This was expected, given his tragic Rogue One fate. But while speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Luna officially confirmed that Andor will be his final say on the title character.
“For me, this is it,” said Luna. “It’s a beautiful journey now that I have 24 episodes, 24 shorter films, to tell the story of where Cassian comes from and how he got to be the man we met in Rogue One.”
The first season of Andor will show us how Cassian went from being a common thief to become one of the Rebellion’s most valuable agents. Along the way, fans will witness how some of the Alliance’s other top players, including Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) gave him a new lease on life that ultimately led him to sacrifice himself for the Rebel cause.
However, season 2 will cover much more ground, with a one-year time jump happening every three episodes. The next season will also bring Luna’s Rogue One co-star, Alan Tudyk, back into the mix as K-2SO. But according to recent reports, this onscreen reunion might be two years away.
RELATED: Andor Character Posters Showcase the Heroes of the Rebellion
Showrunner Tony Gilroy has also said that the end of Andor season 2 leads directly into the beginning of Rogue One. Which means that any new stories would have to wind the clock back further into the past, something Luna isn’t interested in (“I’m not getting any younger, so it definitely would have to be someone else.”). Regardless, Luna sounds perfectly fine with ending Cassian’s story sooner rather than later. He even explained the benefits of keeping the series confined to certain points on the timeline.
“It does have a beginning and an end,” added Luna. “Therefore, I can understand it and I can enjoy the ride and kind of picture the aim we have. I think that’s needed, otherwise you’re always working to get somewhere else. I don’t think that way. All those people and coaches that tell people, ‘Oh, picture yourself in 10 years, where you want to be. Project that and work for that.’ That’s nonsense. Worry about what you’re doing today. Do it the best way you can. Enjoy the ride. Make sure you give the most, and you give everything you have. And something cool will happen if you do that. And, if not, the journey was worth it. So it’s about now, the moment.”
Andor will premiere its first three episodes on Disney+ tonight at midnight.
Are you sad to hear that Luna won’t be revisiting the character after the series concludes its second season? Tell us what you think in the comment section below!
Recommended Reading: The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
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JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military said Thursday it has filed terror charges against a senior member of the Islamic Jihad militant group whose arrest in the occupied West Bank helped spark three days of heavy fighting in Gaza earlier this month.
Islamic Jihad had demanded the release of Bassam al-Saadi and another detained Palestinian who is on a prolonged hunger strike as part of the Egyptian-brokered cease-fire that ended the fighting. The indictment signals that those demands will not be met.
The military said al-Saadi, 62, stands accused of “committing crimes of affiliation with and activity in an illegal association” and receiving funds from Islamic Jihad in Gaza, as well as “impersonation, incitement and aiding contact with enemy elements,” the military said.
Islamic Jihad is an Iran-sponsored Palestinian militant group that is opposed to Israel’s existence and has carried out scores of deadly attacks over the years targeting Israeli civilians. It operates in both the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Al-Saadi was arrested earlier this month during a night-time military raid in the West Bank city of Jenin. In response to his arrest, Islamic Jihad said it was going “on alert.”
Israel says the group was planning a revenge attack from Gaza. In response to what it said was an imminent threat, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes in Gaza that killed a senior Islamic Jihad commander. The militants began launching hundreds of rockets at Israel hours later.
The flare-up left 49 Palestinians dead, including the militant group’s top two commanders and 10 other fighters, before the cease-fire took effect. Gazan militants fired some 1,100 rockets, but no one on the Israeli side was killed or seriously wounded.
It was the deadliest exchange of fire since last year’s war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that has ruled Gaza for the last 15 years — and which did not take part in the latest fighting.
Despite the lopsided toll, Islamic Jihad has held rallies across Gaza in recent days, including on Thursday, on the main road of Gaza’s Shijaiyah neighborhood. At a rally Wednesday in the southern town of Rafah, the militants displayed life-sized replicas of rockets.
Al-Saadi has spent a total of 15 years over several stints in Israeli jails for being an Islamic Jihad member. Israel killed two of his sons, who were also Islamic Jihad militants, in separate incidents in 2002, and destroyed his home during a fierce battle in Jenin that year.
Israeli forces have carried out regular operations into Jenin in recent months that the military says are aimed at dismantling militant networks in the wake of several deadly attacks inside Israel. The raids often ignite gunbattles with Palestinian militants.
Since seizing power in 2007, Hamas has fought four wars with Israel, often with support from Islamic Jihad fighters. In the past, Islamic Jihad militants in Gaza have challenged Hamas by firing rockets, often without claiming responsibility, to raise the group’s profile.
Israel and Western countries consider both Hamas and Islamic Jihad to be terrorist groups because they have carried out scores of deadly attacks over the years targeting Israeli civilians. Many Palestinians view the militants as freedom fighters resisting Israel’s 55-year military occupation of lands the Palestinians want for their future state.
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| 2022-09-21T02:39:58Z
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Emma D’Arcy Makes Her House of the Dragon Debut In New Preview Clip
House of the Dragon may have done too good of a job by casting Milly Alcock and Emily Carey as young Rhaenyra Targaryen and young Alicent Hightower. In only five episodes, they’ve become entrenched in the roles and embraced by fans of the series. However, last Sunday’s episode marks their final appearance on the show barring any flashbacks. Episode 6 is jumping ten years into the future, as Emma D’Arcy takes over the role of Rhaenyra, while Olivia Cooke will step into the part of Queen Alicent.
HBO has released a new preview scene from House of the Dragon that marks the debut of D’Arcy on the series. John Macmillan is also making his first appearance as Laenor Velaryon, the older version of Rhaenyra’s husband. This clip also demonstrates just how badly Rhaenyra and Alicent have fallen out. Moments after giving birth to her latest child, Rhaenyra answers a summons from the queen to show off her infant. But this is far from a friendly request. Instead, it’s a test of wills between former friends.
Here’s your first look at Emma D’Arcy and John Macmillan in next week’s episode of #HouseoftheDragon. And I’m just getting started. #HBO50 pic.twitter.com/iD9OLz5AVF
— HBO (@HBO) September 20, 2022
RELATED: House of the Dragon Episode 5 – What Did You Think?!
While their former characters are becoming bitter enemies, Alcock and Carey seem to have a much closer relationship. In an Instagram post from Alcock, she shares an image of herself embracing Carey, as well as a look behind-the-scenes of the series.
View this post on Instagram
Despite only having a short time on the series, Alcock and Carey may enjoy breakout success going forward in their careers. But only time will tell for sure.
House of the Dragon episode 6 will premiere this Sunday, September 25, on HBO and HBO Max.
What do you think about the first look at Emma D’Arcy as Rhaenyra? Let us know in the comment section below!
Recommended Reading: Fire & Blood: 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones
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ROME (AP) — Italy’s worst drought in 70 years has exposed the piers of an ancient bridge over the Tiber River once used by Roman emperors but which fell into disrepair by the third century.
Two piers of Nero’s Bridge have been visible much of the summer near the Vittorio Emanuele bridge that traverses the river near the Vatican, a pile of moss-covered rocks where seagulls now sun themselves.
The bridge was built in the first century for Emperor Nero to reach his gardens near the Janiculum Hill near what is present-day St. Peter’s Square, said historian Anthony Majanlahti. The bridge was already falling apart by the third century, traffic was diverted to the nearby Sant’Angelo Bridge, which funneled pilgrims past the Castel Sant’Angelo to the Vatican.
Nero’s Bridge originally is believed to have had four piers, but Majanlahti says two were dismantled in the 19th century to allow for a better flow of river traffic.
“Because the water level of the river is so low now due to widespread drought across Italy, we’re able to see a lot more of the piers of the bridge that we usually could,’’ Majanlahti said.
In normal water level years, one of the bridge’s piers can often been seen in the driest season, but this year two are visible.
The Italian government has declared a state of emergency in several regions because of the prolonged drought and accompanying heat wave. The drought has also exposed a World War II tank in Italy’s largest river, the Po, as well as 20th century ordinance in lakes.
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Follow all AP stories on drought and the environment at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.
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TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s national police chief said Thursday he will resign to take responsibility over shortfalls in security that an investigation by his own agency showed did not adequately safeguard former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe from a fatal shooting of at a campaign speech last month.
National Police Agency Chief Itaru Nakamura’s announcement came as his agency released a report blaming flaws in police protection — from planning to guarding at the scene — that led to Abe’s assassination July 8 in Nara in western Japan.
Nakamura said he took the former prime minister’s death seriously and that he submitted his resignation to the National Public Safety Commission earlier Thursday.
“In order to fundamentally reexamine guarding and never to let this happen, we need to have a new system,” Nakamura told a news conference as he announced his intention to step down.
Nakamura did not say when his resignation would be official. Japanese media reported that his resignation is expected to be approved at Friday’s Cabinet meeting.
The alleged gunman, Tetsuya Yamagami, was arrested at the scene and is currently under mental evaluation until late November. Yamagami told police that he targeted Abe because of the former leader’s link to the Unification Church, which he hated.
Abe sent a video message last year to a group affiliated with the church, which experts say may have infuriated the shooting suspect.
In a 54-page investigative report released Thursday, the National Police Agency concluded that the protection plan for Abe neglected potential danger coming from behind him and merely focused on risks during his movement from the site of his speech to his vehicle.
Inadequacies in the command system, communication among several key police officials, as well as their attention in areas behind Abe at the campaign site led to their lack of attention on the suspect’s movement until it was too late.
None of the officers assigned to immediate protection of Abe caught the suspect until he was already 7 meters (yards) behind him where he took out his homemade double-barrel gun, which resembled a camera with a long lens, to blast his first shot that narrowly missed Abe. Up to that moment, none of the officers was aware of the suspect’s presence, or recognized the blast as a gun shot, the report said.
In just over two seconds, the suspect was only 5.3 meters (yards) behind Abe to fatally fire the second shot.
The report called for significant strengthening in both training and staffing of Japan’s dignitary protection, as well as revising police protection guidelines for the first time in about 30 years. It said the prefectural police’s Abe protection plan lacked a thorough safety evaluation and largely copied an earlier visit by another top party lawmaker.
The national police called for doubling dignitary protection staff in Tokyo, a greater supervisory role for the national police over prefectural staff, and use of digital technology and drones to bolster surveillance from above ground. The police agency also proposed bullet-proof shields that are not yet used in Japan, a country known for strict gun control.
Abe’s family paid tribute to him in a private Buddhist ritual Thursday marking the 49th day since his assassination. His younger brother and former Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, and other senior party officials and ministers reportedly attended.
About 1,000 people, including Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, attended an earlier private funeral at a Tokyo temple days after his death.
Kishida’s government plans to hold a state funeral Sept. 27, a plan that has split public opinion amid growing criticisms over the governing party members’ cozy ties with the controversial Korean church. Kishida’s Cabinet is reportedly announcing a 250 million yen ($1.8 million) budget to invite 6,400 guests from in and outside Japan for the upcoming funeral.
The Unification Church, which was founded in South Korea in 1954 and came to Japan a decade later, has built close ties with a host of conservative lawmakers, many of them members of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party on their shared interests of anti-communism.
Since the 1980s, the church has faced accusations of problematic recruiting and religious sales in Japan, and the governing party’s church ties have sent support ratings of Kishida’s Cabinet into a nosedive even after its recent shuffle.
In Nara on Thursday, prefectural police chief Tomoaki Onizuka also expressed his intention to step down over Abe’s assassination.
“I have been almost crushed by the seriousness of my responsibility” in the former leader’s death, teary Onizuka said. “We will grit our teeth and endeavor in order to regain the public trust and be helpful to the people in the prefecture and across Japan.”
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| 2022-09-21T02:40:14Z
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Four years before Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people at a Florida high school, therapists at another school wrote a letter to his psychiatrist saying he was fixated on guns and dreamed of killing others and being covered in blood, testimony at his penalty trial showed Thursday.
Dr. Brett Negin, testifying for the defense, said he never received it.
Negin and another psychiatrist who treated Cruz in the decade leading up to the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School testified during Thursday’s abbreviated court session about the various medications he was given for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other issues. Both said under cross-examination by prosecutors they never saw anything that would have led them to believe he was capable of mass murder.
But Negin, who treated Cruz from 2012 into August 2017, was then shown by the defense a June 2014 letter written to him by a psychiatrist and therapist at Cross Creek School, a campus attended by students with emotional and behavioral problems.
Dr. Nyrma N. Ortiz and therapist Rona O’Connor Kelly’s two-page letter addressed to Negin says Cruz, then 15, was experiencing extreme mood swings, adding, “He is usually very irritable and reactive.” They said he is “inappropriately” obsessed with guns and the military, defiant, verbally aggressive toward his teachers, paranoid and places the blame on others for the problems he creates.
“At home, he continues to be aggressive and destructive with minimal provocation,” the two wrote. He destroyed a television after losing a video game, punched holes in walls and used sharp objects to cut up the furniture and carve holes in the bathroom. He had a hatchet that he used to chop a dead tree in the back yard, but his mother reported she could no longer find it.
Cruz shared at school “he dreams of killing others and is covered in blood.”
The two said he had been assessed for hospitalization, but that never happened. They said they were writing Negin so he could adjust Cruz’s medication.
Negin testified Thursday he never received the letter and no one followed up with him when he didn’t respond. He said Cross Creek’s typical procedure if the staff was having problems with one of his patients was to have a counselor come to his office with the student and parents to discuss the issue.
“This did not happen one time with Mr. Cruz,” Negin said.
Negin also testified that in 2013 he wrote a letter for Cruz’s mother supporting his voluntary hospitalization. That also never happened.
Office and home numbers for Ortiz were disconnected. O’Connor Kelly did not immediately respond to an email Thursday seeking comment.
The defense is trying to show that Cruz, 23, had a long history of mental health issues that were never fully treated. He pleaded guilty in October to the murders — the trial is only to decide whether he is sentenced to death or life without parole.
The defense is trying to overcome the prosecution’s case, which ended earlier this month. It featured surveillance video of Cruz, then 19, mowing down students and staff with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle as he stalked a three-story building for seven minutes, photos of the aftermath and a jury visit to the building.
For Cruz to receive a death sentence, the seven-man, five-woman jury must be unanimous. If one juror votes for life, that will be his sentence.
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Associated Press writer Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T02:40:22Z
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GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (AP) — Administrators at a Nebraska school shuttered the school’s award-winning student newspaper just days after its last edition that included articles and editorials on LGBTQ issues, leading press freedom advocates to call the move an act of censorship.
The staff of Northwest Public Schools’ 54-year-old Saga newspaper was informed on May 19 of the paper’s elimination, the Grand Island Independent reported. Three days earlier, the newspaper had printed its June edition, which included an article titled, “Pride and prejudice: LGBTQIA+” on the origins of Pride Month and the history of homophobia. It also included an editorial opposing a Florida law that bans some lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity and dubbed by critics as “Don’t Say Gay.”
Officials overseeing the district, which is based in Grand Island, have not said when or why the decision was made to eliminate the student paper. But an email from a school employee to the Independent cancelling the student paper’s printing services on May 22 said it was “because the school board and superintendent are unhappy with the last issue’s editorial content.”
The paper’s demise also came a month after its staff was reprimanded for publishing students’ preferred pronouns and names. District officials told students they could only use names assigned at birth going forward.
Emma Smith, Saga’s assistant editor in 2022, said the student paper was informed that the ban on preferred names was made by the school board. That decision directly affected Saga staff writer Marcus Pennell, a transgender student, who saw his byline changed against his wishes to his birth name of “Meghan” Pennell in the June issue.
“It was the first time that the school had officially been, like, ‘We don’t really want you here,’” Pennell said. “You know, that was a big deal for me.”
Northwest Principal P.J. Smith referred the Independent’s questions to district superintendent Jeff Edwards, who declined to answer the questions of when and why the student paper was eliminated, saying only that it was “an administrative decision.”
Some school board members have made no secret of their objection to the Saga’s LGBTQ content, including board president Dan Leiser, who said “most people were upset” with it.
Board vice president Zach Mader directly cited the pro-LGBTQ editorials, adding that if district taxpayer had read the last issue of the Saga, “they would have been like, ‘Holy cow. What is going on at our school?’”
“It sounds like a ham-fisted attempt to censor students and discriminate based on disagreement with perspectives and articles that were featured in the student newspaper,” said Sara Rips, an attorney for the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nebraska Press Association attorney Max Kautsch, who specializes in media law in Nebraska and Kansas, noted that press freedom is protected in the U.S. Constitution.
“The decision by the administration to eliminate the student newspaper violates students’ right to free speech, unless the school can show a legitimate educational reason for removing the option to participate in a class … that publishes award-winning material,” Kautsch said. “It is hard to imagine what that legitimate reason could be.”
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| 2022-09-21T02:40:45Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — A New York City police detective has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the city from firing him and other workers for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Lawyers for Detective Anthony Marciano asked the court Thursday for an emergency injunction that would block the city from enforcing a rule requiring all municipal employees to get vaccinated.
Marciano, a 10-year police veteran, was among a small percentage of civil servants who refused the shots and didn’t qualify for a medical or religious exemption.
More than 1,000 New York City employees have been fired for refusing the vaccines, and others are waiting to find out whether their requests for exemptions will be approved.
Legal challenges to the rules have largely failed, but Marciano’s case is still pending in a federal appeals court. In a petition to the Supreme Court, Marciano’s lawyer asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor to block the city from enforcing its rule until that appeal is resolved.
“Each day more and more municipal workers are being fired for refusing the EUA Covid 19 mandate in a City riddled with crime, and rapidly decaying, in need of more, not less, skilled municipal workers,” wrote the lawyer, Patricia Finn.
Marciano argues in his legal filing that he has “natural immunity” to COVID-19 and the vaccines against the virus have “simply too many adverse consequences that applicant is unwilling to risk.”
Health authorities say the COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in the United States are safe, and they recommend vaccination even among people who have acquired some immunity from previous infections.
New York’s previous mayor, Bill de Blasio, mandated that all workplaces in the city — including private businesses — only admit vaccinated workers, with certain exemptions for professional athletes and entertainers.
A police department spokesperson said the department would not comment on pending litigation. A message seeking comment was sent to representatives for Mayor Eric Adams and the city law department.
Also on Thursday, leaders of the union representing city firefighters held a news conference to discuss the status of firefighters who face termination over their refusal to get vaccinated. A message seeking comment was sent to the Fire Department.
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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — More than a year after the Taliban takeover that saw thousands of Afghans rushing to Kabul’s international airport amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, Afghans at risk who failed to get on evacuation flights say they are still struggling to find safe and legal ways out of the country.
Among those left behind is a 49-year-old interpreter who worked for a NATO contractor in 2010 accompanying convoys in Kandahar. Only six days after the Taliban reached the capital last August, they came looking for him.
“They come to my house and they threatened my son and my wife (when) I was not at home. They (then) destroy my office,” he told AP via WhatsApp referring to the place where he taught English. He asked that his name not be revealed for security reasons.
This month, he was interrogated by the Taliban again for more than two hours.
During the chaotic days of the U.S. pullout, he had tried several times to reach Kabul Airport but, like many, failed to get through massive crowds made even more dangerous by attacks around the airport that killed dozens. He then tried to leave Afghanistan by crossing the land border with Pakistan but was stopped by the Taliban who demanded $700 per person to cross — money he did not have. To make matters worse, his passport is no longer valid.
Like millions of Afghans, he’s also been impacted by the country’s economic freefall, caused in part by international sanctions and vanishing foreign aid.
“We eat once a day,” the interpreter said. Still, he continues hoping he and his family will leave Afghanistan at some point.
“I never give up because of my future and my children future,” he said.
Since their return to rule, the Taliban have been trying to transition from insurgency and war to governing, with the hard-liners increasingly at odds with the pragmatists on how to run a country in the midst of a humanitarian and economic crisis. But a year on they have so far failed to gain international recognition. Initial promises to allow girls to return to school and women to continue working have been broken.
Those who have failed to evacuate include interpreters and drivers but also women journalists, activists and athletes who say they cannot live freely under a Taliban-led government.
The U.S., together with other Western nations, hastily evacuated more than 120,000 people, both foreign nationals and Afghan citizens, in August last year.
Some 46,000 Afghans who remained in the country after Aug. 31 have since applied for U.S. humanitarian parole, according to the Migration Policy Institute. But only 297 have been approved so far.
Because there is no longer a U.S. consulate in Afghanistan, asylum-seekers must make their way to other countries with consular services for in-person interviews.
The list of obstacles to getting out of Afghanistan is extensive, starting with the difficulty in obtaining passports as offices repeatedly close due to technical problems.
“Today, the vast majority of Afghans don’t have access to legal identity, meaning if they need tomorrow to be able to get to safety legally, they can’t,” said Nassim Majidi, co-founder and executive director of Samuel Hall, an independent think tank that conducts research on migration and displacement. Majidi was speaking at a seminar organized by the Migration Policy Institute looking at the situation of Afghans in Afghanistan and abroad a year after the withdrawal.
Around 2,000 Afghans and their families who worked with NATO, its agencies, and member countries were among those evacuated from Kabul according to the military alliance. But the evacuations were organized by individual member countries. NATO, as an organization, had no repatriation plan.
Evacuations from third countries are still happening, although sporadically. Earlier this month a plane carrying nearly 300 Afghans who had collaborated with the Spanish government landed in Madrid. Germany and France also have continued to work on evacuation cases, Majidi said.
But thousands of Afghans are still living in limbo in third countries including Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo and Albania while they wait for their applications to be processed for resettlement to the United States and Canada.
Though life-saving for many, the evacuations also fractured families. Among them is that of an Afghan journalist who asked to remain anonymous, fearing for the safety of her relatives in Kabul.
“It was really difficult to leave everything behind in an hour,” she told the Associated Press in a phone interview from her new home in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, which she moved into after months of living in a temporary refugee shelter.
The government of the Netherlands had called her on Aug. 26 offering a single spot on an evacuation flight. Her relatives told her she needed to save herself first if she wanted to help them.
A year later, three of her family members have recently managed to get evacuated to France, she said. But despite repeated family reunification requests to the Netherlands and other European countries, the majority of her siblings remain in Kabul, living across the street from a police station now in Taliban hands.
On June 17 one of her older brothers was allegedly beaten to death by Taliban forces on the street after he was found carrying a photo of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban, she said.
Days later, she said, the men showed up at the family’s home and forced them to sign a death certificate that stated he had died of “natural causes.” The AP was unable to independently verify her claims.
With most of her family still in Afghanistan and many bureaucratic hurdles to face in the Netherlands, it has been difficult to start a new life, she said.
“Until now it is just darkness.”
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Associated Press reporter Rahim Faiez in Islamabad and Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of global migration at https://apnews.com/hub/migration
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BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand entered a phase of political uncertainty on Thursday, with its prime minister suspended and his deputy taking over in his stead pending a ruling from a top court on whether the premier has reached his constitutional term limit.
Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha came to power in a military coup in 2014, and would have hit the 8-year term limit earlier this week if the clock started when he seized power.
The Constitutional Court suspended Prayuth, the army’s commander at the time of the coup, on Wednesday as it considers arguments in his case.
His supporters argue that his term as prime minister should be calculated from when he won the job legally after a general election in 2019, or, if nothing else, from when the term-limit provision became part of the current constitution in 2017.
Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan has assumed the role of acting prime minister, taking over Prayuth’s duties.
Prawit, 77, is closely associated with the military clique behind the 2014 coup, and is expected to toe the same line as Prayuth.
On Thursday, Prawit chaired a meeting of a committee on communications during national disasters that he was previously scheduled to attend.
Prayuth, who has kept his other Cabinet position as defense minister, attended a monthly meeting of the government’s Defense Council in that capacity, participating via video.
No date has been set for the court’s ruling, but Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, said there is a good possibility they will decide in favor of keeping Prayuth as prime minister even though public sentiment is seen to favor the “literal interpretation” of his eight years in office.
“Looking at how the court has always ruled in his favor, it would not be a surprise if the Constitutional Court comes up with a technicality,” he said. “We must remember it was appointed during the military regime.”
Prayuth’s popularity has been falling over accusations he botched Thailand’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and mishandled the economy, but his coalition government survived four no-confidence votes.
Prayuth has argued against his detractors that his government has successfully steered the economy through the pandemic, allowing it to now reopen and start generating the tourist revenue upon which it relies heavily.
If he is allowed to remain in power by the court, it risks invigorating a protest movement that has long sought to oust him and reopening deep fissures in Thailand.
After the court’s ruling on Wednesday, opposition politicians called for Prayuth to resign and make way for new elections.
Pita Limjaroenrat, leader of the opposition Move Forward party, said the leadership swap with Prawit filling in meant Thailand was still going nowhere politically, likening it to “sailing a boat in a tub.”
While there were multiple protests by tens of thousands in 2020 demanding Prayuth and his Cabinet resign, the court decision on Wednesday attracted only a handful of demonstrators in Bangkok.
Thitinan said it was likely dissent will grow as the court ruminates over its decision.
“The grievances that have underpinned the protests have not gone away,” he said. “They’ve only been swept under the carpet, the grievances have been accumulating — there’s a lot of unhappiness in Thailand under Prayuth’s watch.”
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Associated Press journalist Jerry Harmer contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T02:41:24Z
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MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday ordered the Russian military to increase the number of troops by 137,000 to a total of 1.15 million amid Moscow’s military action in Ukraine.
Putin’s decree, which takes effect on Jan. 1, didn’t specify whether the military will beef up its ranks by drafting a bigger number of conscripts, increasing the number of volunteer soldiers or using a combination of both. But some Russian military analysts predicted it would rely heavily on volunteers, a cautious stand reflecting the Kremlin’s concerns about a possible fallout from an attempt to increase the draft.
The presidential decree will boost the overall number of Russian military personnel to 2,039,758, including 1,150,628 troops. A previous order put the military’s numbers at 1,902,758 and 1,013,628 respectively at the start of 2018.
The Kremlin has said that only volunteer contract soldiers take part in what it calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine, rejecting claims that it was pondering a mobilization.
Russian media and non-governmental organizations say Russian authorities have sought to bolster the number of troops involved in the military action in Ukraine by attracting more volunteers, engaging private military contractors and even offering amnesty to some prisoners in exchange for a tour of military duty.
Regional authorities have also tried to help beef up the ranks, forming volunteer battalions to be deployed to Ukraine.
All Russian men aged 18-27 must serve one year in the military, but a large share avoid the draft for health reasons or deferments granted to university students. The share of men who avoid the draft is particularly big in Moscow and other major cities.
The Russian military rounds up draftees twice a year, starting April 1 and Oct. 1. Putin ordered the drafting of 134,500 conscripts during the latest spring draft earlier this year and 127,500 last fall.
In recent years, the Kremlin has emphasized increasing the share of volunteer contract soldiers as it sought to modernize the army and improve its capability. Before the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, the Russian military had over 400,000 contract soldiers, including about 147,000 in the ground forces. The number of conscripts has been estimated at around 270,000, and officers and non-commissioned officers have accounted for the rest.
Military analysts say if the campaign in Ukraine drags on, those numbers could be clearly insufficient to sustain the operations in Ukraine, which has declared a goal of forming a 1-million-strong military.
But many observers have warned that a broad mobilization or a sweeping increase in the number of draftees could fuel public discontent and destabilize the political situation in Russia. That happened during the separatist wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and the early 2000s, when poorly trained Russian conscripts were sent into combat and suffered heavy losses.
Col. Retired Viktor Murakhovsky noted that Putin’s decree on Thursday reflected the pressure of filling the ranks amid the military action in Ukraine.
In comments carried by the RBC online news outlet, he charged that the Kremlin would likely try to keep relying on volunteers and predicted that they would account for the bulk of the increase ordered by the Kremlin.
Another Russian military expert, Alexei Leonkov, also said the authorities wouldn’t expand the draft and would increase the number of troops by hiring more contract soldiers.
“The new military equipment has become more complex, and people operating it need training for at least three years,” Leonkov was quoted as saying by the state RIA Novosti news agency. “A draft won’t help that, so there will be no increase in the number of draftees.”
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| 2022-09-21T02:41:32Z
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DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees on Thursday marked the fifth anniversary of their exodus from Myanmar to Bangladesh, while the United States, European Union and other Western nations pledged to continue supporting the refugees’ pursuit of justice in international courts.
Bangladesh is hosting more than 1 million Rohingya refugees who fled from Myanmar over decades, including some 740,000 who crossed the border in August 2017 after the Myanmar military launched a “clearance operation” against them following attacks by a rebel group. The safety situation in Myanmar has worsened since a military takeover last year, and attempts to send them back failed.
In March, the United States said the oppression of Rohingya in Myanmar amounts to genocide after authorities confirmed accounts of mass atrocities against civilians by Myanmar’s military in a widespread and systematic campaign against the ethnic minority. Muslim Rohingya face widespread discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where most are denied citizenship and many other rights.
Bangladeshi officials have expressed frustration over the repatriation of the refugees to Myanmar after at least two attempts to send them back failed since 2017, but Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said that their repatriation to their own land is the only solution to the crisis.
On the eve of the anniversary, Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said in a statement that his country wants the refugees to return to Myanmar safely.
“Bangladesh wants to ensure that the Rohingya can return home to safe conditions in Myanmar where they will no longer be persecuted and will finally receive citizenship,” he said.
“We urge the international community to work alongside us to provide support to the Rohingya people, by asserting pressure on Myanmar to stop the mass persecution and allow Rohingya safe repatriation to their homes,” Khan said.
The issue of the Rohingya crisis has gone to international courts where Myanmar denied charges of any wrongdoing. But global powers are not satisfied with Myanmar’s position.
In a statement, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Wednesday that the U.S. remained “committed to advancing justice and accountability” for Rohingya and all people of Myanmar.
“We continue to support the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, the case under the Genocide Convention that The Gambia has brought against Burma before the International Court of Justice, and credible courts around the world that have jurisdiction in cases involving Burmese military’s atrocity crimes,” Blinken said.
Separately, a joint statement by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union, and the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States said they remained concerned by the U.N. fact-finding mission’s establishment of consistent patterns of serious human rights violations and abuses, of which many amount to grave crimes under international law.
“We also recognize other initiatives to hold perpetrators accountable, including The Gambia’s efforts before the International Court of Justice, which is currently examining whether the atrocities committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya amounted also to genocide,” the statement reads.
“We reiterate that Myanmar must comply with the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures order,” it said.
Human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also urged action.
In a statement, Human Rights Watch said the anniversary should prompt concerned governments to do more to hold the Myanmar military to account and secure justice and safety for the Rohingya in Bangladesh, Myanmar and across the region.
“Governments should mark the five-year anniversary of the devastating campaign against the Rohingya with a coordinated international strategy for accountability and justice that draws on Rohingya input,” said Elaine Pearson, acting Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a bilateral agreement in November 2017, brokered by China, for repatriation of the refugees. Bangladesh earlier this month sought China’s assistance to help repatriate Rohingya to Myanmar during a visit by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
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A Russian court on Thursday ordered the release of a former mayor of the country’s fourth-largest city from custody pending an investigation and trial on the charges he is facing for criticizing Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.
Yevgeny Roizman, 59, who served as the mayor of Yekaterinburg from 2013 to 2018, was allowed to walk free, but was barred from attending public events, using the internet, telephone or mail and communicating with anyone other than his lawyers and close family.
Police arrested Roizman on Wednesday. He told reporters the case against him was launched under a new law adopted after Russia sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. He faces up to three years in prison if convicted.
Russian courts fined Roizman three times earlier this year on similar charges, paving the way for a criminal case the law authorizes for repeat offenders.
Roizman, a sharp critic of the Kremlin, is one of the most visible and charismatic opposition figures in Russia. During his tenure as mayor, he enjoyed broad popularity in Yekaterinburg, a city of 1.5 million in the Ural Mountains.
His arrest triggered protests in his support, and one demonstrator was detained and ordered to serve 15 days in jail.
Roizman said the criminal charges against him were triggered by him calling the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine an “invasion.” The Kremlin describes it as a “special military operation.”
Days after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russia’s Kremlin-controlled parliament approved legislation that outlawed alleged disparaging of the Russian military or the spread of “false information” about the country’s military operation in Ukraine.
Russian courts have increasingly handed out fines and, occasionally, prison terms to critics of Moscow’s action in Ukraine.
OVD-Info, a legal aid group that tracks political arrests in Russia, has counted 90 criminal cases on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military since Feb. 24.
According to Net Freedoms, another legal aid group focused on free speech cases, as of mid-August there were up to 4,000 administrative cases on charges of disparaging the armed forces.
Roizman remains one of the few visible opposition figures in Russia who had not yet been been jailed or fled the country under pressure from authorities. Two other prominent opposition politicians, Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, were arrested under the same law as Roizman and face up to 10 years in prison, if convicted.
Similar charges were recently brought against eight close associates of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most well-known critic. All of them have left Russia after they became the subjects of multiple criminal investigations.
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| 2022-09-21T02:41:48Z
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