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...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM HST SATURDAY...
* WHAT...East winds 20 to 25 kt. Seas 8 to 10 feet.
* WHERE...Kauai Northwest Waters, Kauai Windward Waters, Kauai
Leeward Waters, Kauai Channel, Oahu Leeward Waters, Maui
County Leeward Waters, and Big Island Windward Waters.
* WHEN...Until 6 AM HST Saturday.
* IMPACTS...Conditions will be hazardous to small craft.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller
vessels, should avoid navigating in these conditions.
&&
SACRAMENTO (KITV4) -- A Sacramento man was arrested for allegedly preying on more than 100 children nationwide, including three here in Hawaii.
Sacramento County Sheriff's arrested 24-year-old Demetrius Carl Davis for allegedly uploading child pornography to the internet.
The sheriff's office said Davis posed as a young girl named "Lizzie" and communicated with kids between the ages six and 13 through a fake social media account.
Investigators also found a digital device were Davis allegedly stored videos of those children conducting sexually explicit acts.
So far only 80 of the victims have been identified.
"While many victims have been identified thus far, it is believed Davis communicated with over a 100 children from late 2020 to December 2021. Please check your children's electronic devices if there is a way they could have internet contact with people you are not familiar with," said Sgt. Rod Grassman with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.
Parents are asked to call the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office, if they believe their child is a victim of Davis. That number is 916-874-3002. | https://www.kitv.com/news/crime/hundreds-of-kids-targeted-by-accused-california-sexual-predator-including-3-in-hawaii/article_9d756da8-cce4-11ec-a42d-f7a8d4b62ead.html | 2022-05-06T04:11:38Z |
...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM HST SATURDAY...
* WHAT...East winds 20 to 25 kt. Seas 8 to 10 feet.
* WHERE...Kauai Northwest Waters, Kauai Windward Waters, Kauai
Leeward Waters, Kauai Channel, Oahu Leeward Waters, Maui
County Leeward Waters, and Big Island Windward Waters.
* WHEN...Until 6 AM HST Saturday.
* IMPACTS...Conditions will be hazardous to small craft.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller
vessels, should avoid navigating in these conditions.
&&
House and Senate lawmakers officially adjourned Hawaii's legislative session sine die amid a year of a record budget surplus.
"A a result of your work hundreds of thousands of people will have opportunity and a better chance in our state," said House Speaker Scott Saiki.
After talking about possible cuts and furloughs last year amid the economic crisis created by the pandemic, this year was a different story, with a multi-billion surplus.
"This year if there was any poetic justice we have the largest budget surplus in history and we have I believe spent it well," says Rep. Bert Kobayashi (D-Waialae, Kahala).
Much of the session dealt with how to spend that extra money. The governor praised lawmakers for approving $1 billion in funding for the Department of Hawaiian Homelands.
"his was the first real opportunity to be able to move forward on initiatives and priorities that we haven't been able to do for a while," says Governor Ige.
But the fate of some other items now heading to Gov. Ige's desk is a little less clear - The governor said he's still reviewing the bill to restructure management of Mauna Kea, something Native Hawaiian groups had been pushing for.
He's also debating whether to sign a controversial bail reform bill that would allow people arrested for misdemeanors like theft and shoplifting to be released without bail, which some have criticized as a public safety issue.
"Trying to make certain that we can identify those who continue to pose a danger to the community at the same as releasing them I think is a challenge before all of us," Ige says.
The governor will have 45 days to whether he will veto any bills.
Do you have a story idea? Email news tips to news@kitv.com
Tom anchors Good Morning Hawaii weekends and reports for KITV4. He comes to Hawaii after reporting in Nevada, Oklahoma and Georgia. Tom is a proud Terp, graduating from the University of Maryland in 2012. | https://www.kitv.com/news/hawaii-legislative-session-comes-to-a-close-amid-budget-surplus/article_cf8d4ad0-ccea-11ec-a56d-6f8e78aa614a.html | 2022-05-06T04:11:44Z |
...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM HST SATURDAY...
* WHAT...East winds 20 to 25 kt. Seas 8 to 10 feet.
* WHERE...Kauai Northwest Waters, Kauai Windward Waters, Kauai
Leeward Waters, Kauai Channel, Oahu Leeward Waters, Maui
County Leeward Waters, and Big Island Windward Waters.
* WHEN...Until 6 AM HST Saturday.
* IMPACTS...Conditions will be hazardous to small craft.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller
vessels, should avoid navigating in these conditions.
&&
Kirsten Davis is graduating from the University of Hawaii with an English degree in two weeks.
And like many other new graduates, there's lots of jobs to choose from.
"I feel like I could pretty much work at any job," she said. "So I definitely have a lot more options to explore what I want to do."
Many employers are desperate to fill job openings left vacant during the pandemic. And that's giving new grads the upper hand.
"Yeah, it definitely makes me feel better knowing that as I'm looking, there's also people looking to hire people," Davis added.
Businesses recently surveyed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers are planning to increase hiring of new graduates this year by more than 30%.
"You see so many employees that are sort of changing their career fields that it opens up a lot of other opportunities that our graduates may not have had or even thought of," said Wendy Sora, director of the UH-Manoa Career Center.
Jacelyn Ho graduated in December and landed a full-time job just two months later.
"I was surprised like how quickly I was able to get a job," she said.
Many college seniors are finding opportunities for employment even before they graduate, according to Hawaii Pacific University.
"They are getting jobs right after graduation or if not earlier, and it depends on what they're looking for ... they can be a little bit more selective on where they want to go," said Cathy Lee Chong, HPU director of creative services and communications operations.
And with employers competing for workers, many of them are offering higher starting salaries -- making first jobs much more lucrative for today's graduates.
Kristen joined KITV4 in March 2021 after working for the past two decades as a newspaper reporter. Kristen's goal is to produce meaningful journalism that educates, enlightens and inspires to affect positive change in society. | https://www.kitv.com/news/hawaiis-labor-market-ripe-for-new-grads-as-employers-struggle-to-recruit-more-workers/article_8df67a02-cce9-11ec-aa26-6b4ebd5ee6c1.html | 2022-05-06T04:11:50Z |
HONOLULU (KITV4) -- A popular restaurant in Chinatown was just named the top Korean restaurant in Hawaii by Yelp.
That honor goes to O'Kims on Nuuanu Avenue. The restaurant, created by owner and chef Hyun Kim, offers creative and contemporary Korean and Asian fusion food.
"When our customers are happy, then I'm happy," Kim said. "We will do our best to keep our quality and integrity to make our customers happy."
Popular items include Truffle Mandoo, Kalbi, and Pork Belly Brulee.
O'Kims is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.
The Yelp list is based on factors including total volume and ratings.
Yelp's list of the top Korean eateries in the U.S. and Canada
USA
Alabama – So Gong Dong Tofu & BBQ (Montgomery)
Alaska – Seoul Casa (Anchorage)
Arizona – Jin BBQ (Mesa)
Arkansas – KJ Sushi & Korean BBQ (Fayetteville)
California – Broken Mouth Lee’s Homestyle (Los Angeles)
Colorado – Seoul ManDoo (Aurora)
Connecticut – DAWA Korean Restaurant (West Haven)
DC (Washington) – Manna Dosirak
Delaware – Yukon Korean BBQ and Sushi Bar (Dover)
Florida – Haeorum Foods (Ocala)
Georgia – Incredibowl Korean Grill (Lawrenceville)
Hawaii – O’Kims (Honolulu)
Idaho – Koco Bell (Boise)
Illinois – Chungkiwa Restaurant (Mount Prospect)
Indiana – Omoni Fresh Fast Korean Grill (Carmel)
Iowa – Onnuri Korean BBQ (Iowa City)
Kansas – Seoul USA Korean Restaurant (Salina)
Kentucky – JY Kitchen (Lexington)
Louisiana – Little Korea BBQ (New Orleans)
Maine – N To Tail (Portland)
Maryland – Seoul Pub Sushi Chicken Beer (Elliott City)
Massachusetts – K Restaurant (Peabody)
Michigan – Seoul Market Cafe (Wyoming)
Minnesota – Kbop Korean Bistro (Minneapolis)
Mississippi – RC Korean Restaurant (Biloxi)
Missouri – Sides of Seoul (St. Louis)
Montana – Whistle Pig Korean (Bozeman)
Nebraska – Korean Grill (Bellevue)
Nevada – Arario Midtown (Reno)
New Hampshire – Yama – Young’s Restaurant (West Lebanon)
New Jersey – Peck Peck Korean Style Chicken (Teaneck)
New Mexico – Asian Pear (Albuquerque)
New York – Rice Kitchen (New York)
North Carolina – Oiso (Cary)
Ohio – KupBop Korean Well Being Food (Kettering)
Oklahoma – Seoul Bistro (Tulsa)
Oregon – Happy Bibimbap House 2 (Portland)
Pennsylvania – Bae Bae’s Kitchen (Pittsburgh)
Rhode Island – Den Den Cafe Asiana (Providence)
South Carolina – Ko Cha Asian Restaurant (Charleston)
South Dakota – Silk Road Cafe (Vermilion)
Tennessee – Soy Bistro (Brentwood)
Texas – Doma Seolleongtang (Dallas)
Utah – PotStickers Plus 1 (Salt Lake City)
Vermont – Asiana Noodle Soup (Burlington)
Virginia – Loopy’s Eatery (Annandale)
Washington – Chop Express (Everett)
West Virginia – Green Pineapple (Shepherdstown)
Wisconsin – Asiana Asian Cuisine Restaurant (Racine)
Wyoming – Korean House (Cheyenne)
CANADA
So Hyang Korean Cuisine (Vancouver, BC)
Gangnam Street Food (Edmonton, AB)
Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu (Toronto, ON)
Bol Orange (Montréal, QC)
Backoos Korean ToGo Food (Halifax, NS) | https://www.kitv.com/news/business/an-oahu-restaurant-makes-yelps-list-of-top-korean-restaurants/article_619761c6-cd05-11ec-9909-1362bd584221.html | 2022-05-06T07:27:08Z |
HONOLULU (KITV4)- The Federal Reserve's interest rate increase is hitting people's spending habits in a variety of ways. It's not just about mortgages and car loans -- interest rate increases are likely to affect the credit cards you use every day.
One expert told KITV4 that credit card users could be seeing interest rate increases as much as 2.5% by the end of the year. That's considered a significant increase. Some of the notices for these changes are already in people's mailboxes and emails.
"I've already seen a letter that said our interest rate was going to go up. I thought that I had to pay this off ASAP. It's unfortunate people have to do this during COVID, but I guess its something we just have to do," said credit card user Mayte Varnam.
Varnam says she's already got a letter in the mail telling her the interest rate is going up on her Bank of America Credit Card, and the Federal Reserve only raised the interest rate by half a point the other day.
Some professionals say rate raises at this point are not unexpected.
"I'm certain there will be more federal interest rate hikes before the end of the year," said National Securities Corporation Branch Manager of Honolulu Colin Watanabe. "The federal reserve has already signaled that because of the incredible 40 year high in inflation. So they are trying to throw water on the fire, to slow down the economy and prevent it from overheating,"
In particular, credit card rates from banks are connected to the Federal Reserve, which is instituting the rate increase, considered the biggest rate change in 20 years. "Banks get the money they loan, not only from their deposits, they can also draw money from the Federal Reserves," said Watanabe.
If you have a credit card from a Credit Union, you might be in better shape. "Credit Unions only loan out the money they get from their users' deposits," said Watanabe. So, the increase on interest from the Federal Reserve doesn't affect them so much.
But there are disadvantages to Credit Union credit cards as well. We're told their limits are generally lower. "If you are late on the payment, they can collect the payment from your savings account in some cases," said Watanabe.
Whatever kind of card you have, Watanabe says now is not the best time to use it. Everyone KITV4 spoke to on the street about the subject, tends to agree.
"This means my credit cards are being put away. That's the only thing I can say to that. The only way to keep my sanity is to use cash until things change," said credit card user Larry Caldwell.
"I would try to pay [my cards] off as soon as possible," said Varnam.
Ways to protect yourself against rising rates include: paying down debt before a large interest payment hits, focusing on credit cards that already have rates over 16%, looking for a zero-percent balance transfers, and having a good credit score. | https://www.kitv.com/news/business/fed-interest-rate-change-affecting-credit-card-rates/article_f496f912-ccfd-11ec-84ba-6b61c7ae1497.html | 2022-05-06T07:27:14Z |
...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM HST SATURDAY...
* WHAT...East winds 20 to 25 kt. Seas 8 to 10 feet.
* WHERE...Kauai Northwest Waters, Kauai Windward Waters, Kauai
Leeward Waters, Kauai Channel, Oahu Leeward Waters, Maui
County Leeward Waters, and Big Island Windward Waters.
* WHEN...Until 6 AM HST Saturday.
* IMPACTS...Conditions will be hazardous to small craft.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller
vessels, should avoid navigating in these conditions.
&&
UH Manoa Men’s Volleyball Team defeated Indiana’s Ball State in the NCAA semi-finals. The Bows will play No. 1 Long Beach State on Saturday in the Championship.
The Rainbow Warriors beat No. 2 Ball State in five sets in the second semifinal (28-26, 19-25, 20-25, 25-20), just a few hours after Long Beach also won in five sets by reverse sweeping UCLA (18-25, 18-25, 25-15, 25-10, 16-14).
Dimitrios Mouchilias and Spyros Chakas each had 19 kills to lead Hawaii in the second semifinal.
In the opening semifinal, Long Beach State topped UCLA by hitting .412 in the match, paced by Alex Nikolov's 20 kills on .405 hitting.
While Hawaii is going for its second consecutive title, Long Beach State is hopes to win their third since 2018. The two teams met in the 2019 final, with Long Beach State taking that one in four sets.
The Championship match streams live on NCAA.com on Saturday, May 7, starting at 2pm HST. | https://www.kitv.com/sports/uh-manoa-men-s-volleyball-team-defeated-indiana-s-ball-state-in-the-ncaa-semi/article_a96e7c00-cd00-11ec-b948-370e04f7485e.html | 2022-05-06T07:27:20Z |
...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM HST SATURDAY...
* WHAT...East winds 20 to 25 kt. Seas 8 to 10 feet.
* WHERE...Kauai Northwest Waters, Kauai Windward Waters, Kauai
Leeward Waters, Kauai Channel, Oahu Leeward Waters, Maui
County Leeward Waters, and Big Island Windward Waters.
* WHEN...Until 6 AM HST Saturday.
* IMPACTS...Conditions will be hazardous to small craft.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller
vessels, should avoid navigating in these conditions.
&&
HONOLULU (KITV4) – Fading surf with breezy winds for Aloha Friday.
Tonight, some passing trade wind showers tonight. Lows in the lower 70s.
Friday, a mix of sun and clouds with passing trade wind showers in the morning hours. The highest rain chances will be for windward and mauka spots with a few showers for leeward spots. High level clouds will move over the state at times creating cloudy conditions.
Highs 79 to 85. Breezy winds out of the northeast.
Sun and drier conditions for the weekend as winds lighten up by Mother’s Day Sunday.
Friday Surf: A fading Northwest and South swell for Friday.
North: 5-7 ft
West: 6-8 ft
South: 7-9 ft
East: 5-7 ft
Do you have a story idea? Email news tips to news@kitv.com
Chief Meteorologist Pete Caggiano forecasts for KITV4 Island News during the 5,6 and 10 p.m. newscasts Monday – Friday. He has the American Meteorological Society and National Weather Association Seal of Approval. | https://www.kitv.com/weather/thursday-evening-weather-report-may-5-2022/article_b71d4970-ccfc-11ec-afc0-e3469a39b394.html | 2022-05-06T07:27:26Z |
State employees ordered to return to office
RICHMOND, Va. (WWBT) - Governor Glenn Youngkin is ordering most state employees to return to their offices.
The Youngkin Administration is drastically curtailing a “work from home” policy that was instituted at the height of the pandemic.
“After listening to the needs of Virginians, discussing solutions with agency heads across government, and closely monitoring the pandemic, we are excited to welcome our employees in-person this summer. We know that creative, innovative, and effective solutions for all Virginians occur with regular, in-person interaction by our incredible workforce here in the Commonwealth. Embarking on a new path that values innovation and teamwork, we are updating Virginia’s telework policy for the first time in more than a decade. Since day one, my commitment to have a best-in-class government serving all Virginians has been clear, these updates balance the demands of government services with the needs of our public servants,” said Youngkin.
Teleworking options are still available, but workers must apply.
The governor is encouraging state workers to return to their offices as soon as possible. However, the deadline to return is July 5.
Copyright 2022 WWBT. All rights reserved.
Want NBC12’s top stories in your inbox each morning? Subscribe here. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/05/state-employees-ordered-return-office/ | 2022-05-06T08:38:31Z |
COVID coverage for all dries up even as hospital costs rise
WASHINGTON (AP) — For the first time, the U.S. came close to providing health care for all during the coronavirus pandemic — but for just one condition, COVID-19.
Now, things are reverting to the way they were as federal money for COVID care of the uninsured dries up, creating a potential barrier to timely access.
But the virus is not contained, even if it’s better controlled. And safety-net hospitals and clinics are seeing sharply higher costs for salaries and other basic operating expenses. They fear they won’t be prepared if there’s another surge and no backstop.
“We haven’t turned anybody away yet,” said Dr. Mark Loafman, chair of family and community medicine at Cook County Health in Chicago. “But I think it’s just a matter of time ... People don’t get cancer treatment or blood pressure treatment every day in America because they can’t afford it.”
A $20 billion government COVID program covered testing, treatment and vaccine costs for uninsured people. But that’s been shut down. Special Medicaid COVID coverage for the uninsured in more than a dozen states also likely faces its last months.
At Parkland Health, the frontline hospital system for Dallas, Dr. Fred Cerise questions the logic of dialing back federal dollars at a time when health officials have rolled out a new “test-to-treat” strategy. People with COVID-19 can now get antiviral pills to take at home, hopefully avoiding hospitalization. Vice President Kamala Harris, who recently tested positive but is back working at the White House, is an example.
“Test-to-treat will be very difficult for uninsured individuals,” predicted Cerise, president and CEO of the system. “If it’s a change in strategy on the large scale, and it’s coming without funding, people are going to be reluctant to adopt that.”
Officials at the federal Department of Health and Human Services say the new antiviral drugs like Paxlovid have been paid for by taxpayers, and are supposed to be free of charge to patients, even uninsured ones.
But they acknowledge that some uninsured people can’t afford the medical consultation needed to get a prescription. “We hear from state and local partners that the lack of funding for the Uninsured Program is creating challenges for individuals to access medications,” said Dr. Meg Sullivan, chief medical officer for the HHS preparedness and response division.
The nation has not pinched pennies on the pandemic before.
“We’re well short of universal health coverage in the U.S., but for a time, we had universal coverage for COVID,” said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. “It was extraordinary.”
Recently an urgent White House request for $22.5 billion for COVID priorities failed to advance in Congress. Even a pared-back version is stuck. Part of the Biden administration’s request involves $1.5 billion to replenish the Uninsured Program, which paid for testing, treatment and vaccine-related bills for uninsured patients. The program has now stopped accepting claims due to lack of money.
That program, along with a less known Medicaid option for states, allowed thousands of uninsured people to get care without worrying about costs. Bipartisan support has given way as congressional Republicans raise questions about pandemic spending.
The Uninsured Program was run by the Health Resources and Services Administration, an HHS agency. Medical providers seeing uninsured people could submit their bills for reimbursement. Over the last two years, more than 50,000 hospitals, clinics, and medical practices received payments. Officials say they can turn the program back on if Congress releases more money.
The Medicaid coverage option began under the Trump administration as a way to help states pay for testing uninsured people. President Joe Biden’s coronavirus relief bill expanded it to treatment and vaccine costs as well. It’s like a limited insurance policy for COVID. The coverage can’t be used for other services, like a knee replacement. The federal government pays 100% of the cost.
Fifteen states, from deep blue California to bright red South Carolina, have taken advantage of the option, along with three U.S. territories. It will end once the federal coronavirus public health emergency is over, currently forecast for later this year.
New Hampshire Medicaid Director Henry Lipman said the coverage option allowed his state to sign up about 9,500 people for COVID care that includes the new antiviral drugs that can be taken at home.
“It’s really the safety net for people who don’t have any access to insurance,” said Lipman. “It’s a limited situation, but in the pandemic it’s a good back-up to have. It makes a lot of sense with such a communicable disease.”
With COVID cases now at relatively low levels, demand for testing, treatment and vaccination is down. But the urgency felt by hospitals and other medical service providers is driven by their own bottom lines.
In Missouri, Golden Valley Memorial Healthcare CEO Craig Thompson is worried to see federal funding evaporate just as operating costs are soaring. Staff have gotten raises, drug costs have risen by 20% and supply costs by 12%.
“We’ve now exited this pandemic ... into probably the highest inflationary environment that I’ve seen in my career,” Thompson said. The health system serves a largely rural area between Kansas City and Springfield.
In Kentucky, Family Health Centers of Louisville closed a testing service for uninsured people once federal funds dried up. The private company they were working with planned to charge $65 a test.
Things are manageable now because there’s little demand, said spokeswoman Melissa Mather, “but if we get hit with another omicron, it’s going to be very difficult.”
Floridian Debra McCoskey-Reisert is uninsured and lost her older brother to COVID-19 in the first wave two years ago. In one of their last conversations, he made her promise she wouldn’t catch the virus.
McCoskey-Reisert, who lives north of Tampa, has managed to avoid getting sick so far. But she’s overshadowed by fear of what could happen if she or her husband get infected.
“If either one of us get sick with COVID, we don’t have a way to pay for it,” she said. “It would likely bankrupt us if we can’t find some other help.”
Retrenchment on the uninsured mirrors some of the bigger problems of the U.S. health care system, said Chicago hospital physician Loafman.
“Quite frankly, we as a society take care of the uninsured for COVID because it’s affecting us,” he said. “You know, a gated community doesn’t keep a virus out ... that’s sort of the ugly truth of this, is that our altruism around this was really self-motivated.”
___
Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/covid-coverage-all-dries-up-even-hospital-costs-rise/ | 2022-05-06T08:38:38Z |
Defenders inside Ukrainian steel mill refuse to surrender
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian fighters battling Russian forces in the tunnels beneath Mariupol’s immense steel plant refused to surrender in the face of relentless attacks, with the wife of one commander saying they had vowed to “stand till the end.”
The fight in the last Ukrainian stronghold of the strategic port city reduced to ruins by the Russian onslaught appeared increasingly desperate amid growing speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to present the Russian people with a battlefield triumph — or announce an escalation of the war — in time for Victory Day on Monday.
“They won’t surrender,” Kateryna Prokopenko said Thursday after speaking by phone to her husband, a leader of the steel plant defenders. “They only hope for a miracle.”
She said her husband, Azov Regiment commander Denys Prokopenko, told her he would love her forever. “I am going mad from this. It seemed like words of goodbye,” she said.
GRAPHIC: Videos used may contain disturbing content.
The Ukrainian military’s General Staff said Friday that “the blockade of units of the defense forces in the Azovstal area continues” and that the Russians, with aviation support, had resumed assault operations to take control of the sprawling plant.
Monday’s Victory Day is the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar, marking the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany. But as long as Ukrainians resist the takeover of the plant, “Russian losses will continue to build and frustrate their operational plans in southern Donbas,” the British Defense Ministry said in an assessment.
Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, by Russia’s most recent estimate, were holed up in a maze of tunnels and bunkers beneath Azovstal steelworks. A few hundred civilians were also believed trapped there.
“There are many wounded (fighters), but they are not surrendering,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address. “They are holding their positions.”
“Just imagine this hell! And there are children there,” he said. “More than two months of constant shelling, bombing, constant death.”
The Russians managed to get inside the plant Wednesday with the help of an electrician who knew the layout, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Internal Affairs Ministry.
“He showed them the underground tunnels which are leading to the factory,” Gerashchenko said in a video.
Zelenskyy said the attack was preventing evacuation of the remaining civilians, even as U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said another attempt was underway. “We must continue to do all we can to get people out of these hellscapes,” Guterres said.
The Kremlin denied its troops were storming the plant and has demanded the Ukrainians surrender. They have refused. Russia has also accused the fighters of preventing the civilians from leaving.
The fall of Mariupol would deprive Ukraine of a vital port, allow Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up troops to fight elsewhere in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that the Kremlin says is now its chief objective.
Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov Regiment, pleaded on Ukrainian TV for the evacuation of civilians and wounded fighters from the steelworks, saying soldiers were “dying in agony due to the lack of proper treatment.”
More than 100 civilians were rescued from the steelworks over the weekend. But many previous attempts to open safe corridors from Mariupol have fallen through, with Ukraine blaming shelling and firing by the Russians.
Meanwhile, 10 weeks into the devastating war, Ukraine’s military claimed it recaptured some areas in the south and repelled other attacks in the east, further frustrating Putin’s ambitions after his abortive attempt to seize Kyiv. Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting village by village.
The General Staff in Kyiv said Russian forces were conducting surveillance flights, and in the hard-hit areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukrainian forces repulsed 11 attacks and destroyed tanks and armored vehicles. Russia gave no immediate acknowledgement of those losses.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Russian forces are making only “plodding” progress in the Donbas.
There are growing suggestions that Ukraine might try to widen its push to seize more territory from Russia outside of Kharkiv, its second-largest city.
Ukrainian chief of defense, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said Thursday that a counteroffensive could begin to push Russian forces away from Kharkiv and Izyum, which has been a key node in Russia’s control of the eastern cauldron. Ukraine in recent days has driven Russian troops some 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Kharkiv, which has been repeatedly struck by Russian shelling.
Additional Ukrainian advances may spare the city from artillery strikes, as well as force Moscow to divert troops from other areas of the front line.
On Thursday, an American official said the U.S. shared intelligence with Ukraine about the location of a Russian flagship before the mid-April strike that sank it, one of Moscow’s highest-profile failures in the war.
The U.S. has provided “a range of intelligence” that includes locations of warships, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said the decision to target the missile cruiser Moskva was purely a Ukrainian decision.
Fearful of new attacks surrounding Victory Day, the mayor of the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk urged residents to leave for the countryside over the long weekend and warned them not to gather in public places.
And the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, a key transit point for evacuees from Mariupol, announced a curfew from Sunday evening through Tuesday morning.
Mariupol, which had a prewar population of over 400,000, has come to symbolize the misery inflicted by the war. The siege of the city has trapped perhaps 100,000 civilians with little food, water, medicine or heat.
As the battle raged there, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Russian bombardment Thursday hit dozens of Ukrainian military targets, including troop concentrations in the east, an artillery battery near the eastern settlement of Zarozhne and rocket launchers near the southern city of Mykolaiv.
The war has devastated Ukraine’s medical infrastructure, Zelenskyy said in a video link to a charity event in the U.K. Nearly 400 health care facilities have been damaged or destroyed, he said.
“There is simply a catastrophic situation regarding access to medical services and medicines,” in areas occupied by Russian forces, he said. “Even the simplest drugs are lacking.”
With the challenge of mine-clearing and rebuilding after the war in mind, Zelenskyy announced the launch of a global fundraising platform called United24.
At the same time, Poland hosted an international donor conference that raised $6.5 billion in humanitarian aid. The gathering was attended by prime ministers and ambassadors from many European countries, as well as representatives of other nations and some businesses.
In addition, a Ukrainian cabinet body began to develop proposals for a comprehensive postwar reconstruction plan, while Zelenskyy also urged Western allies to put forward a program similar to the post-World War II Marshall Plan plan to help Ukraine rebuild.
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Anna reported from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Associated Press journalists Yesica Fisch in Zaporizhzhia, Inna Varenytsia and David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington and AP staff around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/defenders-inside-ukrainian-steel-mill-refuse-surrender/ | 2022-05-06T08:38:46Z |
FDA restricts J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine due to blood clot risk
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. regulators on Thursday strictly limited who can receive Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine due to the ongoing risk of rare but serious blood clots.
The Food and Drug Administration said the shot should only be given to adults who cannot receive a different vaccine or specifically request J&J’s vaccine. U.S. authorities for months have recommended that Americans get Pfizer or Moderna shots instead of J&J’s vaccine.
FDA’s vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks said the agency decided to restrict the vaccine after taking another look at the data on the risks of life-threatening blood clots and concluding that they are limited to J&J’s vaccine.
“If there’s an alternative that appears to be equally effective in preventing severe outcomes from COVID-19, we’d rather see people opting for that,” Marks said. “But we’ve been careful to say that-- compared to no vaccine-- this is still a better option.”
The problem occurs in the first two weeks after vaccination, he added: “So if you had the vaccine six months ago you can sleep soundly tonight knowing this isn’t an issue.”
The FDA authorized J&J’s shot in February last year for adults 18 and up.
The vaccine was initially considered an important tool in fighting the pandemic because it required only one shot. But the single-dose option proved less effective than two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Moderna and Pfizer shots over J&J’s because of its safety issues.
As of mid-March, federal scientists had identified 60 cases of the side effect, including nine that were fatal. That amounts to 3.23 blood clot cases per 1 million J&J shots. The problem is more common in women under 50, where the death rate was roughly 1 per million shots, according to Marks.
Marks said the FDA spent extra time analyzing the problem to be sure it wasn’t connected to a separate issue, such as women taking birth control medications that raise their risk of clotting.
The J&J vaccine will carry a starker warning about potential “long-term and debilitating health consequences” of the side effect.
Under the new FDA instructions, J&J’s vaccine could still be given to people who had a severe allergic reaction to one of the other vaccines and can’t receive an additional dose. J&J’s shot could also be an option for people who refuse to receive the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and therefore would otherwise remain unvaccinated, the agency said.
A J&J spokesman said in an emailed statement: “Data continue to support a favorable benefit-risk profile for the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine in adults, when compared with no vaccine.”
The clotting problems first came up last spring, with the J&J shot in the U.S. and with a similar vaccine made by AstraZeneca that is used in other countries. At that time, U.S. regulators decided the benefits of J&J’s one-and-done vaccine outweighed what was considered a very rare ri sk — as long as recipients were warned.
COVID-19 causes deadly blood clots, too. But the vaccine-linked kind is different, believed to form because of a rogue immune reaction to the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines because of how they’re made. Clots form in unusual places, such as veins that drain blood from the brain, and in patients who also develop abnormally low levels of the platelets that form clots. Symptoms of the unusual clots include severe headaches a week or two after the J&J vaccination — not right away — as well as abdominal pain and nausea.
The New Brunswick, New Jersey-based company announced last month that it didn’t expect a profit from the vaccine this year and was suspending sales projections.
The rollout of the company’s vaccine was hurt by a series of troubles, including manufacturing problems at a Baltimore factory that forced J&J to import millions of doses from overseas.
Additionally, regulators added warnings about the blood clots and a rare neurological reaction called Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Pfizer and Moderna have provided the vast majority of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. More than 200 million Americans have been fully vaccinated with the companies’ two-dose shots while less than 17 million Americans got the J&J shot.
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This version corrects the rate of blood clots reported with J&J’s vaccine. It is 3.23 cases per 1 million vaccinations.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/fda-restricts-jjs-covid-19-vaccine-due-blood-clot-risk/ | 2022-05-06T08:38:53Z |
Giuliani withdraws from interview with Jan. 6 committee
WASHINGTON (AP) — A spokesman for the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol says Rudy Giuliani, who led Donald Trump’s court efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has withdrawn from an interview that was scheduled to take place Friday.
Committee spokesman Tim Mulvey released a statement to multiple media outlets Thursday night saying: “Mr. Giuliani had agreed to participate in a transcribed interview with the Select Committee. Today, he informed committee investigators that he wouldn’t show up unless he was permitted to record the interview, which was never an agreed-upon condition.”
Mulvey continued: “Mr. Giuliani is an important witness to the conspiracy to overthrow the government and he remains under subpoena. If he refuses to comply the committee will consider all enforcement options.”
Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello, told CNN that even though Friday’s meeting is off, talks between the two sides continue.
In January the committee issued subpoenas to Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team who filed bogus legal challenges to the 2020 election that fueled the lie that race had been stolen from the former president.
Giuliani also spoke at the rally in front of the White House that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection. Like Trump, he suggested the certification of Biden’s victory was an existential crisis for the country and used rhetoric that alluded to violence.
“Let’s have trial by combat,” Giuliani said. “I’m willing to stake my reputation, the President is willing to stake his reputation, on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there.”
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/giuliani-withdraws-interview-with-jan-6-committee/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:00Z |
GOP works to get out the vote after calling elections rigged
ATLANTA (AP) — Republican David Perdue has made election fraud the centerpiece of his run for Georgia governor. But if he hopes to win in this year’s midterm elections, his supporters will have to use the same democratic system he says they shouldn’t trust.
The only way to win a rigged election, he says, is to turn out in such high numbers that the Democrats can’t get away with cheating.
“If we get out the vote, if everybody votes, we will win,” Perdue told his audience at a campaign speech last month.
Across the nation, Republicans who have embraced discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 election are attempting a similar high-wire act: campaigning for votes by preaching skepticism about elections.
For GOP contenders, it’s a tricky calculus. If they continue spreading former President Donald Trump’s lies that the election was stolen, they risk undermining faith in democracy and having their supporters stay at home. But those who reject Trump’s false claims face the wrath of the former president and his supporters, who wield sizable influence in many GOP primaries.
The tactic of campaigning on a distrust of democracy can confuse voters on whether their vote matters or not. Joe Kent, a Republican running for Congress in Washington, said voters sometimes ask him why they should bother voting at all, if elections are rigged. Kent said he believes Trump won and has said he would work to overturn President Joe Biden’s win if elected, even though there is no legal mechanism for doing so.
“I don’t have a perfect answer for you,” is what Kent said he tells voters who say they no longer trust voting. “I wish there was a remedy. If you buy into ‘It’s all rigged’ and ‘I’m not going to vote,’ we are 100% going to lose.”
In the 18 months since Biden defeated Trump, other issues have bubbled up to compete for the attention of candidates and voters: inflation, the bloody exit from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and debates over vaccines and masks in schools.
Trump’s false statements about the election, meanwhile, have been roundly disproved — by courts, law enforcement, elected election officials from both parties, and independent investigations.
“We need to move on to solving problems for citizens,” said Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, the Republican from southwest Washington state facing a primary challenge this year from Kent. Beutler has said she supported Trump’s right to bring legal challenges, but there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Beutler is one of 10 House Republicans who supported Trump’s second impeachment. She also voted to certify Biden’s election victory, making her a major target for Trump and his supporters.
The former president began spreading doubts about the 2020 election years before the first votes were even cast, saying he would only accept the results if he was the victor. He’s spent the last year and a half repeating those same claims, despite an absence of evidence. Now, he’s using his power within the GOP to punish candidates for being insufficiently loyal.
When Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, a stalwart Trump backer, told a crowd of Trump supporters that it was time to move on from 2020, he was jeered. Trump ended up pulling his endorsement of Brooks in Alabama’s Senate race.
“He wanted the election rescinded and a do-over,” Brooks later said. “But there’s no legal way to do it.”
Many Republicans have leaned into Trump’s conspiracy theories. In Missouri, Rep. Billy Long, who is running for the U.S. Senate, released a 30-second ad claiming the “Democrats rigged the election.” YouTube later removed the ad from its platform for violating its rules on misinformation.
In Texas, one survey of 143 Republican candidates for Congress this year found that only 13 stated that Biden was the election’s rightful winner.
Georgia is perhaps the best example of how Trump’s self-serving conspiracy theories continue to resonate with Republican voters, and the candidates hoping for their support.
Republican turnout in Georgia dropped in the January 2021 runoffs amid Trump’s barrage of voter fraud claims in his own election defeat, leading many Republicans to conclude that Trump’s messaging cost their party control of the Senate when Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock beat Perdue and fellow Republican Kelly Loeffler.
Perdue, now running for governor at Trump’s behest, has made election fraud the centerpiece of his challenge to incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp. Perdue and Trump blame Kemp’s refusal to attempt to overturn Trump’s defeat in Georgia during the 2020 campaign for their losses.
In his campaign speech, Perdue pledged to eliminate Georgia’s Dominion voting machines, which Trump has falsely accused of flipping votes against him. But Perdue also said concerns about the machines shouldn’t discourage Republicans from voting, noting that Democratic-leaning Virginia elected Republican Glenn Youngkin with votes recorded on Dominion machines.
“Let’s give you some hope. In Virginia, we just elected a Republican governor using these same machines,” Perdue said. “How did we do it? Well, Trump told people, he said: ‘Look, they fixed some rules. We still use the machines. It’s not perfect yet, but we can overwhelm it if we all get out and vote.’”
Perdue has also touted Republican efforts to recruit more poll watchers, saying they will help prevent fraud, although Perdue’s accusations have focused on the disproven claim that fraud in Georgia centered on absentee ballots that were returned in drop boxes.
Running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, Herschel Walker has taken a different tack, saying he doesn’t want to look backward at the 2020 election. During an April 20 interview with radio station WDUN-AM in Gainesville, Georgia, Walker acknowledged concerns about election fraud among Republican voters. He sought to reassure voters that Georgia’s restrictive 2021 election law will put to rest worries about absentee ballots by requiring driver license numbers on ballot applications and by limiting ballot drop boxes.
“I don’t know if there are problems with the 2020 elections,” Walker said. “One thing I have to worry about right now is that I’m going to have a fair election, and that people can believe in our election when I run.”
Surveys indicate that many Republicans have harbored doubts about Biden’s win, skepticism that has been encouraged by Trump and his allies on cable TV and talk radio, along with conspiracy theories and misinformation spreading online.
Distrust of American institutions was already increasing when Trump began telling his supporters that the election was rigged if he lost. The COVID-19 pandemic then prompted many states to rush out new vote-by-mail rules that alarmed some conservatives and prompted even more falsehoods from Trump.
When the votes were counted, large numbers of those mail-in ballots helped tilt the outcome in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia toward Biden.
“They view what happened in Pennsylvania and Georgia with suspicion,” said Daron Shaw, a former campaign strategist and polling expert who now teaches at the University of Texas. “But it was their guy who said don’t vote by mail. Voters take their cues from partisan elites, but instead of pushing back on this (voter fraud claim), the party elites have acted as an accelerant.”
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Klepper reported from Providence, R.I.
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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/gop-works-get-out-vote-after-calling-elections-rigged/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:07Z |
Hill bargainers seek Ukraine aid deal, COVID aid in question
WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers are working toward compromise on President Joe Biden’s $33 billion Ukraine aid request, even as signs emerge that Democrats may need to swallow another COVID-19 setback and drop their goal of wrapping pandemic spending into the package.
Bipartisan talks among House and Senate Appropriations committee leaders are underway in hopes of producing legislation Congress could vote on as soon as next week, members of both parties say. Changes in Biden’s proposal are likely — the price tag, particularly for military spending, could rise — but there’s wide agreement on the urgency of helping Kyiv and regional allies resist Russia’s 10-week-old onslaught.
Republican budget-writers “are probably knocking some things out and adding some things. But I think by and large, everybody agrees we’ve got to do all we can to help,” said No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Thune of South Dakota. He said some Republicans believe “this package may not be robust enough, but I think it probably strikes close to the right balance.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., cited broad backing for the measure Thursday but warned, “This isn’t about battling climate change.” McConnell aides said he was objecting to some proposed funding to international organizations that Republicans have criticized for spending money on alternative energy initiatives.
“If the Senate is serious about helping Ukraine win, we need to show it by passing supplemental assistance. Clean, no strings attached, and soon,” McConnell said.
One participant said bargainers must resolve details of Biden proposals to provide health care, food and other benefits to Ukrainian refugees in the U.S. and to strengthen government powers to use assets seized from billionaire friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin to help Ukraine. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe the talks publicly.
When Biden sent his $33 billion proposal to Congress last week, he wrote that “to avoid needless deaths in the United States and around the world,” Congress should include additional billions for COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines. Democrats have hoped doing so would pressure the GOP to accept the pandemic spending, which Democrats say is needed to prepare for the virus’ all but inevitable next curveball.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has resorted to more lawyerly language, not specifying that the two issues should be combined. “We need to figure out the best way to get both done, and that’s what we’re going to try to do in the next few weeks,” he told reporters Tuesday.
Minutes earlier, McConnell spelled out his view of the best way forward.
“There is overwhelming bipartisan support for getting the Ukrainians as much help as they need as quickly as possible,” McConnell said. “For that to happen here in Congress, that package needs to be moved without the other extraneous issues.”
While combining Ukraine and pandemic money into one package has broad Democratic support, bargainers say party leaders haven’t made a final decision on that yet. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in an interview that he wants funding for Ukraine and COVID-19 tied together because both are crucial.
“It may” fall out of the bill, Leahy said of the pandemic money, “and I think that would be a mistake.”
Biden’s overall proposal is anchored by $20 billion to help Ukraine and nearby countries defend themselves and replenish U.S. arms shipped to the area. There’s $8.5 billion to bolster Ukraine’s economy and government and $3 billion for refugees and to supplement food supplies around the world disrupted by the war.
The proposal’s fine print, contained in White House documents sent to Congress, adds texture to Biden’s plans.
It would make it easier for Russians with advanced degrees in more than two dozen sciences — including missile propulsion, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and cybersecurity — to get job-based visas and come to the U.S. Besides strengthening the U.S. in those fields, the move would “undercut Russia’s innovative potential, benefitting U.S. national security,” according to the materials accompanying Biden’s proposal.
The documents, which break down Biden’s defense request by each branch of the military, include $800,000 for the new U.S. Space Force. The expenditures are described as covering intelligence analysis, flying hours, weapon system sustainment and other costs, but no other details are provided. The overall U.S. defense budget is around $800 billion.
There’s nearly $600 million for Patriot anti-missile systems in Europe, money to care for wounded Ukrainian troops at an American military medical center in Germany and a proposal to let Afghan refugees who’ve fled to this country since the U.S. withdrawal become lawful permanent residents if they qualify.
Rapid approval of Ukraine aid would let both parties avoid an election-year display of dysfunction by spiraling into a spat over the widely popular cause of helping Ukraine avoid being overpowered by Russia.
Passage of Ukraine aid separately would also preserve GOP hopes of boxing Democrats into a corner on border security, an issue Republicans are banking on in November’s elections for congressional control.
Should Senate Democrats press ahead with a separate pandemic bill, Republicans plan to force a vote on retaining a Trump-era order citing the pandemic as justification for quickly removing asylum-seekers crossing the Mexican border into the U.S. The Biden administration has planned to let that rule expire May 23, and Democrats are divided over whether to extend it.
Already this year, a White House request for $30 billion for the pandemic was cut in half and ultimately dropped by the House. A bipartisan Senate compromise then trimmed it to $10 billion, but stalled over GOP demands for a vote on immigration.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/hill-bargainers-seek-ukraine-aid-deal-covid-aid-question/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:14Z |
Jill Biden to meet Ukrainian refugees during border visit
WASHINGTON (AP) — For weeks, first lady Jill Biden has been transfixed by the news coming out of Ukraine, by the bombings and scenes of “parents weeping over their children’s broken bodies in the streets,” as she said in a recent speech.
Now Biden is using her second solo overseas trip to get an up-close look at the Ukrainian refugee crisis by visiting Romania and Slovakia, where she will spend Mother’s Day meeting with displaced families in a small Slovakian village on the border with Ukraine.
Biden, who opens the visit Friday in Romania, told reporters traveling with her Thursday night, “It’s so important to the president and to me that the Ukrainian people know that we stand with them.” She said earlier in the week she wants the refugees to know “their resilience inspires me.”
NATO allies Romania and Slovakia border Ukraine and have taken in some of the millions of mostly women and children who fled after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, triggering Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.
Biden also will use her four days in Europe to highlight issues she promotes at home, such as support for U.S. service members, education and the welfare of children.
After flying overnight from Washington, Biden was to arrive at Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania, near the Black Sea, in time to help serve Friday dinner to U.S. service members stationed there. Some of the several thousand U.S. troops that President Joe Biden deployed to eastern Europe in the leadup to the war were sent to the base, which is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Romania’s border with Ukraine.
The centerpiece of the first lady’s trip comes Sunday — Mother’s Day — when Biden, a mother of three, meets with displaced Ukrainians who sought refuge across the border in Slovakia.
Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden, had planned to accompany her mother to Europe, but backed out after learning Thursday that she was a close contact of someone who tested positive for COVID-19, said Michael LaRosa, the first lady’s spokesperson. Ashley Biden tested negative, LaRosa said.
“I can only imagine the grief families are feeling,” Jill Biden said this week. “I know that we might not share a language, but I hope that I can convey, in ways so much greater than words, that their resilience inspires me, that they are not forgotten, and that all Americans stand with them still.”
The first lady also will meet during the trip with humanitarian aid workers, educators, government officials and U.S. embassy personnel, the White House said.
Nearly 6 million Ukrainians, mostly women and children, have fled their country since Russia’s invasion, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Many have resettled in next-door countries, like Romania and Slovakia, or have gone elsewhere in Europe to try to rebuild their lives.
More than 850,000 Ukrainians have entered Romania since the invasion, while nearly 400,000 have crossed into Slovakia, according to government figures from those countries.
Biden has long displayed an interest in the plight of refugees around the world.
In 2011, when her husband was vice president, she traveled to drought-stricken east Africa to visit with Somali famine refugees at the Dadaab camp in Kenya. In 2017, she visited refugees in Chios, Greece, as part of work by the aid organization Save The Children, on whose board she served.
Some refugee advocates said Biden’s trip will send the message that the United States takes seriously its humanitarian commitment to the Ukrainian people.
“Every first lady has a far-reaching platform to raise awareness and this trip will be an important tool for mobilizing additional support for those forced to flee their homeland,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and formerly a policy director to first lady Michelle Obama.
Jill Biden’s trip will be the latest to the region by a U.S. government representative following recent visits to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
President Biden visited Ukrainian refugees during a stop in Poland in March. That’s the closest he’s been to Ukraine. The White House has said there are no current plans for him to visit Kyiv.
After her time with the U.S. service members, the first lady was set to spend Saturday in Bucharest, Romania’s capital, being briefed on humanitarian efforts, meeting with Romanian first lady Carmen Iohannis and touring a school where Ukrainian refugee students are enrolled before she departs for Slovakia. Biden is a community college English professor.
On Sunday, she heads to Kosice, Slovakia, to visit a city-operated refugee center and a public school that also hosts Ukrainian refugee students, where she will spend time with Ukrainian and Slovakian mothers and children as they participate in Mother’s Day activities. Afterward, she will travel to the Slovakia-Ukraine border crossing in Vysne Nemecke, Slovakia.
The White House declined to comment on whether she will cross the border and enter Ukraine.
She’ll also visit a small Greek Catholic chapel in Vysne Nemecke that serves refugees.
Monday brings a meeting with Slovakian President Zuzana Caputova, the country’s first female president, before Biden heads back to Washington.
The first lady has shown her support the Ukrainian people in several ways. She wore a sunflower — Ukraine’s national flower — on her mask and a dress sleeve, and traveled to a Tennessee hospital to visit with Ukrainian children flown there for cancer treatment.
She had Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Oksana Markarova, sit with her during President Biden’s State of the Union address in March, and went to the Army’s Fort Campbell in Kentucky to visit with the families of U.S soldiers who were deployed to Europe to assist with the Ukraine crisis.
The trip is the first lady’s second overseas by herself. She flew to Tokyo last year to represent the United States at the opening of the Olympic Games.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/jill-biden-meet-ukrainian-refugees-during-border-visit/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:20Z |
JMU women’s lacrosse claims three major CAA honors
HARRISONBURG, Va. (WHSV) - The James Madison women’s lacrosse team claimed three major honors Thursday when the All-CAA awards were announced for the 2022 season.
Attacker Isabella Peterson is the CAA Player of the Year while goalie Molly Dougherty has been named the CAA Goalkeeper of the Year. Defender Mairead Durkin picked up CAA Defensive Player of the Year honors. In all, seven JMU players earned All-CAA honors. For more details, click here.
James Madison is currently ranked No. 10 in the latest national poll. The Dukes won ten straight games to end the regular season and are now awaiting their fate for the NCAA Tournament. JMU is expected to earn an at-large bid despite being banned from the CAA Tournament due to the athletic program’s impeding move to the Sun Belt Conference.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/jmu-womens-lacrosse-claims-three-major-caa-honors/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:29Z |
Official: US gave intel before Ukraine sank Russian warship
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. says it shared intelligence with Ukraine about the location of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva prior to the strike that sank the warship, an incident that was a high-profile failure for Russia’s military.
An American official said Thursday that Ukraine alone decided to target and sink the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet using its own anti-ship missiles. But given Russia’s attacks on the Ukrainian coastline from the sea, the U.S. has provided “a range of intelligence” that includes locations of those ships, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Biden administration has ramped up intelligence sharing with Ukraine alongside the shipment of arms and missiles to help it repel Russia’s invasion. The disclosure of U.S. support in the Moskva strike comes as the White House is under pressure from Republicans to do more to support Ukraine’s resistance and as polls suggest Americans question whether President Joe Biden is being tough enough on Russia.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion in February, the White House has tried to balance supporting Ukraine, a democratic ally, against not doing anything that would seem to provoke a direct war between Putin and the U.S. and NATO allies. As the war has gone on, the White House has ramped up its military and intelligence support, removing some time and geographic limits on what it will tell Ukraine about potential Russian targets.
The official who spoke Thursday said the U.S. was not aware that Ukraine planned to strike the Moskva until after they conducted the operation. NBC News first reported on the American role in the sinking of the ship.
Speaking earlier Thursday after a New York Times report about the U.S. role in supporting Ukraine’s killing of Russian generals, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said American agencies “do not provide intelligence on the location of senior military leaders on the battlefield or participate in the targeting decisions of the Ukrainian military.”
“Ukraine combines information that we and other partners provide with the intel that they themselves are gathering and then they make their own decisions and they take their own actions,” Kirby said.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/official-us-gave-intel-before-ukraine-sank-russian-warship/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:36Z |
Pence: Leaked abortion draft opinion helps some ‘22 hopefuls
SPARTANBURG, S.C. (AP) — Former Vice President Mike Pence applauded the essence of a leaked draft opinion suggesting that the U.S. Supreme Court could be poised to overturn the landmark case that legalized abortion nationwide, predicting that the decision could have favorable impacts for anti-abortion candidates in midterm elections across the country.
“I hope and pray that the Supreme Court draft opinion will hold and become part of the law of the land, returning the question of abortion to the states and to the American people,” Pence said. “I also have no doubt that the women and men who are standing for public office at every level who have taken a strong stand for the unborn and the sanctity of life will be favorably impacted by this decision, particularly at the state level.”
Pence spoke Thursday night at a benefit for Carolina Pregnancy Center, a crisis pregnancy center in Spartanburg, part of South Carolina’s conservative Upstate. Ahead of his remarks, he toured the organization’s mobile ultrasound unit.
Earlier this week, a draft opinion leaked to Politico suggested the U.S. Supreme Court could be poised to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide. It’s his second visit in a week to the early-voting state that would be key to Pence’s support among white Evangelical Christian voters.
A decision to overrule Roe would lead to abortion bans in roughly half of the country and could have huge ramifications for this year’s elections. But it’s unclear if the draft represents the court’s final word on the matter — opinions often change in ways big and small in the drafting process.
The issue of abortion has long been a centerpiece of Pence’s political life, dating to his days in Congress and as governor of Indiana. He has spent the months since the end of the Trump administration trying to position himself as a conservative who can appeal both to his white Evangelical Christian base, as well as Trump supporters and those who may have been fond of Trump’s policies, but not his pugilistic style.
As he mulls a possible presidential bid, Pence has built a post-White House operation that includes a political advocacy group, delivering speeches, fundraising and bolstering relationships that could help him, should he choose to run in 2024.
“Governors, state legislators at every level, if this Supreme Court draft opinion holds, will now have a say over the issue of life in their individual states,” Pence said Thursday. “And I have a sense, as the nation is moving more and more in the direction of recognizing the sanctity of life, that they will be looking for women and men who are willing to stand up unapologetically for the cause of life this year and in the years to come.”
This is Pence’s second visit in a week to this state, which holds the first presidential primary elections in the South. On Saturday, Pence spoke at commencement exercises at Columbia International University, sharing his personal faith story and telling graduates of the Christian school that “the antidote to cancel culture is freedom, so decide here and now that you will live as free men and women, and defend the freedoms that generations of Americans have fought to defend.”
During that visit, CIU President Mark Smith, who served as a faith adviser to the Trump White House, said he felt “Pence saved our nation by refusing to overturn the election on Jan 6.”
“I asked him, ‘How did you do it?’” Smith said. “I will not betray his words, but I will convey to you, character comes through.”
South Carolina would be key to Pence should be seek the presidency in 2024, with its large contingent of white evangelical conservative voters. Last year, Pence chose South Carolina as the scene of his first public speech since leaving the Trump administration, addressing a fundraiser for a conservative Christian nonprofit.
On Thursday, Pence told a crowd of more than 1,000 that supporting organizations like Carolina Pregnancy Center, which counsels women against seeking abortions and provides them with support, needs them to continue their financial backing.
“I think we’re going to see more and more states make a greater and greater commitment to provide support for women facing crisis pregnancies,” Pence said. “I truly do believe that, when the moment comes that the Supreme Court does their job, then it’s incumbent on us to do our job.”
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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/pence-leaked-abortion-draft-opinion-helps-some-22-hopefuls/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:42Z |
SpaceX brings 4 astronauts home with midnight splashdown
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX brought four astronauts home with a midnight splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, capping the busiest month yet for Elon Musk’s taxi service.
The three U.S. astronauts and one German in the capsule were bobbing off the Florida coast, near Tampa, less than 24 hours after leaving the International Space Station. NASA expected to have them back in Houston later in the morning.
“That was a great ride,” said Raja Chari, the capsule commander. As for the reintroduction to gravity, he noted: “Only one complaint. These water bottles are super heavy.”
NASA’s Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and the European Space Agency’s Matthias Maurer, were out of the capsule within an hour of splashdown, waving and giving thumbs-up as they were hustled away on rolling chaises for medical checks.
Their departure from the space station Thursday was bittersweet, as they embraced the seven astronauts remaining there.
“It’s the end of a six-month mission, but I think the space dream lives on,” Maurer said.
SpaceX brought up their U.S. and Italian replacements last week, after completing a charter trip to the station for a trio of businessmen.
That amounts to two crew launches and two splashdowns in barely a month. Musk’s company has now launched 26 people into orbit in less than two years, since it started ferrying astronauts for NASA. Eight of those 26 were space tourists.
SpaceX’s William Gerstenmaier, a vice president, called it “a pretty exciting time.”
“Satellites are nice, but flying people are a little special and a little bit different, and the team here sure understands that,” he told reporters. “There’s a sense of relief and and a sense of accomplishment that you know you’ve done something good.”
NASA is more impressed than ever, given SpaceX’s hectic pace of late. The only problem of note in the latest flight was a mechanical nut that wiggled loose and floated away from the SpaceX capsule following Thursday’s undocking. Officials assured everyone it would not pose a danger to the space station.
“Look at all this work in the last month,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA’s space operations mission chief. “I really want to personally thank SpaceX for just, wow, just performing such seamless operations on all those missions.”
The astronauts said their mission was highlighted by the three visitors and their ex-astronaut escort who dropped by in April, opening up NASA’s side of the station to paying guests after decades of resistance.
On the down side, they had to contend with a dangerous spike in space junk after Russia blew up a satellite in a missile test in mid-November. More than 1,500 pieces of shrapnel spread across Earth’s orbit for years to come.
While the war in Ukraine has caused tensions between the U.S. and Russia, the astronauts have stood by their Russian crewmates, and vice versa. Flight controllers in Houston and Moscow also continued to cooperate as always, according to NASA officials.
As he relinquished command of the space station earlier this week, Marshburn called it “a place of peace” and said international cooperation would likely be its lasting legacy. Russian Oleg Artemyev, the new commander, also emphasized the “peace between our countries, our friendship” in orbit and described his crewmates as brothers and sisters.
Up there now are three Russians, three Americans and one Italian.
It was Marshburn’s third spaceflight, and the first for the three returning with him. Chari and Barron’s next stop could be the moon; they are among 18 U.S. astronauts picked for NASA’s Artemis moon-landing program. Two others in that elite group are now at the space station.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/spacex-brings-4-astronauts-home-with-midnight-splashdown/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:49Z |
Tornadoes strike Texas, Oklahoma, cause widespread damage
SEMINOLE, Okla. (AP) — A storm system spawned several tornadoes that whipped through areas of Texas and Oklahoma, causing damage to a school, a marijuana farm and other structures.
There were no reports of serious injuries following the Wednesday night tornadoes, but the system caused flooding in parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas, and more stormy weather took place Thursday.
Significant damage was reported in the Oklahoma city of Seminole, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) southeast of Oklahoma City, where Gov. Kevin Stitt said damage assessments were underway after he toured the area Thursday.
“(We’re) getting all the resources and supplies that the city wants and needs,” including generators, Stitt said. “Thank the Lord that nobody was hurt” and no deaths have been reported.
The National Weather Service said it found damage in Seminole from an EF2 tornado, which has winds speeds of up to 135 mph (217 kph).
More than 2,900 customers remained without power in Seminole late Thursday afternoon, according to Oklahoma Gas & Electric, more than 63% of the utility customers in the city.
The Academy of Seminole took a direct hit but no one was injured, the school said on Facebook.
Video footage from Oklahoma TV station KOCO showed a tornado hit a marijuana farm in the nearby town of Maud.
Several roads and highways were closed Thursday morning in parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas because of flash flooding.
In Bixby, Oklahoma, located south of Tulsa, officials opened a temporary shelter at a church after thunderstorms flooded some homes and streets in one neighborhood.
In East Texas, a tornado on Thursday damaged several campers and buildings at an RV park in Rusk County, Sheriff Johnwayne Valdez told KTRE-TV. The Rusk County Office of Emergency Management reported one person was injured after being hit by a tree.
On Wednesday, a “large and dangerous tornado” was spotted in the rural community of Lockett, about 170 miles (275 kilometers) northwest of Dallas, said the National Weather Service office in Norman, Oklahoma.
The weather service said it found damage near Lockett from an EF3 tornado, which has winds speeds of up to 165 mph (265 kph).
There were no significant injuries or deaths to residents in Wilbarger County, where Lockett is located, Sheriff Brian Fritze told KAUZ-TV. He said several homes and barns appeared to sustain extensive damage.
In Washington County in northwest Arkansas, officials performed more than 30 water rescues as heavy rainfall flooded homes and streets in the cities of Fayetteville and Johnson, KHBS/KHOG-TV reported.
The storms on Wednesday and Thursday were the latest in several rounds of severe weather in the central United States. Last week, a tornado damaged more than 1,000 buildings in the Wichita suburb of Andover, Kansas. Three University of Oklahoma meteorology students died in a car crash while returning from storm chasing.
The storms, which were moving east into other southern U.S. states, could bring more tornadoes, large hail and damaging winds, and the threat of severe weather will continue Friday in parts of the South and over the weekend in the central Plains and Midwest, the weather service said.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/tornadoes-strike-texas-oklahoma-cause-widespread-damage/ | 2022-05-06T08:39:56Z |
...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM HST SATURDAY...
* WHAT...East winds 20 to 25 kt. Seas 8 to 10 feet.
* WHERE...Kauai Northwest Waters, Kauai Windward Waters, Kauai
Leeward Waters, Kauai Channel, Oahu Leeward Waters, Maui
County Leeward Waters, and Big Island Windward Waters.
* WHEN...Until 6 AM HST Saturday.
* IMPACTS...Conditions will be hazardous to small craft.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller
vessels, should avoid navigating in these conditions.
&&
HONOLULU (KITV4) - The Annual Honolulu Triathlon returns on Sunday, May 15, starting at the Ala Moana Beach Park at 6:00 am.
Event participants will start with a 1500-meter swim, followed by a 25-mile bike along Ala Moana Blvd, Nimitz, to Lagoon Drive, returning to Ala Moana Beach Park, and a 6.2-mile run inside Ala Moana Beach Park. There will be traffic restrictions and closures along the route.
See the press release for detailed traffic flows and a map of affected areas.
Traffic Movement Restrictions:
The Bike Course will be held on the Makai (ocean) side of Ala Mona Blvd from Ala Moana Beach Park, Ewa bound, to Nimitz under the viaduct. The bikes will make a 180 U-turn under the viaduct at Lagoon Drive and then back onto Nimitz and Ala Moana Blvd, to Ala Moana Beach Park (MAKAI SIDE).
Ala Moana Blvd and Nimitz road closure begin at 4 am.
Nimitz to Ward Ave will be open no later than 10:00 am.
There will be restricted cross-traffic on Ala Moana and Nimitz.
A Hot Line will be available, and it will be active from May 8th through May 15th, 24 hours a day. Honolulu Triathlon will post the number on the website.
Do you have a story idea? Email news tips to news@kitv.com | https://www.kitv.com/news/local/honolulu-triathlon-race-starts-on-may-15-at-ala-moana-beach-park-traffic-rerouted/article_f81e536c-ccd2-11ec-9676-af52018afd17.html | 2022-05-06T09:02:43Z |
...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM HST SATURDAY...
* WHAT...East winds 20 to 25 kt. Seas 8 to 10 feet.
* WHERE...Kauai Northwest Waters, Kauai Windward Waters, Kauai
Leeward Waters, Kauai Channel, Oahu Leeward Waters, Maui
County Leeward Waters, and Big Island Windward Waters.
* WHEN...Until 6 AM HST Saturday.
* IMPACTS...Conditions will be hazardous to small craft.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller
vessels, should avoid navigating in these conditions.
&&
A passenger is taken into custody after opening the emergency exit and walking on the wing of the plane.
A United Airlines passenger was taken into custody Thursday morning at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport after opening an aircraft door and walking out onto the wing of the plane while it was taxiing.
"A male subject was onboard a plane that was approaching the gate when he pulled the emergency exit and walked out onto the wing of the plane," according to a statement from the Chicago Police Department.
"The subject then slid down the wing and onto the airfield," police added.
The incident occurred on United Airlines flight 2478 coming from San Diego.
United Airlines said ground crew stopped the individual outside the aircraft. When the plane arrived at the gate, all passengers deplaned safely, according to a statement from the airline.
"CPD arrived and placed him into custody. Charges are pending," police said. | https://www.kitv.com/passenger-taken-into-custody-after-opening-emergency-exit-and-walking-on-wing-of-plane/article_17288fe0-9fa8-564a-97d4-b26a3d371524.html | 2022-05-06T10:37:18Z |
“He makes zombie movies, and he makes superhero movies. And sometimes he makes both in the same movie!”
So says the 12-year-old Marvel Cinematic Universe fan who lives in our house, describing director Sam Raimi’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” after a recent preview screening. Reader, he is on the nose with that assessment. The film is equal parts “Doctor Strange” sequel; harsh “WandaVision” do-over; and, for a climax, a festival of undead digital demons who wouldn’t be out of place in Raimi’s “Evil Dead” pictures or his delightfully zingy “Drag Me to Hell.”
This latest MCU bid to keep the MCU going until we’re all moldering underground is not business as usual. It is a paradox: a glumly playful experiment in testing the story limits of multiverse travel, while dramatizing all the wrong ways of dealing with grief, guilt and a broken heart (Strange’s and the Scarlet Witch’s). The script’s a messy sort of mess. There are also clear signs of a nervy director at work.
We begin with a bittersweet wedding. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who nearly destroyed our world in order to save it from Thanos, attends the nuptials of his one true love (Rachel McAdams), who is marrying another. All of a CGI sudden, a one-eyed giant octopus from another dimension appears on the Manhattan streets below, in violent pursuit of a new character, young America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez).
This teenager is blessed/cursed with the ability to “dreamwalk” in and out of other universes. And this makes her valuable to Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen, whose grief has turned to monomaniacal rage). In “Doc Strange 2″ Wanda has lost touch with her better instincts, having availed herself of the “Dark Hold,” which sounds like something Baron von Raschke used to try in the wrestling ring. The antidote to the Dark Hold is the hallowed Book of the Vishanti, which is the very thing Strange and America are after in the nightmare vision of the prologue. All this determines the fate of the multiverse, while factoring into an audience’s enjoyment of the movie not much at all.
Strange runs into other Stranges in other universes. A zombie Strange returns to life at one point. And at that same point, director Raimi, working from a script by “Loki” screenwriter Michael Waldron, lets loose with the unruly horror/fantasy mashup he’s been dying to make all along. Some younger viewers may not like this part, just as some older ones may not, either. I went for it, because it kept the explanatory blah-blah quiet for a bit.
Along the way, Strange and company encounter Baron Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his motley Illuminati crew, which pulls a bizarre range of characters from various Marvel franchises for a fast, corpse-strewn detour. The movie’s all detours, really. America Chavez is a major player, but we hardly know her any better by the end. The memory flashback of America’s two mothers implies a same-sex relationship that already has caused some censorship issues for the film’s international rollout. I wish it came to more. Wanda’s torturous efforts to become a legitimate loving mother in a more accommodating universe takes up a substantial amount of the narrative. It has the effect of sitting on the movie at the expense of working out Dr. Strange’s own storylines, and it seems odd that with so many alternate realities afoot, the movie avoids a happy ending for the Cumberbatch and McAdams characters in one of those realities.
What do I know? I’m just a mono-universe critic. In flashes, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” reveals Raimi at his imaginative best. Some of the visual transitions are striking; the eyeblink edits, for example – Bob Murawski and Tia Nolan coedited the picture – sending Wanda’s warring selves flying from one universe to another, nearly subliminally, leads to some genuinely impressive disorientation.
Elsewhere, sadly, the exposition dumps are dumpier than usual. Raimi’s heavier, twisted sense of humor, which worked just right in the first two Tobey Maguire “Spider-Man” pictures, feels at odds here with the general tone, and the numbing percentage of effects-driven work guiding this project. The throwaway gags feel a little off, as when Strange’s trademark cloak attempts to slap its unconscious owner awake.
Is the movie better at its actual messiest, in its passages of pure abstraction? In fact, yes: When the audience goes dreamwalking with the characters, at one point we’re confronted, briefly, with a universe where people turn into primary-colored splashes of paint. At another juncture two characters engage in a battle of literal musical notes, used as a conjurer’s weapons, floating in the air. That’s something new, certainly, requiring composer Danny Elfman, otherwise unengaged, a chance to score something that doesn’t sound like everything else.
From “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (2018) to “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021) to the spider-free “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022), the notion of nearly unlimited life choices, at a cost, has caught the wonderment of a populace not so enthralled with the real world at present. The stranger half of “Doc Strange 2” periodically slaps the other half awake. Or maybe the best and strangest version of this movie is opening this week in a pandemic-free theater, somewhere over in Multiverse Heights. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/features/doctor-strange-review-sam-raimi-drags-the-marvel-universe-halfway-to-hell/article_c78254a1-9b49-5ab5-84f2-dd2a8adbbd6e.html | 2022-05-06T12:33:44Z |
If the descriptor “first album in over 50 years” has ever been used before, it certainly hasn’t been often.
It can legitimately be applied to the MC5’s “Heavy Lifting,” the first album from the Detroit proto-punk band since its third album, “High Time,” in 1971.
Guitarist Wayne Kramer is the lone original member carrying on the name of the provocative leftist band that was on stage (for eight hours) during the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and redefined hard rock with the 1969 classic “Kick Out the Jams.” MC5, which incorporated blues, garage-rock, psychedelia and free jazz, enjoyed limited commercial success and was beset by drug, production and label problems before signing off on Dec. 31, 1972.
Rob Tyner, the explosive frontman, died of a heart attack in 1991, guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith (husband of Patti Smith) died of cancer in 1994, and bassist Michael Davis succumbed to liver failure in 2012. The various reunions ended with Davis’ death, until Kramer reconstituted the band in 2018 for the MC50 celebration of “Kick Out the Jams.” The current touring lineup also includes singer Brad Brooks, drummer Stephen Perkins (Jane’s Addiction), bassist Vicki Randle (Mavis Staples) and guitarist Stevie Salas (David Bowie).
The forthcoming album, produced by the legendary Bob Ezrin (Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Kiss), is a star-studded affair that includes contributions from Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Don Was and drummer Abraham Laboriel, Jr., with lyrical touches from Kesha, Alejandro Escovedo, Jill Sobule and Tim McIlrath (Rise Against). Original MC5 drummer Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson plays percussion on two songs.
Of this 51-year gap between albums, Kramer says, in a phone interview, “I’ve seen reports of bands doing their first album in, you know, five years or 10 years or even 20 years, but nobody’s made the half-century mark. Leave it to the MC5 to do something that nobody’s ever done, for sure.”
Inspiration came, in part, from the exploits of our most recent former president, according to Kramer, who brings the band to the Thunderbird Music Hall on Friday.
”It’s the MC5 of today hewing to the legacy message that MC5 has carried all these decades – of action, of taking action. We kick out the jams, we don’t hand out the jams. We’re in a time now that’s very dangerous for our nation. The forces of authoritarianism and fascism are not joking. The white nationalist movement, the religious right, the Republican Party, these people are serious and they want to restrict communication, they want to restrict activities, they want everyone to be armed to the teeth, and if one looks at the history, that’s all you need to see that our democracy is at risk.”
In terms of the musical forces at play, it began when he started writing songs with Brooks, an Oakland, Calif., singer who was in the ‘90s bands Reckonball and Dolorosa and went solo in 2000. Once they had a few songs demoed, Kramer played them for Ezrin, with whom he worked on the most recent Alice Cooper album, “Detroit Stories.”
”Bob said, ‘Man, this stuff is great. Let’s make an album,’” Kramer says. “Then, my wife brought in a record label, and the idea emerged that this is an MC5 album, and the creativity grew exponentially. We brought in more musicians and writers and the idea that ‘We Are All MC5’ began to take shape.”
Of Ezrin, who is 73, Kramer says, “He’s as creative and imaginative as you could imagine. You know, music is not something that’s actually tied to being young. If you’re in sports, it takes a young body to do that. In the arts, you can continue to develop your ideas and your passion can grow deeper and your techniques can become stronger over time. Great jazz and blues and classical musicians, they get better and better as time went on, and they work on their instruments and their composing right to the end. Musicians don’t retire.”
Is that something he anticipated as a 17-year-old playing with the MC5?
”To be honest,” he says. “I never gave it much thought. I was so in the moment I was in, and I still do that. I try to live in the day I’m in, and the moment I’m in.”
Times have certainly changed in terms of political music making an impact on people the way that rock and hip-hop did in the latter half of the last century, but he was not going to be dissuaded by that.
”Music has always had a role to play in social change,” he says. “It cannot do it by itself. You can’t write one song that’s going to make a difference. But what we do in music and in art, in general, is if we’re honest and have the courage to write about the things that we feel passionately about, other people feel that way too, and when you hear the songs, your minds connect, your hearts connect, your aspirations connect, and you build community. So, if you love a Bob Dylan song and I love the same Bob Dylan song, we meet in that song. That’s what music has always done for creating and supporting a non-violent mass movement of people to effect political change. If we’re protesting a war or we’re protesting the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, then we meet in that song and we have an agreement in our origin story.”
In February, the MC5 was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the sixth time, so Kramer and Thompson have been through the wringer in terms of legacy.
”The MC5,” Kramer says, “has been nominated so many times now that I’ve walked through all the criticisms I can think of and all the cynicism that I can think of, and at this point, I would just say ‘Gee, it would be nice.’ It would be nice for the fans, the people that have supported the MC5 all these decades to have a confirmation that their tastes matter, that their favorite bands matter. It would be a good thing. Do I think it’s going to happen? Hell no. The MC5 was never a hit band. ‘Kick Out the Jams’ was banned from the radio, and the albums we made back in the day, they were all banned from the radio. Maybe we’ll have better luck with the new ‘Heavy Lifting’ album.”
A date for the album has not been announced. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/features/mc5-ready-to-kick-out-the-jams-on-first-new-album-in-50-years/article_7137715c-0e8e-5c41-86a8-4c5f39434580.html | 2022-05-06T12:33:51Z |
Jason Pierce of Spiritualized performs on the Sonora stage during the 2022 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival, on April 22, 2022 in Indio, California. (Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Coachella)
The multitalented musician (whose real name is Jason Pierce) is operating at the height of his space-rock powers on the newly released “Everything Was Beautiful.”
It’s a gorgeous and moving suite of orchestral pop, towering rock and intergalactic sounds, sewn together in furious yet meticulous fashion by the always adventurous Spaceman and his fellow musical travelers in the band Spiritualized.
The album is overflowing with wildness and wonder, tension and turmoil, and every song seems to evoke new emotions and feelings. It’s the rare record that changes course on a regular basis and yet still manages to come across as totally coherent.
Of course, Spaceman has long been a master at making the whole feel so much greater than the sum of its parts. Most famously, Spiritualized’s 1997 effort, “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space,” is rightly considered one of the greatest albums of the ’90s.
“Everything Was Beautiful” can be comfortably mentioned in the same breath as that acclaimed earlier effort and should be considered an early frontrunner for best album of 2022.
Besides listening to the new album – Spiritualized’s ninth overall – fans can visit YouTube and watch the cool live film of “I’m Coming Home” (the amazing closing cut on “Everything Was Beautiful”). The film was directed by Spaceman and Juliette Larthe and uses footage filmed in the band’s Nottingham rehearsal space in early 2022. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/features/this-space-rock-epic-is-an-early-contender-for-best-album-of-2022/article_366282ac-6361-5435-882a-2538516558a9.html | 2022-05-06T12:33:57Z |
Cheyenne and Laramie County
Movies at the Library, Burns
– May 6, 1-3 p.m. Join the Burns Branch Library for a family friendly movie and some popcorn. This week’s movie is “Encanto” (PG). Burns Branch Library, 112 Main St. 307-547-2249
Friday Matinee, Pine Bluffs
– May 6, 1:30-3:30 p.m. Spend your Friday afternoons at the library to watch a family friendly matinee. Bring a favorite snack and enjoy the show. This week’s movie is “The Addams Family 2” (PG). Pine Bluffs Branch Library, 110 E. Second St. 307-245-3646
Gamers Unite: Super Smash Bros.
– May 6, 3-5 p.m. They’re crashing and smashing at the library. Go get your game on at Gamers Unite. Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
2022 Tacos & Tequila
– May 6, 5-10 p.m. $40. The yearly fundraiser for the COMEA House and Resource Center returns. Ticket price includes event admission, access to silent and live auction, taco and fajita buffet, free tequila tasting and a full bar. Cheyenne Frontier Days Arena, Exhibit Hall and Event Center, 1312 W. Eighth Ave. Call 307-632-3174 for tickets.
Arts Cheyenne ArtHaus Launch Party and Artwalk
– May 6, 6 p.m. Arts Cheyenne will be showcasing the first ArtHaus exhibit, a Fine Arts Cheyenne Invitational, which will highlight local artists’ work. Enjoy the art as you sip on a beverage and meet the artists eager to chat and share their creations. Cheyenne Depot, 232 W. 15th St. 307-632-3905
WyArt Coalition Fine Art Exchange
- May 6-7. The second installment of the Fine Art Exchange is here. Attendees can bid through the silent auction, or ... You know all those skills you have in plumbing? Or web design? Maybe you bake a killer wedding cake. How about just a crazy, off-the-wall skill you can teach? Well, now is your chance to offer that up in return for some artwork. Cheyenne Depot, 232 W. 15th St. 307-632-3905
CLTP presents “Cabaret”
– May 6-8, 12-15, 20-22, 7:30 p.m. $24, dinner theater $48. In a Berlin nightclub, as the 1920s draw to a close, a garish Master of Ceremonies welcomes the audience and assures them they will forget all their troubles at the “Cabaret.” With the Emcee’s bawdy songs as wry commentary, “Cabaret” explores the dark, heady and tumultuous life of Berlin’s natives and expatriates as Germany slowly yields to the emerging Third Reich. Historic Atlas Theatre, 211 W. Lincolnway. 307-638-6543
Kentucky Derby Brunch
– May 7, 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. $25 per guest, $300 per table. Enjoy brunch with K9s 4 Mobility at The Metropolitan. Place your predictions on the live K9s Derby Puppy Run. There will also be brunch, games, drinks and music from Southern Fryed. The Metropolitan Gallery, 1701 Carey Ave. 307-222-9597
Wyoming State Museum Family Day
– May 7, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Free. This month’s theme is “May Flowers.” Join the museum for a day dedicated to the diverse plant life of our state. Make your own potted plant, explore how the fruits and veggies that you eat are pollinated, and meet experts from across Wyoming. Register online. The library will also hold storytime from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Wyoming State Museum, 2301 Central Ave. 307-777-7022
The Three Little Pigs: Musical Story Time and Instrument Petting Zoo
– May 7, 11 a.m. Free. Join master storyteller Aaron Sommers and Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra musicians, violinist Sarah McCoy and cellist Suzy Wagner for musical story time. Activities presented in partnership with Delta-Kappa Gamma, Upsilon Chapter. Paul Smith Children’s Village at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, 710 S. Lions Park Drive. 307-637-6458
Virtual SaturD&D
– May 7, 1-3 p.m. Roleplaying adventure is just a click away. Join the library’s Teen D&D online community and get started on creating a character today. Don’t have a Discord account yet? No problem. Laramie County Library offers Discord Communities for teens to interact, chat, and play online. RSVP for the event at lclsonline.org/calendar/.
4th Annual Corgi Derby
– May 7, 2-4 p.m. Pine Bluffs Distillery is allowing 50 dogs to participate in the races. Come dressed in your best derby attire (the bigger the hat, the better!). Dog costumes are also welcome. Prizes will be given to both humans and furry friends for “Best in Show,” so be sure to bring your A-game. There will also be food trucks and drink specials. $1 from each drink will go to the Cheyenne Animal Shelter. Pine Bluffs Distilling Tasting Room, 115 Bourbon St. 307-245-3000
All Things Tulips
– May 7, 2 p.m. $5. Join Isaiah Smith as he discusses the biology, history and use of tulips. He will also give tips on how to design and plant tulips in your own garden. Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, 710 S. Lions Park Drive. 307-637-6349
Mother’s Day Buffet @ The Metropolitan
– May 8, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. A special brunch buffet menu in celebration of Mother’s Day. Reservations are encouraged. The Metropolitan Downtown, 1701 Carey Ave. 307-432-0022
3rd Annual Mothers Day Family Reunion Picnic
– May 8, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Nay & Jay’s Mothers Day Picnic will feature a bouncy house, food trucks, games, live music, raffles and a family tournament. There will also be a 3v3 basketball tournament. This event is presented by The Louise Event Venue. Holliday Park, East 16th Street. 307-220-1474
Poetry Open Mic @ The Hawthorn Tree
– May 8, 1-3 p.m. Free. Each poet gets five minutes to read, but occasionally go two rounds, so bring extra poems. Arrive five minutes early to sign up. The Hawthorn Tree, 112 E. 17th St. 307-369-4446
Mother’s Day Brunch @ Danielmark’s
– May 8, 1-4 p.m. $15 for unlimited beermosas and finger food. Danielmark’s Brewing Co., 209 E. 18th St. 307-514-0411
Mother’s Day @ Wyoming Rib & Chop House
– May 8, 1-10 p.m. Reservations required. A special menu in celebration of Mother’s Day. Moms will receive a complimentary photo and picture frame upon entrance. Wyoming Rib & Chop House, 400 W. Lincolnway. 307-514-0271
LCCC presents “A Night at the Opera”
– May 8, 7 p.m. The Cheyenne Brass Band and LCCC’s Wind Ensemble, Chamber Orchestra, Collegiate Chorale and Cantori will showcase the diversity and history of opera through this musical performance. The free program will feature pieces by Mozart, Puccini, Verdi and Gilbert & Sullivan. Surbrugg/Prentice Auditorium, Laramie County Community College, 1400 E. College Drive. 307-778-5222
Guided Play
– May 9, 10-11:45 a.m. Each week, the library will feature a different playscape in the Early Literacy Center, along with suggestions of how to engage your child in guided play. This week’s theme is “Parachute Party.” Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
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Cowgirls of the West Luncheon
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{div class=”subscriber-only”}– May 9, 11:30 a.m. Reservations $25. Mike Kassel will be presenting the program on “Cheyenne and its Indian Neighbors.” Little America Hotel and Resort, 2800 W. Lincolnway. Call 307-632-2814 by May 6.
Painting and Pints @ Freedom’s Edge Brewing Co.
– May 9, 6-8 p.m. $42, includes all painting supplies and one pint. Freedom’s Edge and Flydragon Design Art Studio team up for another guided painting session. Space is limited to 12 painters. Freedom’s Edge Brewing Co. 1509 Pioneer Ave. 307-514-5314{/div}
”Retribution” 30th Anniversary Tour
– May 9, 7 p.m. All ages. Donation required to enter. The legendary Death Metal band “Malevolent Creation” is on tour, celebrating the 30th anniversary of their album “Retribution.” With touring acts Luna In Sanguinem, from Illinois and Narcotic Wasteland, featuring members from Florida and Colorado. Cheyenne’s own death dealers Casket Huffer, will be playing new tracks from their upcoming release. Ernie November, 217 W. Lincolnway. 307-632-6867
Famous Illustrators
– May 10, 4:15-5:15 p.m. Ever wonder how illustrators make the beautiful pictures you see in books? Take a look into how some of your favorite book illustrators make their art. This month, the library will focus on the Pumphrey brothers. Wear play clothes, as it could get messy. Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
We Drink and We Know Star Wars
– May 10, 6 p.m. Monthly themed trivia night on the second Tuesday of each month. This month is Star Wars themed, so gather your team, drink some beers and show us what you know! Freedom’s Edge Brewing Co., 1509 Pioneer Ave. 307-514-5314
Brown Bag Book Club
– May 12, 6-7 p.m. Grades 4-6. Book Club will meet twice during the month of May. We will chat about the book, do some crazy activities and enjoy a delicious treat. Participants can bring a “brown bag” meal, and drinks will be provided. We will be reading “Artemis Fowl” by Eoin Colfer. Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
Open Jam Night
– May 12, 7-10 p.m. Free. The Lincoln Theatre is hosting its next Open Jam Night. Musicians are encouraged to bring their guitar, bass, etc. and come jam with other local musicians! Backline provided. A full bar will be available for those who just want to come and watch. The Lincoln Theatre, 1615 Central Ave. 307-369-6028
Movies at the Library, Burns
– May 13, 1-3 p.m. Join the Burns Branch Library for a family friendly movie and some popcorn. This week’s movie is “Trolls” (PG). Burns Branch Library, 112 Main St. 307-547-2249
Friday Matinee, Pine Bluffs
– May 13, 1:30-3:30 p.m. Spend your Friday afternoons at the library to watch a family-friendly matinee. Bring a favorite snack and enjoy the show. This week’s movie is “Encanto” (PG). Pine Bluffs Branch Library, 110 E. Second St. 307-245-3646
Magic Beans, Schema Things, and Amorphic @ The Lincoln
– May 13, 8-11 p.m. $20 advance, $25 at the door. A night of funk/rock jam bands hailing from Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado. The Lincoln Theatre, 1615 Central Ave. 307-369-6028
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VFW Craft and Flea Market Show
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{div class=”subscriber-only”}– May 14, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. The final show until September. Support local veterans while enjoying unique stands filled with jewelry, crochet items, candles and more. Lunch will be available. VFW Post 1881, 2816 E. Seventh St. 307-632-4053
13th Annual Sherman Hill Train Show
– May 14-15, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Activities for the entire family, including a riding train for kids, a kids corner, operating model train layouts and vendors, with a variety of model and prototypical railroad wares and food. Event Center at Archer, 3801 Archer Pkwy. {a class=”action-item” href=”mailto:shmrrcts@gmail.com” rel=”nofollow”}shmrrcts@gmail.com{/a}
Cheyenne Day of Service
– May 14, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Help us clean up Cheyenne and show our community pride by participating in the fifth annual Day of Service. The city has put together a list of cleanup areas that are in need of some love and attention, and Community Recreation and Events Deputy Director Jason Sanchez is asking residents to pre-register beforehand, if possible, to adequately distribute the manpower. He can be reached at 307-638-4358. Various locations.
The Last Hurrah at Danielmark’s Brewing
– May 14, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. The local brewery is changing ownership. There will be live music, great food, a cornhole tourney, and it’ll be customers’ last chance to score some sweet Danielmark’s gear, so don’t miss out. Free beer with entry. Danielmark’s Brewing Co., 209 E. 18th St. 307-514-0411{/div}
Virtual SaturD&D
– May 14, 1-3 p.m. Roleplaying adventure is just a click away. Join the library’s Teen D&D online community and get started on creating a character today. Don’t have a Discord account yet? No problem. Laramie County Library offers Discord Communities for teens to interact, chat, and play online. RSVP for the event at lclsonline.org/calendar/. Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
Battle of the Bands @ The Lincoln – Metal bands
– May 14, 7 p.m.; doors at 6 p.m. $5. The fourth night of a four-month, multi-genre Battle of the Bands competition. Each performer will be given a 15-minute set. The event is open to all musicians within 50 miles of Cheyenne that are not signed to a label. All material performed must be original. The Lincoln Theatre, 1615 Central Ave. 307-369-6028
Guided Play
– May 16, 10-11:45 a.m. Each week, the library will feature a different playscape in the Early Literacy Center, along with suggestions of how to engage your child in guided play. This week’s theme is “Block Party.” Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
Library for All
– May 19, 12:30-2:30 p.m. An event specifically geared toward adults with disabilities. This month, the library will be planting an herb from the Seed Library of Laramie County to take home. Please bring your staff with you. RSVP for this event at lclsonline.org/calendar/. Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
Sit, Stay, Read! Read to a Therapy Dog
– May 19, 4-5 p.m. Everyone loves to hear a story, even our four-pawed friends. Visit the library and practice reading aloud to one of the community’s therapy dogs. Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
Painting Wine Glasses
– May 19, 6 p.m. $25. Have an evening of fun painting tulips on wine glasses. Painting isn’t just for the canvas! Create your own custom wine glass, hand painted by you. We will provide the glass and all the art materials. Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, 710 S. Lions Park Drive. 307-637-6349
Billy Bob Thornton & The Boxmasters with Sugar Britches @ The Lincoln
– May 19, 8-11 p.m. Formed in 2007, The Boxmasters have recorded an impressive and diverse catalogue of music that touches on their love of a wide array of influences, but most importantly, the rock ‘n’ roll of the 1960s. The Lincoln Theatre, 1615 Central Ave. 307-369-6028
Storytime at the Paul Smith Children’s Village
– May 20, 11-11:30 p.m. The library is taking storytime to the garden. Head on over to the Paul Smith Children’s Village to participate in one of our early literacy storytimes. Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561
Movies at the Library, Burns
– May 20, 1-3 p.m. Join the Burns Branch Library for a family-friendly movie and some popcorn. This week’s movie is “The Mitchells vs. The Machines” (PG). Burns Branch Library, 112 Main St. 307-547-2249
Friday Matinee, Pine Bluffs
– May 20, 1:30-3:30 p.m. Spend your Friday afternoons at the library to watch a family-friendly matinee. Bring a favorite snack and enjoy the show. This week’s movie is “Tangled” (PG). Pine Bluffs Branch Library, 110 E. Second St. 307-245-3646
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Comedy Night at The Metropolitan
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{div class=”subscriber-only”}– May 20, 7:30 p.m. $20. Laughter is good for the soul. Get your giggles on at this 90-minute comedy show featuring two awesome comedians. The Metropolitan Downtown, 1701 Carey Ave. 307-432-0022
Ongoing
Governor’s Capitol Art Exhibition
– Through Aug. 14, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Presented by the Wyoming State Museum, this exhibit compiles 66 different pieces of artwork from artists around the state of Wyoming. Wyoming State Capitol basement extension, 200 W. 24th St. 307-777-7220{div class=”subscriber-only”}
Art & Text: Artist as Storyteller
– Through May 17, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Enjoy visual stories and the written word created by K–12 students in Laramie County School District 1. Art is located throughout all three floors of the library. Laramie County Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave. 307-634-3561{/div}
The Front Range
Alice in Wonderland
- May 6-7, 13-14, 7 p.m.; May 1, 7, 14, 1 p.m. $10. To celebrate their 30th season, Debut Theatre Company takes you on a delightful adventure to capture the imagination of all ages with clever, nonsensical word-play and irreverent humor. Lewis Carroll’s famous story about dreams and reality, childhood and growing up, games and nonsense, will transport you to a land that vexes time, stretches space and asks you to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast. The Lincoln Center, 417 W. Magnolia St. 970-221-6730
Canyon Concert Ballet presents “Snow White”
– May 7-8, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. $30-$40. This debut production brings to life the legendary fairy tale of Snow White. This production from new Artistic Director Michael Pappalardo will be complete with new sets, costumes and his exquisite choreographic style. Lincoln Center Performance Hall, 417 W. Magnolia St. 970-221-6730
Fort Collins Symphony presents Reflections: The Emotions of Music
– May 14, 7:30 p.m. $42-$60. Chen Yi’s intense, high-spirited and hopeful composition, Ge XU (Antiphony) is a tribute to Southern China’s Zhuang minority people and their celebratory song styles. Claude Debussy accesses playful emotions in Children’s Corner, dedicated to his young daughter and her favorite toys. Lincoln Center Performance Hall, 417 W. Magnolia St. 970-221-6730
”Black and White in Black and White” Exhibit
–Through May 28, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. $8. This new exhibit features striking photographs attributed to African American photographer John Johnson who took powerful, early 20th-century portraits of African Americans in Lincoln, Nebraska. Greeley History Museum, 714 9th St, Greeley, Colorado. 970-350-9220{/div} | https://www.wyomingnews.com/features/todo/friday-calendar-5-6-22/article_e6eac7e7-9d06-5c60-9323-1455b2fd0387.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:03Z |
Debuting Tuesday, May 3, on HBO Max is a documentary taking a look at a reunion 15 years in the making. “Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known” follows the reunion concert of the original cast of the eight-time Tony winning musical “Spring Awakening,” benefiting The Actor’s Fund. The film, directed by Michael John Warren, gives fans a taste of the concert, but also dives into the development and production of the show, a challenging and unique piece of work that struggled to find its producers, and its audience, before becoming a bona fide cultural phenomenon, thanks in large part to its young, talented cast. The stars of “Spring Awakening,” many of them teenagers and young adults, were launched into the stratosphere with the success of the show and have become stars in film and TV in their own right in the years since.
Based on the German expressionist play “The Awakening of Spring,” written by Frank Wedekind, “Spring Awakening” is a strange, but utterly intoxicating musical. Set in 1890s Germany, it feels distressingly relevant even today, as the cast of teenagers deals with the roller coaster of sex, mental health, abuse, abortion and suicide, their pleas for compassion and understanding falling on the deaf ears of their parents and teachers. Written by Steven Sater and composed by rock musician Duncan Sheik, the play uses the period setting to comment on contemporary issues while the anachronistic rock, punk and folk songs bring a modern sound to the story. The original Broadway cast album is a must listen.
Part of the fun of watching the documentary is seeing the “Spring Awakening” stars before they were stars. Leads Jonathan Groff and Lea Michele will be familiar to anyone who has watched TV over the past decade or so. Michele starred as Rachel Berry in the Ryan Murphy hit show choir sitcom “Glee,” which showcased her incredible pipes, and her former “Spring Awakening” co-stars Groff and Skylar Astin dropped in for guest roles too. All six seasons of the series are available to rent on Amazon or iTunes.
Groff’s TV work hasn’t featured his singing as much as as Michele’s, but he’s excelled in high-profile series like the underrated Andrew Haigh show “Looking” on HBO Max, a slice of gay life in San Francisco. Groff also landed the co-lead in David Fincher’s FBI profiling series “Mindhunter” on Netflix, playing a young FBI agent who gets a bit too close to his cases. He also co-starred in “The Matrix Resurrections” last year, which will be back on HBO Max soon, and is currently available to rent.
Fortunately, most of Skylar Astin’s major roles post-“Spring Awakening” have featured his singing, including in the “Pitch Perfect” franchise, as Jesse, the lead singer of the a cappella group The Treblemakers. All three “Pitch Perfect” films are available to rent on most major digital platforms. He also sings in musical sitcom “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” on Peacock, and in “Crazy Ex Girlfriend,” on Netflix.
John Gallagher Jr., who won a Tony for his performance as the tortured Moritz Stiefel, has had a successful career in dramatic film roles, including the 2013 indie “Short Term 12,” available to stream on Peacock, Tubi and available to rent elsewhere. He also had roles in the horror films “10 Cloverfield Lane” and “Underwater” (both available to rent on all platforms). Also check him out on the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom” on HBO Max.
Other notable cast members include Krysta Rodriguez, who delivered a stunningly pitch perfect performance as Liza Minnelli in the Netflix mini-series “Halston” last year, and Gideon Glick, seen in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” on Prime Video, and “The Other Two,” on HBO Max. Lauren Pritchard, who spearheaded the reunion and is also a producer on the documentary, has made a career as a songwriter, and co-wrote the ubiquitous Panic! At the Disco hit “High Hopes.”
Check out “Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known,” and then take a spin through the careers of the original Broadway cast on streaming. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/features/todo/what-to-stream-documentary-turns-spotlight-back-on-spring-awakening-cast/article_3827e10b-c8f1-5ff6-afdd-eac5daeb9527.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:09Z |
FRIDAY
Free stress relief clinic: Noon to 1 p.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
Chicken Fried Steak Dinner fundraiser: 5:30-7:30 p.m., Laramie Elks Lodge 582, 103 S. 2nd St. Cost is $16 for members and their guests. Seating is limited, so call for a reservation, 307-742-2024.
”Meet the Macbeths!” presented by Laramie Children’s Musical Theater Workshop: 7 p.m., Studio 253 in the Laramie Plains Civic Center, 710 E. Garfield St. Tickets $10 for adults, $5 for children younger than 12. Appropriate for ages 8 and older.
UW Music presents Andrew Staupe on piano: 7:30 p.m., Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets $10 general admission, $7 seniors and $6 for non-UW students. Ca307-766-6666 or visit uwyo.edu/finearts.
UW Planetarium presents “Astrology”: 8 p.m., UW Planetarium. Look into the past at the origins of astrology and learn how it’s affected the world, along with why we don’t depend on it today. Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
SATURDAY
Free stress relief clinic: 10-11 a.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
UW Planetarium presents “Europe to the Stars”: 2 p.m., UW Planetarium. An epic journey behind the scenes at the most productive ground-based observatory in the world. Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
VFW Post 2221 Commander’s Charity Dinner: 5:30-8 p.m., 2142 E. Garfield St. Tickets 412 at the door, all proceeds to benefit VFW Poppy Fund and Albany County Search and Rescue.
”Meet the Macbeths!” presented by Laramie Children’s Musical Theater Workshop: 7 p.m., Studio 253 in the Laramie Plains Civic Center, 710 E. Garfield St. Tickets $10 for adults, $5 for children younger than 12. Appropriate for ages 8 and older.
UW choirs present Brahms’ beloved “German Requiem”: 7:30 p.m., Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts. For tickets, call 307-766-6666 or visit uwyo.edu/finearts.
UW Planetarium presents “Liquid Sky Indie Rock”: 8 p.m., UW Planetarium. Enjoy a custom playlist of music from out-of-this-world artists pushing the limits of rock. Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
SUNDAY
Mother’s Day Brunch fundraiser: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Laramie Elks Lodge 582, 103 S. 2nd St. Cost is $15 for members and their guests, with complimentary brunch for moms. Call 307-742-2024 for a reservation.
MONDAY
Alcoholics Anonymous meets: Daily at various times in person or on Zoom. For more information, call 307-399-0590 or visit area76aawyoming.org or aa.org.
Laramie Basin Land Coalition meet and greet: 5:30-6:30 p.m., Hilton Garden Inn, 2229 Grand Ave.
Survivors of Suicide Support Group: Meets from 5:30-6:45 p.m. at Hospice of Laramie House, 1754 Centennial Drive.
Women for Sobriety meet: 6:30-8:30 p.m. via Zoom. For meeting details, email 1093@womenforsobriety.org.
TUESDAY
Prayers & Squares Quilting Group meets: 9 a.m., Room 1 of Hunter Hall at St. Matthews Cathedral.
Free stress relief clinic: 1-2 p.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
Albany County Republican Party meets: 6 p.m., Albany County Public Library.
Albany County Genealogical Society meets: 7 p.m., Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 3311 Hayford Ave. Meetings are free to attend and open to the public. This month’s program is “Early Colonial Roads and How They Opened the West.”
WEDNESDAY
Laramie Tai Chi and tea: Meets at 1:30 p.m. at the north end of the stadium in Laramie Plainsman Park, North 15th and Reynolds. For more information, visit laramietaichiandtea.org.
Ivinson Medical Group women’s health prenatal education: 5:30 p.m., Ivinson Memorial Hospital in the Summit Conference Room. Learn more or register at ivinsonhospital.org/childbirth.
THURSDAY
Caregivers for loved ones with Alzheimer’s/dementia: 3 p.m., meet for coffee, pie, understanding and comradeship at Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 204 S. 30th St. For more information, call 307-745-6451.
Stitching the Past Together creative aging class: 6:30-8 p.m., Albany County Public Library large meeting room. Students will learn memory-based storytelling through beading techniques in this free course. Register at acplwy.org or at the circulation desk.
May 13
Free stress relief clinic: Noon to 1 p.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
UW Planetarium presents “Extrasolar Planets”: 8 p.m., UW Planetarium. Just a couple of decades ago scientists could only speculate if planets existed around the other stars of our galaxy. Today, an abundance of diverse worlds are cataloged each day. Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
May 14
University of Wyoming graduation ceremony: 8:30 a.m., UW Arena-Auditorium, undergraduate ceremony for the colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Engineering and Applied Science and School of Energy Resources.
Free stress relief clinic: 10-11 a.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
University of Wyoming graduation ceremony: 10 a.m., Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts, for the College of Law.
University of Wyoming graduation ceremony: 12:15 p.m., UW Arena-Auditorium, for master’s and doctoral students from colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Business, Education, Engineering and Applied Science, Health Sciences and Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources.
UW Planetarium presents “Out There: Extrasolar Worlds”: 2 p.m., UW Planetarium. For thousands of years, mankind thought that the Earth was the center of the universe. Thanks to our curiosity, imagination and urge to explore, we now know that planets like ours are nothing special in the cosmos. Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
University of Wyoming graduation ceremony: 3:30 p.m., UW Arena-Auditorium, for undergraduate ceremony for colleges of Arts and Sciences, Education, Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources and Office of Academic Affairs.
UW Planetarium presents “Liquid Sky Pop”: 8 p.m., UW Planetarium. Enjoy a custom playlist of music from today’s pop artists. Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
May 15
Walk With a Doc: 1:30-2:30 p.m. at the Washington Park west shelter No. 3. Bring walking shoes and a friend. For more information, email questions@ivinsonhospital.org.
May 16
Alcoholics Anonymous meets: Daily at various times in person or on Zoom. For more information, call 307-399-0590 or visit area76aawyoming.org or aa.org.
Survivors of Suicide Support Group: Meets from 5:30-6:45 p.m. at Hospice of Laramie House, 1754 Centennial Drive.
Women for Sobriety meet: 6:30-8:30 p.m. via Zoom. For meeting details, email 1093@womenforsobriety.org.
May 17
Prayers & Squares Quilting Group meets: 9 a.m., Room 1 of Hunter Hall at St. Matthews Cathedral.
Free stress relief clinic: 1-2 p.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
UW Planetarium presents “Wyoming Skies”: 8 p.m., UW Planetarium. What’s up in the sky around Wyoming? Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
May 18
Laramie Tai Chi and tea: Meets at 1:30 p.m. at the north end of the stadium in Laramie Plainsman Park, North 15th and Reynolds. For more information, visit laramietaichiandtea.org.
Ivinson Medical Group women’s health prenatal education: 5:30 p.m., Ivinson Memorial Hospital in the Summit Conference Room. Learn more or register at ivinsonhospital.org/childbirth.
May 19
Caregivers for loved ones with Alzheimer’s/dementia: 3 p.m., meet for coffee, pie, understanding and comradeship at Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 204 S. 30th St. For more information, call 307-745-6451.
Stitching the Past Together creative aging class: 6:30-8 p.m., Albany County Public Library large meeting room. Students will learn memory-based storytelling through beading techniques in this free course. Register at acplwy.org or at the circulation desk.
May 20
Albany County CattleWomen meet: 11:30 a.m., location tbd. Visit wyaccw.com in the week before the meeting for location and more information.
Free stress relief clinic: Noon to 1 p.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
UW Planetarium presents “Science of Sci-Fi”: 8 p.m., UW Planetarium. Everyone loves a good sci-fi movie, but how much is science and how much is fiction? Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
May 21
Free stress relief clinic: 10-11 a.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
UW Planetarium presents “Hot and Energetic Universe”: 2 p.m., UW Planetarium. The planetarium documentary “The Hot and Energetic Universe” presents with the use of immersive visualizations and real images the achievements of modern astronomy. Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
UW Planetarium presents “Liquid Sky Throwbacks”: 8 p.m., UW Planetarium. Stranger Things meets Guardians of the Galaxy — 1980s nostalgia addicts unite! Enjoy a custom playlist of music from yesterday’s top artists. Tickets $5; $3 for UW students, staff and first responders; free for children younger than 5. Call 307-766-6506.
May 23
Alcoholics Anonymous meets: Daily at various times in person or on Zoom. For more information, call 307-399-0590 or visit area76aawyoming.org or aa.org.
Survivors of Suicide Support Group: Meets from 5:30-6:45 p.m. at Hospice of Laramie House, 1754 Centennial Drive.
Women for Sobriety meet: 6:30-8:30 p.m. via Zoom. For meeting details, email 1093@womenforsobriety.org.
America Sewing Guild Laramie Chapter meets: 7 p.m., United Methodist Church, 1215 E. Gibbon St. Please enter through the lower east door off the parking lot.
May 24
Prayers & Squares Quilting Group meets: 9 a.m., Room 1 of Hunter Hall at St. Matthews Cathedral.
Free stress relief clinic: 1-2 p.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
May 25
Laramie Tai Chi and tea: Meets at 1:30 p.m. at the north end of the stadium in Laramie Plainsman Park, North 15th and Reynolds. For more information, visit laramietaichiandtea.org.
May 26
Caregivers for loved ones with Alzheimer’s/dementia: 3 p.m., meet for coffee, pie, understanding and comradeship at Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 204 S. 30th St. For more information, call 307-745-6451.
Stitching the Past Together creative aging class: 6:30-8 p.m., Albany County Public Library large meeting room. Students will learn memory-based storytelling through beading techniques in this free course. Register at acplwy.org or at the circulation desk.
May 27
Free stress relief clinic: Noon to 1 p.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
May 28
Free stress relief clinic: 10-11 a.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
May 30
Alcoholics Anonymous meets: Daily at various times in person or on Zoom. For more information, call 307-399-0590 or visit area76aawyoming.org or aa.org.
Survivors of Suicide Support Group: Meets from 5:30-6:45 p.m. at Hospice of Laramie House, 1754 Centennial Drive.
Women for Sobriety meet: 6:30-8:30 p.m. via Zoom. For meeting details, email 1093@womenforsobriety.org.
May 31
Prayers & Squares Quilting Group meets: 9 a.m., Room 1 of Hunter Hall at St. Matthews Cathedral.
Free stress relief clinic: 1-2 p.m., Laramie Plains Civic Center Phoenix Ballroom.
June 3
Fried Shrimp Dinner fundraiser: 5:30-7:30 p.m., Laramie Elks Lodge 582, 103 S. 2nd St. Cost is $16 for members and their guests. Seating is limited, so call for a reservation, 307-742-2024.
June 5
Unexpected Company Senior Theatre presents “Three Doors to Death ... or the Choice is Yours”: 3 p.m., Alice Hardie Stevens Event Center. Tickets $12 can be bought at the Eppson Center for Seniors or Laramie Plains Museum Carriage Gift Shop.
Have an event for What’s Happening? Send it to Managing Editor Greg Johnson at gjohnson@laramieboomerang.com. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/announcements/whats-happening/article_f8f2734d-39bf-5848-91a7-f252bba90f92.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:15Z |
As spring continues to take hold in and around Laramie, construction season is beginning with full force. Projects have already begun on 3rd and Cedar streets, with many more scheduled to get underway during the summer.
City of Laramie Public Works Director Brooks Webb and City Council members agree that while construction may not be convenient, it will be necessary to keep up with failing infrastructure.
“It's the only way we can grow,” said Vice Mayor Jayne Pearce during a council meeting this week. “We’ve got to get infrastructure to expand the community. I think this is something people in the community need to know.”
Maps and a guide to this year’s projects are posted online at tinyurl.com/bddtpsf5. For the 3rd Street utility project, a status map is available where residents can see when certain sections of the road will be closed.
The project entails replacing about 11,000 feet of water main line in preparation for a future road resurfacing project planned by WYDOT to begin around 2025. The water line work is expected to be completed this fall.
Another important project is stormwater outfall work in West Laramie. The project will begin with Adams Street, Van Buren Street and Buchanan Street. The project is meant to manage the flow of stormwater in the area. Once the project is completed, the roads from Wyoming Avenue to the north will have the necessary infrastructure to be paved in the future.
There is a long shipping time on some of the necessary materials due to supply chain issues, which could present a challenge, Webb said. The project is scheduled to be completed this fall.
Other road work projects expected to begin this year and end in the fall include a reconstruction of 9th Street between Harney and Shields streets and a rehabilitation of Flint Street between 3rd and 4th Streets.
Water and sewer projects include a sewer outfall replacement project between Corthell Road and 18th Street and sewer work near 13th and 14th streets, along Reynolds Street between 9th and 11th streets, and along 30th Street and Asphalt Lane.
“It's really important to stay on top of these things and make investments and get things done wherever and whenever we can,” said Mayor Paul Weaver said. “When it doesn’t get done, serious consequences can result.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/news/city-to-ramp-up-summer-infrastructure-projects/article_48611ba1-3813-5de1-91bf-c7bb5f16ec5d.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:21Z |
A “Welcome to Laramie” sign greets northbound travelers on Wyoming Highway 287 on the south side of town shortly before the highway intersects with the South 3rd Street Exit 313 for Interstate 80.
This map shows the reach of the Laramie Area Growth Plan, a collaborative effort to set growth policies and a land use plan for unimorporated ares of Albany County.
A “Welcome to Laramie” sign greets northbound travelers on Wyoming Highway 287 on the south side of town shortly before the highway intersects with the South 3rd Street Exit 313 for Interstate 80.
David Watson/Boomerang File
This map shows the reach of the Laramie Area Growth Plan, a collaborative effort to set growth policies and a land use plan for unimorporated ares of Albany County.
The city of Laramie is partnering with Albany County to create a plan that will outline how to manage growth in the coming years with an eye on unincorporated areas.
A primary focus of the project will be finding middle ground between maintaining autonomy for county residents and the city’s push to expand housing and development opportunities.
“I think the city and county are both concerned with housing and economic development, and I’m increasingly beginning to think those two are the same thing,” said Laramie Mayor Paul Weaver during a Wednesday meeting to discuss the plan.
The governments have hired Logan Simpson, a Fort Collins-based planning consulting firm, to help assess the status of the area and develop a viable outline for the future.
Throughout the summer, the firm plans to seek as much public input as possible from a wide range of community stakeholder on how they want the city and county to evolve.
The firm already has conducted interviews with people from the engineering, land development, construction and ranching industries. The group also has talked with representatives from environmental groups and the university.
Some of the top themes shared by groups interviewed so far include a need for more housing at a range of price points, a desire for entry points into the community to be more visually pleasing and the recognition that the city of Laramie has more rigorous development standards than the county.
Logan Simpson plans to expand its work to more general populations over the summer by doing online outreach and attending local events such as the farmers market and Jubilee Days. Questionnaires, workshops and presentations also will be available.
“We’re here to listen, not to come to conclusions or dictate anything,” said Cameron Gloss, a representative of Logan Simpson. “Every community is different.”
After gathering a range of community opinions, the firm will begin working to create development standards and ultimately form an agreement between the city and county. One of the goals of the project will be to develop a set of core issues that both entities agree on.
“I think we’re at an (important) time in our development (with) the work that’s going on between the city and the county,” council member Sharon Cumbie said. “I think this project has great potential.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/news/here-we-grow-again-city-county-begin-planning-process-for-unincorporated-areas/article_a93b1334-ea0a-5948-910b-ff6b3553d875.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:28Z |
Young performers rehearse for their production of the musical comedy “Meet the Macbeths!,” which premieres this weekend at the Laramie Plains Civic Center.
When the young actors in the production of “Meet the Macbeths!” were cast in early January, no one knew whether or not the show would really be able to go on.
For two years running, the annual spring musicals at Studio 253 had been derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and no one was sure what the situation would be when the musical comedy was to premiere this weekend.
Fortunately, the actors will be rewarded for their work and, led by director and playwright Deborah Kassner, the young performers are excited to present the original musical comedy “Meet the Macbeths!” at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday in the newly created Black Box space at the Laramie Plains Civic Center.
“This show is a testament to the perseverance, creativity and teamwork of this cast and crew and their families,” said Kassner. “We don’t have a tech team or a big budget. So, everyone learns how to do a little bit of everything – building props, painting sets, hanging curtains, brainstorming and problem solving.
“And together, we get the job done.”
“Meet the Macbeths!” features a cast of seven performers ages 9-16 playing multiple roles.
“With a smaller cast this year, we were able to give more acting opportunities to the performers, Kassner said. “That also means a lot of fast costume changes!”
For those, the players are helped backstage by Sarah Weber, Reesie Lane and Henry Kordon.
Tickets are by reservation only, and Friday’s performance is sold out.
Laramie Children’s Musical Theater Workshop @Studio 253 is funded in part by a grant from the Wyoming Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/news/local_news/feel-the-spirits-after-2-year-hiatus-spring-musical-returns-this-weekend/article_9bdbd00b-bc9f-57cc-a12a-73fe46be99f4.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:34Z |
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — It took two trips over state lines, navigating icy roads and a patchwork of state laws, for a 32-year-old South Dakota woman to get abortion pills last year.
For abortion-seekers like her, such journeys, along with pills sent through the mail, will grow in importance if the Supreme Court follows through with its leaked draft opinion that would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision and allow individual states to ban the procedure. The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was concerned for her family’s safety, said the abortion pills allowed her to end an unexpected and high-risk pregnancy and remain devoted to her two children.
But anti-abortion activists and politicians say those cross-border trips, remote doctors’ consultations and pill deliveries are what they will try to stop next.
“Medication abortion will be where access to abortion is decided,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at Florida State University College of Law who specializes in reproductive rights. “That’s going to be the battleground that decides how enforceable abortion bans are.”
Use of abortion pills has been rising in the U.S. since 2000 when the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone — the main drug used in medication abortions. More than half of U.S. abortions are now done with pills, rather than surgery, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.
Two drugs are required. The first, mifepristone, blocks a hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. A second drug, misoprostol, taken one to two days later, empties the uterus. Both drugs are available as generics and are also used to treat other conditions.
The FDA last year lifted a long-standing requirement that women pick up abortion pills in person. Federal regulations now also allow mail delivery nationwide. Even so, 19 states have passed laws requiring a medical clinician to be physically present when abortion pills are administered to a patient.
South Dakota is among them, joining several states, including Texas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee and Oklahoma, where Republicans have moved to further restrict access to abortion pills in recent months.
Those moves have spurred online services that offer information on getting abortion pills and consultations to get a prescription. After the woman in South Dakota found that the state’s only abortion clinic could not schedule her in time for a medication abortion, she found an online service, called Just The Pill, that advised her to drive across to Minnesota for a phone consultation with a doctor. A week later, she came back to Minnesota for the pills.
She took the first one almost immediately in her car, then cried as she drove home.
“I felt like I lost a pregnancy,” she said. “I love my husband and I love my children and I knew exactly what I had to say goodbye to and that was a really horrible thing to have to do.”
Besides crossing state lines, women can also turn to international online pharmacies, said Greer Donley, a professor specializing in reproductive health care at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Some women also are having prescribed pills forwarded through states without restrictions.
“It allows for someone to have an abortion without a direct role of a provider. It’s going to be much harder for states to control abortion access,” she said, adding, “The question is how is it going to be enforced?”
Abortion law experts say it’s an unsettled question whether states can restrict access to abortion pills in the wake of the FDA’s decision.
“The general rule is that federal law preempts conflicting state law,” said Laura Hermer, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. “There is no question that the FDA has proper authority to regulate the drugs used in medication abortions. The question is whether a state can make a viable, winning argument that, for public health purposes, it needs to further regulate access to the relevant medications.”
Hermer said she doesn’t think there is a valid public health reason because the published evidence is that the drugs are “exceptionally safe.” But if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade and a state gives embryos and fetuses full rights as people “then all bets would be off.”
The Planned Parenthood regional organization that includes South Dakota doesn’t believe it can legally mail abortion pills to patients there.
Telemedicine providers have to abide by the laws of the state where the patient is, said Dr. Sarah Traxler, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States in St. Paul. She acknowledged that some organizations disagree. “But,” she added, “we don’t feel like we have liberty to mail pills from Minnesota to other places in the country where it’s illegal to provide medication abortion.”
Sue Leibel, the state policy director for Susan B. Anthony List, a prominent organization opposed to abortion, acknowledged that medication abortions have “crept up” on Republican state lawmakers.
“This is a new frontier and states are grappling with enforcement mechanisms,” she said, adding, “The advice that I always give — if you shut the front door, the pills are going to come in the back door.”
Leibel maintained women should not be prosecuted for seeking abortions, keeping with a long-standing principle of many abortion opponents. She suggested the next target for state enforcement should be the pharmacies, organizations and clinics that provide the abortion pills. She also said abortion-rights opponents should focus on electing a presidential candidate who would work to reverse the FDA’s decision.
The FDA said a scientific review supported broadening access to the drugs and found complications were rare. The agency has reported 26 deaths associated with the drug since 2000, though not all of those can be directly attributed to the medication due to existing health conditions and other factors.
However, with new legal battles on the horizon and abortion seekers going to greater lengths to obtain the procedure, Donley, the law school professor, worried that state lawmakers will turn their attention toward the women who get the pills.
Indeed, a Louisiana House committee advanced a bill Wednesday that would make abortion a crime of homicide for which a woman ending her pregnancy could be charged, along with anyone helping her.
“Many anti-abortion legislators might realize the only way to enforce these laws is to prosecute the pregnant person themselves,” Donley said. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/news/next-battle-over-access-to-abortion-will-focus-on-pills/article_dedd4f6d-b1b8-584f-8be2-7a18f28f74f8.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:40Z |
After three finalists to be the next superintendent for Albany County School District 1 visited Laramie and met with community members last week, it's up to the district's board of trustees to announce a final decision on the position.
The board plans to hold a special meeting at noon today to further consider the candidates and may announce the district's new top administrator after an executive session, according to a press release announcing the meeting.
The candidates are David Barker, John Goldhardt and Charlotte Patterson.
Barker is the current superintendent for Fremont County School District 1 in Lander. He earned a doctorate degree from University of Wyoming.
Goldhardt worked as superintendent for the Manchester School District in New Hampshire. He also has been a principal and school leader in Utah.
Patterson worked as a director for school community services at the Tucson Unified School District in Arizona before retiring in 2020. She recently came out of retirement to work as a director of equity, diversity and inclusion for that district.
“Accountable”, “articulate,” “ethical,” “professional,” “transparent,” “accessible,” “student-focused” and “empathetic” were some of the adjectives that came up in the board’s discussion of their ideal applicant during a meeting in March.
The board determined a starting pay range of $170,000-$185,000 a year for the position. The compensation will include health, dental and vision insurance, with other benefits such as a laptop or vehicle negotiable.
This range is in line with what current superintendent Jubal Yennie is making and with other ranges in the state, where a salary of $200,000 a year would be on the high end. Yennie announced earlier this he he would resign at the end of the school year, which is June 30. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/news/school-board-to-talk-new-superintendent/article_b834e84e-6f4f-52af-bb40-ddd168162857.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:46Z |
In 1994, former President Bill Clinton passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, often considered the most far-reaching crime law in U.S. history.
The act ended Pell Grants – federal grants usually given to students with high financial need – for people in prison. Most in-prison college programs heavily depended on money from Pell Grants and other federal aid because people in prison are overwhelmingly poor. In the year before the 1994 crime law, about 23,000 federal and state prisoners used these grants, a paper from the American Enterprise Institute estimates.
Data from the U.S. Department of Justice shows a drop in college course participation among inmates following the 1994 crime law; in 1991, the participation rate was around 19% for federal prisoners and 14% for state prisoners. That fell to around 10% and 7% in 2004, respectively. The number of college-in-prison programs also fell, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. In the early 90s, there were about 772 programs. By 1997, only about eight programs remained.
But there’s some turnaround on this trend. The administration of former President Barrack Obama established the Second Chance Pell Experiment in 2015. The initiative partly put back in place prison inmates’ former eligibility for the grants. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education chose Wyoming Pathways from Prison – the University of Wyoming’s prison education initiative – to be one among about 200 institutions across almost all 50 states participating in the program.
“After 30 years, the consensus is that it was a mistake to withhold this money from inmates,” said Dan Fetsco, an attorney and UW faculty member in the Criminal Justice & Sociology Department.
Fetsco is part of the team that operates Wyoming Pathways from Prison, which offers free UW college courses to people in Wyoming prisons. The program started in 2016 and has been volunteer-driven, with one-off classes that typically count for one college credit.
Before joining UW, Fetsco worked as the deputy director and executive director of the Wyoming Board of Parole. Through that experience, he became familiar with educational offerings within prisons. Being part of Wyoming Pathways from Prison, he said, was a “natural fit.” He taught his first class through the program on correctional legal history and inmate rights this past year.
“It was a popular class,” he said. Before COVID, UW professors traveled around the state to all of Wyoming’s prisons, teaching inmates about topics ranging from financial literacy to Greek history.
UW Assistant Professor of Philosophy Rob Colter said he would stay at an Airbnb near a prison for a week and teach two- to threehour classes in the morning and afternoon for inmates everyday. The first course he taught was about Stoic philosophy.
“What I aim for is some kind of transformation in the way we think about ourselves and our lives,” he said.
That transformation isn’t just theoretical.
“Data shows a strong correlation between education and reduced recidivism,” Fetsco said.
A 2018 study by the RAND Corporation, a public policy research organization, found that inmates who took part in a correctional education program had about a 43% decrease in their odds of returning to prison compared to their counterparts who didn’t. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Correctional Education came to a similar conclusion.
But the courses that Wyoming Pathways from Prison was offering were intermittent and didn’t result in an actual degree – there simply wasn’t enough funding and volunteers to offer inmates a degree-bearing program.
Participation in the Second Chance initiative, however, will change that. The extra funding will help Wyoming Pathways offer a four-year UW college degree in general studies for inmates, making it the first four-year degree offered in Wyoming prisons since the 1994 crime law.
“It’s going to allow us to take a huge jump,” Colter said. “This development is really big for the university’s ability to serve some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people in the state.”
The team at Wyoming Pathways from Prison plans to work on creating the admissions process for the degree program this summer and aims to have the first cohort of students start in the fall. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/news/uw-to-offer-inmate-degrees/article_a4a5c7c8-10bd-5a70-984f-37f60f3f8a71.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:52Z |
Liz Cheney’s fight to keep her U.S. House seat is supposed to be a slugfest.
How could it not be? There’s so much inherent drama: Cheney, the fallen GOP princess, locked in a duel against her party’s once (and perhaps still) king, Donald Trump. His handpicked surrogate is a former friend and ally, Harriet Hageman, who claims Cheney betrayed their leader.
If Wyoming votes out Cheney, can she still someday make it to the White House? Folks, it’s Survivor: Politicos of the Plains!
Except this showdown for the heart and soul of the Republican Party has been more like a snoozefest. Picture two soccer moms on opposite sides of the field. One is yelling for her kid to kick the ball all the way to Washington, and the other woman is handing out snacks and ignoring the game. An orange-toned man is managing one of the teams, and he’s decided to steal the ball and kick it himself.
Who wants to watch that?
But things will heat up. Soon the headlines will no longer be about heaps of cash they’ve raked in (Cheney has raised $10 million to Hageman’s $2 million), as they start spending it.
Cheney has $6.8 million in the bank and much more to come. She could blanket the state in flyers, inundate broadcast and social media with ads, hold non-stop rallies, fly everywhere, hire boatloads of campaign workers and not spend it all by the Aug. 16 primary election.
This is more than a race against Hageman. This is a referendum on the 45th president.
Trump hates all 10 House Republicans who voted for his second impeachment, but Cheney is his top target.
Back in September, after interviewing several Wyoming hopefuls who came to kiss his (ahem) ring, Trump tweeted his endorsement of Hageman and attacked Cheney as a “warmonger and disloyal Republican.”
If those fighting words weren’t enough, the former president also called her “the Democrats’ number one provider of sound bites.”
“Here’s a sound bite for you: Bring it,” Cheney responded.
Not much has been brought so far. Hageman has taken a few jabs in Cheney’s direction. Her best was a fake website and YouTube campaign spot sponsored by “Virginians for Cheney.”
“Liz grew up right here in Northern Virginia and bases her family here,” the spoof site claims. “Liz is running because she understands the priorities of Northern Virginians, like funneling money to the military industrial complex, listening to big dollar D.C. lobbyists, and fighting for special interest groups.”
It’s clever, but hardly a stinging blow, especially since it didn’t stir even a ripple of response from her opponent.
Cheney’s campaign website is as bland as it gets. There’s no mention of Hageman, Trump or her job as vice chair of the House’s select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cheney says the panel has already gathered enough evidence to refer the former president for federal criminal charges.
Wyoming Republican Party leaders branded Cheney a traitor and claimed she no longer represents them. While Hageman has far less money to spend, her in-state donations more than triple Cheney’s total.
Want to see photos of Cheney and Hageman smiling together in past campaigns? The Facebook campaign website of state Sen. Anthony Bouchard of Cheyenne, another Cheney challenger, is the place to go. Calling Hageman “Cheney 2.0,” Bouchard’s only hope is to take conservative votes away from the Cheyenne attorney.
A year ago, long before Hageman’s candidacy, Bouchard raised more than $330,000. His first-quarter take in 2022 trickled to about $11,000.
The idea of a competition to be more conservative than Cheney was laughable before her impeachment vote. Cheney aligned with Trump’s position about 95% of the time.
Cheney calling out Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him is a heavy lift in Wyoming. Few states are as red, and to the extreme right, a candidate’s loyalty to Trump holds more weight than their conservatism.
On a CBS News “Red & Blue” segment last week, anchor Major Garrett perfectly conveyed the attitude of the beltway media. They’ve already picked the winner.
“Here in Washington, the general assumption is that Liz Cheney is cooked, that she has no chance,” Garrett said. But he speculated that losing “in a sort of fit of Trumpian rage” might be part of her long-term strategy “to eventually rise again in a post-Trump Republican Party.”
Really?
Jim King, University of Wyoming political science professor, told the newsman that “the leadership of the [state] party that censured her is not the electorate. There are tens of thousands of voters who have yet to be heard from.”
I think the Jan. 6 panel’s public hearings next month will be critical to Cheney’s political fate. She will have a daily audience of millions of Americans, but it’s also a prime opportunity to show Wyoming voters why she’s so determined to hold Trump accountable for inciting the Capitol insurrection.
Even if they’ve been lulled into slumber, I guarantee people will wake up and tune in to the show we’ve all been waiting for. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/opinion/contributed_columns/drake-highest-profile-election-in-wyo-history-a-snooze-so-far/article_c86f0074-787f-5ca8-8633-f598511a5939.html | 2022-05-06T12:34:59Z |
As a journalist, covering the pandemic has been possibly the biggest story of my life. That is the main thing I will remember about this crazy period.
I reached out to some other interesting folks and asked them what they will remember:
World traveler and bestselling author Mark Jenkins of Laramie says: “The world is suffering horribly, so much so that I feel guilty living in Wyoming. Due to our wide-open spaces and small population, we can still get outside without seeing a soul. I have cross-country skied or rock climbed or mountain biked or hiked every single day since the beginning of the pandemic.”
Down in Wheatland, Chuck Brown says: “Kate has cleaned every drawer, every closet, every other conceivable surface in the house, and my greatest fear is that she is going to start on me very soon! She also has been seen out scouting around the yard, just waiting for one or two weeds to surface so they can be demolished, as well!”
Helen LaRose of Lander: “We’ve gone back to basics. Both of us are over 60 years old, and one of us is immunocompromised. We drove back home from a winter retreat in Texas under the radar and quietly self-quarantined for two weeks.
“No bread on the shelves? I restarted my sourdough. It’s never been so bubbly and well attended. Occasional drives out to our Wyoming beauty have taken our breath away. What do I miss? Being able to help. I fall into the elderly ‘be careful’ group. I can’t volunteer to this community, and it hurts my soul.”
Former Green River resident Jack Pugh: “The Spanish Flu killed about 18 million people worldwide. We’re all too young to have lived through that. But we’ve got this one, this pandemic. We need to see the present through the lens of the past. This current pandemic will have to do us, I suppose, and the docs say it’s far from over.”
Tom Cox: “The best part of this pandemic is speculating on how it’s going to change our culture. With the technology available today, I can see some big advances in the pharmaceutical industry. Maybe even a better understanding of cancer or neurological maladies. It’s been a rough few weeks, with some more to come before we develop immunity for everyone. The biggest disappointment, I think, is the pervasiveness of politics in dealing with this crisis.”
Bill Schilling of Casper, who is hunkering down near Princeville on Kauai, says: “Two standouts: first, how quickly Rotary at the club, district and international levels have adapted to Zoom meetings without missing a beat in terms of congeniality; and second, how mindful citizens have become regarding social distancing. And how the vast majority are behaving with acceptance of the new normal.”
Bill and Sue Lee of Lander: “In the last month, drove twice to Bellingham, Washington, for the birth of our second grandson. Driving straight through. Clorox wipes, gloves and face mask. Stopping only to get gas. Taking food in cooler. Potty breaks in the woods. Now on to self-quarantine for two weeks now that we are home.”
Jerry Kendall of Hudson says: “We’re gonna make it through this. When we do, I hope that we will use what we have learned from it and not go back to the way it was before, but instead move forward in a decent, honorable way.”
In my own case, as of this writing, we have been hunkering down at our home in Lander. We have been self-quarantined here since March 15, over six weeks.
We have gotten along surprisingly well, and on the health front, neither of us has had the flu, a cold or even the sniffles. This quarantine business has its positive effects. If you are not exposed to anyone, especially the grandkids, you are less likely to pick up some of those nasty spring diseases.
So far, Zoom and Go-to-Meeting virtual meetings – have been over 30 so far. Rarely did I ever do one of these before. Now, some days can see as many as four such meetings.
We are proud of those ordinary folks delivering food, stocking shelves, doing police and firefighter work, cooking in restaurants (for takeout), and a whole slew of folks we always took for granted. They are my new heroes, and I will never look through them or take them for granted again. Ever.
The medical folks and EMT folks deserve special consideration. All across the country, American citizens have a new appreciation for the dangerous work they are doing. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/opinion/guest_column/sniffin-so-what-will-you-remember-about-the-pandemic-of-2020/article_b27bbe08-95a3-58f8-87d2-8f32d77a4d2d.html | 2022-05-06T12:35:05Z |
Liz Cheney’s fight to keep her U.S. House seat is supposed to be a slugfest.
How could it not be? There’s so much inherent drama: Cheney, the fallen GOP princess, locked in a duel against her party’s once (and perhaps still) king, Donald Trump. His handpicked surrogate is a former friend and ally, Harriet Hageman, who claims Cheney betrayed their leader.
If Wyoming votes out Cheney, can she still someday make it to the White House? Folks, it’s Survivor: Politicos of the Plains!
Except this showdown for the heart and soul of the Republican Party has been more like a snoozefest. Picture two soccer moms on opposite sides of the field. One is yelling for her kid to kick the ball all the way to Washington, and the other woman is handing out snacks and ignoring the game. An orange-toned man is managing one of the teams, and he’s decided to steal the ball and kick it himself.
Who wants to watch that?
But things will heat up. Soon the headlines will no longer be about heaps of cash they’ve raked in (Cheney has raised $10 million to Hageman’s $2 million), as they start spending it.
Cheney has $6.8 million in the bank and much more to come. She could blanket the state in flyers, inundate broadcast and social media with ads, hold non-stop rallies, fly everywhere, hire boatloads of campaign workers and not spend it all by the Aug. 16 primary election.
This is more than a race against Hageman. This is a referendum on the 45th president.
Trump hates all 10 House Republicans who voted for his second impeachment, but Cheney is his top target.
Back in September, after interviewing several Wyoming hopefuls who came to kiss his (ahem) ring, Trump tweeted his endorsement of Hageman and attacked Cheney as a “warmonger and disloyal Republican.”
If those fighting words weren’t enough, the former president also called her “the Democrats' number one provider of sound bites.”
“Here’s a sound bite for you: Bring it,” Cheney responded.
Not much has been brought so far. Hageman has taken a few jabs in Cheney’s direction. Her best was a fake website and YouTube campaign spot sponsored by "Virginians for Cheney."
“Liz grew up right here in Northern Virginia and bases her family here,” the spoof site claims. “Liz is running because she understands the priorities of Northern Virginians, like funneling money to the military industrial complex, listening to big dollar D.C. lobbyists, and fighting for special interest groups.”
It’s clever, but hardly a stinging blow, especially since it didn’t stir even a ripple of response from her opponent.
Cheney’s campaign website is as bland as it gets. There’s no mention of Hageman, Trump or her job as vice chair of the House’s select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cheney says the panel has already gathered enough evidence to refer the former president for federal criminal charges.
Wyoming Republican Party leaders branded Cheney a traitor and claimed she no longer represents them. While Hageman has far less money to spend, her in-state donations more than triple Cheney’s total.
Want to see photos of Cheney and Hageman smiling together in past campaigns? The Facebook campaign website of state Sen. Anthony Bouchard of Cheyenne, another Cheney challenger, is the place to go. Calling Hageman “Cheney 2.0,” Bouchard’s only hope is to take conservative votes away from the Cheyenne attorney.
A year ago, long before Hageman’s candidacy, Bouchard raised more than $330,000. His first-quarter take in 2022 trickled to about $11,000.
The idea of a competition to be more conservative than Cheney was laughable before her impeachment vote. Cheney aligned with Trump’s position about 95% of the time.
Cheney calling out Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him is a heavy lift in Wyoming. Few states are as red, and to the extreme right, a candidate’s loyalty to Trump holds more weight than their conservatism.
On a CBS News "Red & Blue" segment last week, anchor Major Garrett perfectly conveyed the attitude of the beltway media. They’ve already picked the winner.
“Here in Washington, the general assumption is that Liz Cheney is cooked, that she has no chance,” Garrett said. But he speculated that losing “in a sort of fit of Trumpian rage” might be part of her long-term strategy “to eventually rise again in a post-Trump Republican Party.”
Really?
Jim King, University of Wyoming political science professor, told the newsman that “the leadership of the [state] party that censured her is not the electorate. There are tens of thousands of voters who have yet to be heard from.”
I think the Jan. 6 panel’s public hearings next month will be critical to Cheney’s political fate. She will have a daily audience of millions of Americans, but it’s also a prime opportunity to show Wyoming voters why she’s so determined to hold Trump accountable for inciting the Capitol insurrection.
Even if they’ve been lulled into slumber, I guarantee people will wake up and tune in to the show we’ve all been waiting for. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/opinion/guest_column/drake-highest-profile-election-in-wyo-history-a-snooze-so-far/article_ee4069a2-e559-514e-92f5-27d98b930588.html | 2022-05-06T12:35:11Z |
In a recent speech at Stanford, former President Barack Obama advocated for a radical reimagining of the First Amendment in response to recent advances in technology. It was an interesting mix of sharp insight and partisan misinformation. But there is one statement that cuts to the heart of his argument and merits careful thought.
Obama said, “it’s not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won.”
Three points jump out of this passage. First, it ignores that our democratic institutions, themselves, have destroyed their own credibility through egregious misconduct. Second, it assumes that citizens can be rendered totally unable to know the truth. Third, it implies that unquestioning trust in political leaders, mainstream media and political institutions will bring infallible truth.
While there are countless examples of institutional misconduct that have weakened democratic institutions, let’s name only one. The Department of Justice allowed the Russian collusion theory to fester for years while possessing reams of evidence that it was a hoax cooked up by the failing Clinton campaign. The DOJ is not discredited by “raw sewage,” but by its own criminal misconduct.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Until the American public sees that the miscreants behind this massive fraud are held to account, that public would be foolhardy to trust the DOJ as an objective and truth-seeking institution. The same can be said of every news outlet that eagerly allowed itself to be the stooge of fraudulent sources.
That brings us to the second claim. Obama is right to observe that many citizens no longer know whom to believe. Outrageous falsehoods peddled by legacy media and three-letter agencies have disorientated millions who once afforded them great trust. But, he is wrong to say that they cannot know what to believe.
The world has always been filled with truth and lies in equal measure. But blessed by rational thought that sorts one from the other, Western civilization has not succumbed to nihilistic claims that truth is impossible to know. That is the entire point of classical education. From Plato, Socrates and Aristotle to Bacon, Newton and Einstein, philosophy, science and religion equip all men, women and children to ferret out the truth for themselves.
On Easter morning two millennia ago, there was not only one narrative, but two. The women who arrived at Jesus’ tomb reported that Jesus had risen from the dead. But, the soldiers guarding the tomb spread a different narrative. The chief priests and elders convinced them to “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep” (Matt. 28:13 ESV). One of these stories was true. The other was a lie.
From then until now, each person must weigh the evidence and decide for himself. On one side, we have the eyewitness testimony of Peter, all 12 apostles, 500 well-known individuals, James and St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:5-8). These people were public figures, available for decades of cross-examination and careful observation. By contrast, nobody even remembers the names of the soldiers who told their competing story. And, unlike their counterparts, they were never pressured to change their story by torture and death.
Will Alejandro Majorkas’ “Disinformation Governance Board,” weigh in on this debate? Will Nina Jankowicz, who obscenely mocks Christmas, tell us whether to believe the soldiers or the apostles? Without a doubt, there are some reading this column who want just that. Certainly, totalitarian regimes from the ancient Romans to the Chinese Communists have done it for millennia.
Every civilization throughout history has seen its most powerful institutions – not the least – wage war on the truth. From the chief priests and elders, to the Bolsheviks and Maoists, regimes propped up by lies demand to be regarded as the sole source of truth. By contrast, small minorities armed with the truth always prevail, sooner or later. Sooner is better.
Obama’s call for “trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions,” is the siren song of those who control these institutions. In reality, no human being or human institution is worthy of unquestioning trust. Any leader who claims to be the final arbiter of truth discredits himself. Any news source that claims infallibility has proved itself fallible. Any institution that demands to be trusted without transparency has disqualified itself from any trust whatsoever.
Technology has not rendered the First Amendment more dangerous, but more necessary than ever. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/opinion/guest_column/lange-truth-lies-and-the-ability-to-discern-which-is-which/article_d51caea5-10cf-5cbe-a8e3-3024434878f2.html | 2022-05-06T12:35:17Z |
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LEXINGTON, Ky. – Bill Simon has been to the Kentucky Derby before, and vowed not to return.
The former president and CEO of retail giant Walmart, Simon appreciated the pageantry and spectacle of his past Derby trip, but acknowledged it was a bucket list item he could check off and move on from.
“I’m not coming again unless I’m in the Derby,” Simon said.
Well, the giddiness in Simon’s voice during a video call with reporters last week hinted at his change of heart.
Simon will stride into Churchill Downs on Saturday as the owner of Barber Road, a long shot in post position No. 14 for the Kentucky Derby.
Barber Road hasn’t won since a starter allowance race last November – also at Churchill Downs – and ran third in the Rebel Stakes and second in the Arkansas Derby, both at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Simon, jockey Reylu Gutierrez and trainer John Ortiz will all be making their Derby debuts with the horse.
Simon thought about playing it cool as the owner of a Kentucky Derby horse, potentially not showing up to Churchill Downs until mid-afternoon on Saturday.
Then he thought again.
“No, that’s not going to happen. I’m like a caged tiger right now,” Simon said. “By the time (9 a.m.) on Saturday rolls around, I’m sure we’ll be headed to the track.”
‘A very chill horse’
Ortiz thought the end was near.
He went out on his own as a trainer in November 2016, and can easily recall the early struggles.
Ortiz remembers being given 12 stalls to fill at Oaklawn Park, only to bring just seven horses to the track.
“I was looking around like, ‘Man, this isn’t going to work,’” Ortiz, 36, told reporters during a video call last week.
But as Ortiz began to ponder a return to being an assistant trainer, bloodstock agent Jared Hughes got him in touch with Simon, who was looking for a trainer.
Ortiz – born in Colombia to his father, Carlos, who was a jockey there before moving his family to the U.S. to race – has Derby Day experience at Churchill Downs as part of the undercard, but never in the main race.
“I’m just sitting there back at the barn looking at this horse and he has no clue what’s about to happen,” Ortiz said of Barber Road. “He’s happy. He is sound. He is animated. He is himself, and proud of himself. . . . He’s a great horse, feeling great and feeling confident.”
Ortiz was 20 years old when he galloped for legendary trainer Bill Mott at the Breeders’ Cup, and Ortiz said he’s been told to stop, relax, look around and enjoy all the moments that come with having a horse in the Derby.
“I’ve got to do my job every morning, that hasn’t changed. The horse is training the same way, that hasn’t changed. . . . Everything’s the same. The only thing that’s different is it’s a name, a Kentucky Derby race,” Ortiz explained. “I’m confident in my horse. I’m confident in myself, more so now that I’ve had Barber Road take the edge off me. He’s my leader right now. He’s my emotional support horse.”
As for Barber Road himself, Ortiz draws parallels between Oaklawn Park – where Barber Road has run half of his eight career races – and Churchill Downs.
Both venues feature a small paddock that sits below the crowd, with an echoey, loud noise that reverberates.
“Nothing bothers him, this is part of his character. He doesn’t get wound up,” Ortiz said. “I think the crowd for him is going to be a piece of cake. He’s a very chill horse.”
‘An active engagement for our family’
Let’s backtrack for a second, and explain why the former boss of Walmart owns Barber Road.
Simon served as president and CEO of Walmart U.S. from 2010 to 2014, and began his involvement in horse racing by buying into a horse with friends in 2017.
As his wife, Tammy, fell in love with horses, Simon fell in love with the math and numbers behind the sport.
Simon’s youngest son recently graduated from Baylor University – where Simon is a part-time lecturer and a member of the Baylor University Board of Regents – and works in the horse racing industry himself.
“We didn’t want to be investors in this. If you’re going to be an investor in horse racing, you probably ought to not because there’s better places to invest your money,” Simon said. “We wanted it to be an active business, an active engagement for our family.”
This hope for a familial atmosphere is also what convinced Simon to retain Ortiz as a trainer.
“He’s open and he’s willing to teach,” Simon said of Ortiz. “We didn’t know much, still don’t know much, about the game, and having somebody like Johnny sort of show us, welcome us and be our guide through the whole thing was really critical.”
The idea of family even extends to the naming, and now the celebration, of Barber Road.
The horse is named for a street in Lenoir County, North Carolina, a rural area in the eastern part of the state where Tammy grew up.
On Saturday for the Derby, the small farming community of Seven Springs will host a watch party at the farm Tammy grew up on.
Simon – who had never owned a horse that earned a Kentucky Derby qualifying point before Barber Road – anticipates up to 100 people will gather under a tent on the farm to watch Barber Road run, from Barber Road itself.
“His success has been something, but it’s really sort of created a rally in this community,” Simon said. “This small, little rural community is made up of a lot of her family and friends and people from their church. It’s been so cool to see everybody get excited about it.”
The other key member of the Barber Road team is Gutierrez, a 25-year-old jockey born in Rochester, New York, who graduated from SUNY Cortland with a degree in exercise science in 2017.
This is his first Kentucky Derby as well, and Gutierrez has ridden Barber Road in his last two races, both Kentucky Derby prep events at Oaklawn Park.
Why keep Gutierrez on the mount for Saturday?
“You dance with who you brought to the dance,” Ortiz said.
Despite odds, will dreams come true?
Ortiz hopes this week’s opportunity can also be used as a showcase moment for a new, younger generation of trainers.
“Hopefully I’m inspiring or motivating other trainers to be thoughtful of their careers,” the 36-year-old Ortiz said. “I want them to succeed, because if I’m succeeding, then somebody’s going to call me (and ask), ‘Who’s the next young trainer?’”
“The industry is at a time, in my view, that it needs young people to be successful. It needs a new group of people to come and change,” Simon added. “There needs to be some hope and some future and some light and some excitement. . . . I think they’ve set the table for the next generation.”
So what chance does Barber Road have to make the wildest dreams of Gutierrez, Ortiz and Simon come true?
If you ask the oddsmakers, not a great one.
Following Monday afternoon’s post-position draw – Barber Road drew post position No. 14 – the morning-line odds installed Barber Road as a 30-1 shot, tied with several other horses at the longest odds to win the race.
But that doesn’t mean the emotion at 6:57 p.m. Saturday will be dampened for those in his camp.
“I’ve spoken in stadiums in front of 20,000 people and been to the White House and met presidents and tons of stuff like that, and I never got nervous, not once. They walk this horse out to the track and I start getting nervous,” Simon said. “I think that’s the thrill of horse racing . . . the opportunity to watch (horses). I think it stirs something down deep in people.”
“The expectations of what’s getting ready to happen hasn’t really hit me yet,” Ortiz said. “I’m just going along with the ride. He’s the road. We’ve just got to follow this path until it gets us where we want to be.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/townnews/sport/barber-road-connects-a-small-town-corporation-and-dreams/article_4fe225f4-7969-5de7-81fb-bb17f41e28ed.html | 2022-05-06T12:35:29Z |
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CHEYENNE – Bailey Applegarth couldn’t have been more excited for last baseball season.
He had had a solid sophomore campaign as part of a young Cheyenne American Legion Post 6 pitching staff bursting with potential. However, Applegarth’s junior season ended almost as soon as it started.
Left knee pain nagged at the right-hander throughout Cheyenne’s spring training. Eventually, his right elbow started aching, as well. He pitched just six innings before the pain became unbearable and forced him to shut it down.
“I never really found out what was wrong,” Applegarth said. “My knee started hurting, and I think I hurt my elbow because I changed how I was pitching because my knee hurt.
“I started using less lower half and a lot more upper, and that put a lot more strain on my elbow.”
Applegarth’s knee pain eventually subsided, but the elbow remained troublesome into the fall, and eventually was put in a cast for three weeks.
“Everything feels pretty good right now,” Applegarth said. “The situation stunk, but I learned a lot from it. I learned to take better care of my body with icing, heating, running and getting in better all-around shape. I’m still trying to do that.”
The 6-foot-4, 235-pounder went 4-2 with 42 strikeouts, 25 walks and a 5.35 earned-run average in 33-2/3 innings as a sophomore. Opponents hit just .224 off of him, which was second-best on the Post 6 roster among pitchers with at least seven innings under their belts.
Thus far this season, Applegarth has posted a 2-0 record in 6-2/3 innings of relief. The 6-foot-4, 235-pounder has a 3.15 ERA with seven strikeouts against four walks. He has given up just four hits.
Applegarth has been strong overall, but up and down as he gets used to pitching again.
He fanned five University of Wyoming club team hitters and allowed just one hit across three innings in his second appearance of the season.
Applegarth’s most recent appearance came during a 14-6 victory over Rapid City (South Dakota) Post 22 on Saturday. He walked the first two batters he faced, but settled down after catcher Kaden Anderson, shortstop Colter McAnelly and third baseman Mason Tafoya worked to pick off a runner trying to steal third.
Applegarth induced a flyout to right and then got out of the inning with a four-pitch strikeout.
“He just needs more reps,” Post 6 manager Ty Lain said. “The more we play, the better he’s going to get. He’s throwing hard, and his slider has been good. (On Saturday), his arm was late and he was missing high, so there was a sequencing issue with his windup.
“We have to get his arm swing on time with his body and get him back on top of the baseball. If he can get back on top of the baseball and throw downhill, he’ll be fine.”
Applegarth isn’t worried about his appearances being a mixed bag early this season. He considers his control issues against Rapid City a blip on the radar, and what he did against UW as the norm.
“I just need to get the jitters I’ve been feeling being back there out of the way,” he said.
Even though he wasn’t able to suit up for the Sixers, Applegarth didn’t truly miss the season. He was a fixture in the dugout regardless of whether Cheyenne was playing at Powers Field or at tournaments in Nebraska, Kansas or southern Colorado.
“He showed he’s a team-first guy by continuing to come around last year,” Lain said. “He showed great character last year.
“He did everything you could have a guy do that wasn’t playing in the game. It was mutually beneficial for us and him.”
Applegarth said it was important for him to be around his teammates, even though he couldn’t step on the field. He also picked up some things he expects to help him this summer.
“I wanted the guys to know I was there for them and supporting them,” he said. “I’ve watched a lot of games, but you pick up a lot more things when you can’t do anything but watch.
“There were things I noticed guys doing things I also do, and heard them being told they needed to work on those things. I was able to start working on those things eventually. Last season was tough, I learned a lot.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wyosports/high_school/cheyenne_central/sixers-bailey-applegarth-coming-back-from-season-ending-injury/article_f2fcaf97-74c7-5190-91e8-359b87cbc4a8.html | 2022-05-06T12:35:42Z |
CHEYENNE – With its back against the wall, Thunder Basin found success at the plate when it needed it most.
Trailing 3-1 with one out, the Bolts plated five runs in the top of the seventh, including five hits and a three-run home run to center field from Lauren O’Loughlin. It allowed them to mount a comeback for a 6-3 victory over Cheyenne Central in a nonconference matchup Thursday evening.
Thunder Basin had six hits through the first six innings as pitchers from both sides kept the bats honest.
“(Jaci Piercy) is a really good pitcher. She has some velocity and after a couple times we went through the lineup, we could get our timing down,” Central coach Carrie Barker said. “Losing’s not fun, but at the same time, it’s one of those things where we’re trying to get some (personnel) things figured out, especially with state coming up.”
The third-ranked Bolts scored their only run prior to the final frame in the first when Macie Selfors hit a double to shallow left field and eventually scored on a single from Caitline Kaul. With runners on first and second, Central got out of the inning with a 5-3-2 double play.
Neither team found much traction over the second and third inning and combined for five total base runners. One of those base runners was Central freshman Izzy Kelly in the bottom of the third when she reached third base. However, the Indians failed to push her across. It was the second time of the game Kelly was stranded on third.
The second-ranked Indians took advantage of their opportunities in the fourth when Kaitlyn Ackerman reached second on an error and was driven home on a double from Lauren Lucas. Lucas reached third on a fielder’s choice and scored on a wild pitch two batters and eight pitches later.
Piercy’s change-up was giving the Indians issues throughout the day, but Central started to get a feel for the pitch as the game progressed.
“That first inning and second inning we weren’t able to hit that pitcher,” Central second baseman Cameron Moyte said. “But, we just kind of came back and started hitting the ball. She had a really good change-up and we came and hit probably four or five of them when it could have been the third strike.”
“To see us figure out how to hit a certain pitch throughout the game is pretty big.”
Central pushed one more run across in the bottom of the fifth when Brogan Allen hit a hard ground ball into center field to score Drue Mirich, but it wasn’t enough insurance to fend off the Bolts’ rally.
Katie Hinz pitched four innings and allowed one earned run on four hits and Allen pitched 2-1/3 allowing no runs on two hits for Central.
Compared to last season, Central is comfortably sitting in position to secure a spot in the Wyoming state tournament. Last season, the Indians had to beat Laramie in what essentially was play-in game to advance to state. This year, they are currently sitting in second place in the East Conference. It’s a refreshing feeling, Barker said.
“We have a lot less pressure on us to make it to state right now (compared to last year),” Barker said. “And I think being able to play a game like this (more loose) instead of stressing out about it is huge.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wyosports/high_school/cheyenne_central/thunder-basin-rallies-late-to-top-central/article_88fda672-c825-5fa7-b8b5-c6fe5517b0f2.html | 2022-05-06T12:35:48Z |
PREP SOFTBALL: South falls to Thunder Basin May 6, 2022 1 hr ago Comments Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Save Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Save CHEYENNE — Thunder Basin scored 12 second-inning runs in a 28-1 win over Cheyenne South on Thursday.The Bolts combined for 25 hits in the five-inning contest.Allie Robért was 2 for 3 with one run and a double and Aubrianna Garcia and Shayla Peterson both went 1 for 2 for the Bison. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Save Tags Inning Thunder Basin Sport Contest Allie Robert Aubrianna Garcia South Cheyenne South Recommended for you Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. comments powered by Disqus Latest Special Section 2021 Wyoming Football Preview To view our latest e-Edition click the image on the left. Trending Now Fans, Texas connections sold Bama DL Keelan Cox on Wyoming Tagg Lain retires from coaching, teaching at Central Jeff Bailey steps down as South boys coach Central blows past East on windy afternoon South's Robért, Downham, Garcia and Lesh sign with colleges Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request. 2022 Wyoming Legislature Updates Sign up to receive daily headlines on the 2022 Wyoming Legislature session. News Updates Would you like to receive our daily news? Sign up today! News Updates - Laramie Boomerang Want to keep updated on news headlines? Sign up today! News Updates - Rawlins Times Would you like to receive our daily news? Sign up today! News Updates - Wyoming Business Report Would you like to receive our daily news? Sign up today! You must select at least one email list. Please enter a valid email address. Sign up Manage your lists | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wyosports/high_school/cheyenne_south/prep-softball-south-falls-to-thunder-basin/article_8e1e53f9-eada-532b-afc1-75781fe1626d.html | 2022-05-06T12:35:54Z |
LARAMIE — After a back-and-forth battle early on, Campbell County showed why it is ranked No. 1 in the state down the stretch Thursday afternoon in a 10-3 win over Laramie High.
The Lady Plainsmen, ranked fourth in this week's WyoPreps.com Coaches and Media softball poll, only trailed 3-2 after four innings, but a series of miscues led to them being outscored 7-1 the rest of the way. Laramie committed three errors for the game, all of which occurred in the final three innings, while stranding nine runners on base.
Despite these struggles, the Lady Plainsmen entered the final inning trailing by only two. However, the Lady Camels plated four runs before the first out of the top of the seventh, and added another on a wild pitch before the end of the frame.
Campbell County improved to 17-6 overall and 9-1 in East Conference play with the win, while LHS fell to 12-8 with a 6-4 mark against conference competition. The first game of the doubleheader counted as a league contest. The second nonconference game was not completed before press time for the Boomerang.
“A few mistakes compounded and snowballed,” Laramie coach Luke Andrews said. “We had a couple things in the field and left a few runners on base. Unfortunately, we've been doing too much of that this year. It was a 5-3 ball game, and things snowballed a little bit.”
Senior starting pitcher Janey Adair, who went the distance with 10 strikeouts, six earned runs and 11 hits allowed in seven innings, gave the Lady Plainsmen an early advantage by knocking an opposite-field leadoff home run in the bottom of the first. That would be their only lead of the game, though, as Campbell County sophomore Natalie Clonch evened the score at 1-1 on a solo shot to lead off the top of the second.
Both teams went scoreless in the third, before the Lady Camels’ bats started to come alive in the fourth. Freshman Lanae Kimbley opened the inning with an infield single, followed by a line-drive double down the left field line from sophomore Avery Gray. Clonch, who went 2-for-2 with three RBIs, two runs scored and two intentional walks, proceeded to bring both runners home with a double to the left field gap.
“Janey is a really good pitcher, so I just tried to attack any pitch that was near me,” Clonch said. “I had to get my hands to the ball fast, because she's a fast pitcher. It was just an on-day.”
Outside of Adair, who had two singles and a stolen base to go along with her solo shot in the first inning, sophomore Marisol Gomez was the only other LHS player to record a multi-hit day. She also had a team-high two RBIs.
Her first hit of the game came in the bottom of the fourth, as she dropped a two-out single just past the second baseman to score junior Kailyn Ruckman and cut the deficit to one run. The other occurred in the bottom of the sixth, as she brought junior Paysen Witte around to score on a stand-up triple to the centerfield fence.
“I had been struggling before, so I just tried to adjust what I was struggling with and sit back and drive the ball,” Gomez said. “Especially on that change-up, I really worked on sitting back and focusing on hitting the ball.”
Unfortunately for the Lady Plainsmen, they weren’t able to produce any runs elsewhere, while Campbell County began to find a groove at the plate in the middle and late innings.
Gray, Clonch and Kimbley each scored two runs and provided at least two hits for the Lady Camels, with Gray — who struck out 15 batters with three runs and eight hits allowed in seven innings — connecting on a team-high three hits. Sophomore Adelaide Rambo added two hits, two RBIs and one run scored for Campbell County.
“It was very tight,” Campbell County coach Haley Gray said. “We know she is an amazing pitcher and it's a really good team, so we struggled the first two innings trying to hit the ball. Once they got on it, I was proud of them for making that adjustment.”
With the Lady Plainsmen averaging just over two strikeouts per inning at the plate in the loss, Andrews pointed to the obvious when it comes to areas of improvement for his team. They'll return to action today at 3 p.m. with a home doubleheader against third-ranked Thunder Basin.
“We have to avoid strikeouts,” Andrews said. “That's something we've been harping on this year, but we have plenty of time left. Now, we're just trying to focus on coming out and playing two games, and putting tough losses behind us.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wyosports/high_school/laramie_high/campbell-county-pulls-away-from-laramie-in-late-innings/article_f843190b-64a6-5fb9-80df-d6e781c70e57.html | 2022-05-06T12:36:00Z |
9-year-old found dead near his home’s shed
NEW KENSINGTON, Pa. (WPXI) - A community is devastated after a 9-year-old boy was found dead Wednesday.
No one has yet been charged in the death of Azuree Charles, but the county’s district attorney confirms there is a person of interest, although she won’t specify who or what their relationship is to the child.
In the meantime, on Thursday afternoon, police picked up Azuree’s father. They had a warrant out for Jean Charles for a simple assault and child endangerment case from November.
He is accused of punching his son in the eye, causing bruising. He was denied bail.
“We are unified in solving this homicide, and I really cannot stress that enough,” said Nicole Ziccarelli, the Westmoreland County district attorney.
As the investigation presses on, officers spent the day canvassing the neighborhood.
On Thursday night, hundreds in the East Ken Manor community came to remember Azuree.
“He was honestly a super nice person, and I can’t believe someone would do that to him,” said his friend, Azalynn Lookhart.
Just days prior to Azuree’s death, “we used to ride bikes together and we used to play together,” said his friend, Zariyah Carter.
The news also hit Azuree’s third-grade teacher especially hard.
“He was the most innocent, sweet, kind and caring child that I have ever met,” Brian Heidenreich said.
People said under no circumstance should they have to hold a vigil for a child in the first place.
“You never have to hurt a child, I don’t care who you are. There are safe places for these kids. Look at this, this is our future. We have to love them, no matter what!” neighbor Tasha Williams said.
Copyright 2022 WPXI via CNN Newsource. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/9-year-old-found-dead-near-his-homes-shed/ | 2022-05-06T13:09:50Z |
Biden to plug manufacturing initiative at Ohio metal company
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is set to announce on Friday that five major U.S. manufacturers have made commitments to boost their reliance on small and medium American firms for 3D printing.
The White House said GE Aviation, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Siemens Energy have agreed to take part in the program, which Biden will highlight during a visit to United Performance Metals in Hamilton, Ohio.
The program is being unveiled by the White House as Biden heads to the industrial Midwest to press Congress to approve a stalled competition and innovation bill that the Democratic president says is critical to bolstering domestic manufacturing and helping solve a semiconductor shortage that has delayed production of life-saving medical devices, smartphones, video game consoles, laptops and other modern conveniences.
“I’m determined to make sure the United States holds the technological high ground in competition with other nations, especially China, as we move forward,” Biden said this week. His comments on the Bipartisan Innovation Act came during a visit Tuesday to an Alabama Lockheed Martin plant building Javelin antitank weapon systems.
GE Aviation and Raytheon set a goal of looking to small and medium firms for 50% of their requests for quotes for products requiring 3D printing or related technologies.
Siemens Energy committed to targeting 20% to 40% of externally sourced 3D print parts and will work with 10 to 20 small and medium firms to help improve their capability. Lockheed Martin has agreed to work with smaller suppliers on research to improve the use of 3D printing as an alternative to castings and forgings. Honeywell is offering technical assistance including part design, data generation, machine operation and post-processing to small and medium suppliers it works with.
The semiconductor chip problem has been building since coronavirus pandemic-related lockdowns shut down major Asian chip factories more than two years ago. Now it could extend past this year, despite the semiconductor industry’s efforts to catch up with demand.
There is bipartisan support for boosting domestic chip production, but lawmakers in the Senate and the House still need to negotiate over differences.
The House in February passed a version of the legislation that could pump $52 billion in grants and subsidies to the semiconductor industry to help boost U.S. production. The bill must now be reconciled with a Senate version passed eight months ago.
House Democrats also tucked in other priorities that have raised Republican concerns about the bill’s cost and scope.
The bill includes $8 billion for a fund that helps developing countries adjust to climate change; $3 billion for facilities to make the U.S. less reliant on Chinese solar components; $4 billion to help communities with significantly higher unemployment than the national average; and $10.5 billion for states to stockpile drugs and medical equipment.
___
Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/biden-plug-manufacturing-initiative-ohio-metal-company/ | 2022-05-06T13:09:56Z |
Hawaiian couple allegedly chained child to porch, beat him with 2-by-4
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow/Gray News) - Prosecutors have revealed more specific allegations against a Hawaiian couple accused of beating a restrained child.
Hawaii County prosecutors said Alexander Aquino allegedly struck his 14-year-old stepson with a two-by-four while the boy was chained by his neck to their porch.
Aquino and his wife, Amy, also allegedly failed to render necessary medical aid when the boy broke his back while trying to escape in 2020.
Officials said the child was locked outside of the couple’s home on multiple occasions.
The teen is now in state custody.
Alexander Aquino’s bench trial just finished, and the judge’s verdict is scheduled for May 18.
Meanwhile, Aquino’s wife ― who faces the same charges of unlawful imprisonment of a minor ― pleaded “no contest” in April. She is scheduled to be sentenced in July.
Officials said Aquino and his wife were granted supervised release, despite prosecutors’ objections, pending their upcoming court dates.
Both face up to five years in prison if convicted.
Copyright 2022 Hawaii News Now via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/hawaiian-couple-allegedly-chained-child-porch-beat-him-with-2-by-4/ | 2022-05-06T13:10:04Z |
‘I read banned books’ library cards offered at Nashville library
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV/Gray News) - The Nashville Public Library launched a unique campaign last week to promote reading banned books.
Library officials said they promote everyone’s freedom to read by offering a free, limited edition “I read banned books” library card. The goal is to get 5,000 cards into the hands of readers across Davidson County, WSMV reported.
The promotion is in response to McMinn County Schools in January removing Art Spiegelman’s acclaimed graphic novel “Maus” from the school district’s curriculum and Williamson County Schools’ removal of Sharon Creech’s “Walk Two Moons” in February.
“I want Nashvillians to know: Nashville Public Library will always respect your Freedom to Read – to determine what you read and don’t read independently and exercise your role in determining what your children read,” said Kent Oliver, director of Nashville Public Library. “This campaign is our way of bringing our community together in our shared Freedom to Read, which is essential to sustaining our democracy.”
The library said the American Library Association has been tracking challenges against books since the 1980s and have recorded thousands of challenges made in cities across the United States.
The Freedom to Read campaign works by having all Davidson County residents and existing library card holders obtain a new or upgraded card at no additional charge.
Customers can sign up for their card on the library’s website or in-person at the library’s 21 locations. The campaign ends May 26.
Copyright 2022 WSMV via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/i-read-banned-books-library-cards-offered-nashville-library/ | 2022-05-06T13:10:11Z |
US added 428,000 jobs in April despite surging inflation
WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s employers added 428,000 jobs in April, extending a streak of solid hiring that has defied punishing inflation, chronic supply shortages, the Russian war against Ukraine and much higher borrowing costs.
Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department showed that last month’s hiring kept the unemployment rate at 3.6%, just above the lowest level in a half-century.
The economy’s hiring gains have been remarkably consistent in the face of the worst inflation in four decades. Employers have added at least 400,000 jobs for 12 straight months.
Yet it’s unclear how long the jobs boom will continue. The Federal Reserve this week raised its key rate by a half-percentage point — its most aggressive move since 2000 — and signaled further large rate hikes to come. As the Fed’s rate hikes take effect, they will make it increasingly expensive for consumers and businesses to borrow, spend and hire.
In addition, the vast economic aid that the government had been supplying to households has expired. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has helped accelerate inflation and clouded the economic outlook. Some economists warn of a growing risk of recession.
For now, the resilience of the job market is particularly striking when set against the backdrop of galloping price increases and rising borrowing costs. This week, the Labor Department provided further evidence that the job market is still booming. It reported that only 1.38 million Americans were collecting traditional unemployment benefits, the fewest since 1970. And it said that employers posted a record-high 11.5 million job openings in March and that layoffs remained well below pre-pandemic levels.
What’s more, the economy now has, on average, two available jobs for every unemployed person. That’s the highest such proportion on record.
And in yet another sign that workers are enjoying unusual leverage in the job market, a record 4.5 million people quit their jobs in March, evidently confident that they could find a better opportunity elsewhere.
Chronic shortages of goods, supplies and workers have contributed to skyrocketing price increases — the highest inflation rate in 40 years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February dramatically worsened the financial landscape, sending global oil and gas prices skyward and severely clouding the national and global economic picture.
In the meantime, with many industries slowed by worker shortages, companies have been jacking up pay to try to attract job applicants and retain their existing employees. Even so, pay raises haven’t kept pace with the spike in consumer prices.
That’s why the Fed, which most economists say was much too slow to recognize the inflation threat, is now raising rates aggressively. Its goal is a notoriously difficult one: a so-called soft landing.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/us-added-428000-jobs-april-despite-surging-inflation/ | 2022-05-06T13:10:17Z |
CHEYENNE – Laramie County School District 1 officials gathered with community members Thursday afternoon to break ground on the new Coyote Ridge Elementary.
The celebration was more than two years in the making, after nearly $25 million for the fifth and sixth grade building was approved by the Wyoming Legislature in 2020. An additional $5 million was appropriated during the 2022 budget session to accommodate for inflation and supply chain issues, which guaranteed the completion of the project.
Students are now expected to walk through the doors of the 73,000-square-foot facility at the start of 2024.
“One of the exciting things about opening a school, really, is that you get to watch from the ground up what it looks like, and how that impacts the future of our community, the future of our region and our state, and most of all our students and education,” LCSD1 Superintendent Margaret Crespo told attendees. “So when we think about these spaces and these new and innovative ways that our community engages with the world, we’re mirroring that as we build this building.”
Coyote Ridge is a part of an effort to relieve capacity issues in the district for at least four to five other elementaries in the Central triad, which LCSD1 Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Jim Fraley said was a notion introduced with the construction of Meadowlark Elementary in the East triad six years ago. He said he is excited to see students have access to the amenities and space that the new school will offer.
District facilities director Andy Knapp said the design was meant to create a more cohesive environment than industrial-style schools from six or seven decades ago. Natural light, open and collaborative spaces and newer technology were all implemented in the plans.
Fraley also told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle the location on Powderhouse Road gave students a greater chance to branch out. He said there are biking trails nearby, open fields, and they won’t be stacked up on top of each other. The school site is approximately 15 acres in size.
“Students get to go out and explore the great, wide open Wyoming,” he said.
Other attendees were also excited for the chance to give students in Cheyenne the space they needed, including Rep. Landon Brown, R-Cheyenne. He’s been working within the Legislature to get the facilities needed for school districts struggling with overcrowding and deteriorating buildings. He said with the continued population growth in the Capital City, it was fantastic to see a new school building constructed for greater learning capabilities.
But he said finding the funding for these opportunities across the state is getting more and more difficult, which the Legislature has to address in the coming years.
“Wyoming is going to have to determine how it funds itself without coal bonus money. It’s becoming tougher. We used to build five to 10 schools a year, or replace them or furnish them,” he said. “Now, it’s one, if we’re lucky.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/in_our_schools/school-officials-break-ground-on-coyote-ridge-elementary/article_26d497fc-feb4-5990-94bb-ccb6382502a8.html | 2022-05-06T14:48:31Z |
CHEYENNE – Sheridan High School students won the Division D award at the We The People National Finals held April 22-25.
The We the People National Finals are a national academic competition that give students an opportunity to display the civic knowledge, skills and disposition necessary to effectively participate in the U.S.'s constitutional democratic republic through simulated congressional hearings. Approximately 1,000 students from 47 classes participated in 636 half-hour virtual hearings during the National Finals.
The finals recognized the top 12 teams, outstanding units and divisions.
Sheridan High, after two days of testimony in the simulated hearings, was considered to have had strong performances by all student panels. It was recognized with a division award in one of the most competitive divisions involving classes from Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
“Sheridan High School represented the great state of Wyoming at the national competition and brought home the Division D Award," said Sheridan Advanced Placement U.S. Government teacher Mike Thomas. "We are very proud of our students and their efforts they have committed to learning about the U.S. Constitution.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/in_our_schools/sheridan-high-wins-division-award-at-we-the-people-national-finals/article_4e107793-5d0a-5747-b40b-9fa7cfce0aae.html | 2022-05-06T16:54:36Z |
LARAMIE – Law enforcement agencies have been working with the FBI to investigate a sexual extortion case involving teenagers on the social media platforms Snapchat and Instagram, the Laramie Police Department has reported.
More than 150 victims nationwide have so far been identified, including students in Albany County and elsewhere in Wyoming. The suspects target teens in the middle and high school age range with no preference on gender, said LPD spokesperson Steve Morgan.
The Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation and Laramie police have been working with the FBI since being notified of the alleged “sextortion” earlier this year. The case involves multiple suspects blackmailing juvenile students into sending sexually explicit photos and videos.
The suspect will send photos or videos from a previous victim and threaten to release the contents unless the new target sends photos and videos of him or herself, a press release says.
“The suspect demands videos and images over a multi-day period and claims that if the the victim complies and the suspect will delete the files. This is not true,” the press release said. “The suspect forces (under threat of exposure) the child victim to conduct video calls which show the victim’s face, while the suspect keeps (their) own face hidden. This is done so the suspect can further exploit the child victim.”
Instagram is part of Meta, the name for the company that also owns Facebook. Snapchat is owned by Snap Inc.
Neither Meta nor Snapchat responded to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle’s request for information Thursday on how to prevent such sextortion. Local authorities in the Cheyenne area also did not immediately provide any immediate information on any investigations.
In such sex extortion crimes, the suspect also will force victims to share their friends or followers lists, authorities have warned.
“Although the suspect(s) remain unidentified, Wyoming DCI and LPD continue to actively investigate this case and work with the FBI in an effort to put a stop to this ongoing exploitation,” the press release says.
Anyone who receives a message of this nature should report it to a police department non-emergency dispatch number. You can also contact the Wyoming DCI at 307-777-7181.
Do not respond to the messages or view any content sent, but do save the messages for reporting purposes, Morgan advised. People also should not accept friend requests from accounts they don’t know or share others’ information.
“The suspect depends on victims feeling ashamed or guilty to continue to exploit them. Remember, it is not your fault,” the press release says. “Regardless of what the suspect says, (they) will not stop the exploitation regardless of how many images or videos a victim sends.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/local_news/law-enforcement-warn-of-social-media-sextortion-of-teens/article_ae8d4c65-a7ce-56f9-a22c-68f51a173512.html | 2022-05-06T16:54:42Z |
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A “Welcome to Laramie” sign greets northbound travelers on Wyoming Highway 287 on the south side of town shortly before the highway intersects with the South 3rd Street Exit 313 for Interstate 80.
This map shows the reach of the Laramie Area Growth Plan, a collaborative effort to set growth policies and a land use plan for unimorporated ares of Albany County.
A “Welcome to Laramie” sign greets northbound travelers on Wyoming Highway 287 on the south side of town shortly before the highway intersects with the South 3rd Street Exit 313 for Interstate 80.
David Watson/Boomerang File
This map shows the reach of the Laramie Area Growth Plan, a collaborative effort to set growth policies and a land use plan for unimorporated ares of Albany County.
The city of Laramie is partnering with Albany County to create a plan that will outline how to manage growth in the coming years with an eye on unincorporated areas.
A primary focus of the project will be finding middle ground between maintaining autonomy for county residents and the city’s push to expand housing and development opportunities.
“I think the city and county are both concerned with housing and economic development, and I’m increasingly beginning to think those two are the same thing,” said Laramie Mayor Paul Weaver during a Wednesday meeting to discuss the plan.
The governments have hired Logan Simpson, a Fort Collins-based planning consulting firm, to help assess the status of the area and develop a viable outline for the future.
Throughout the summer, the firm plans to seek as much public input as possible from a wide range of community stakeholder on how they want the city and county to evolve.
The firm already has conducted interviews with people from the engineering, land development, construction and ranching industries. The group also has talked with representatives from environmental groups and the university.
Some of the top themes shared by groups interviewed so far include a need for more housing at a range of price points, a desire for entry points into the community to be more visually pleasing and the recognition that the city of Laramie has more rigorous development standards than the county.
Logan Simpson plans to expand its work to more general populations over the summer by doing online outreach and attending local events such as the farmers market and Jubilee Days. Questionnaires, workshops and presentations also will be available.
“We’re here to listen, not to come to conclusions or dictate anything,” said Cameron Gloss, a representative of Logan Simpson. “Every community is different.”
After gathering a range of community opinions, the firm will begin working to create development standards and ultimately form an agreement between the city and county. One of the goals of the project will be to develop a set of core issues that both entities agree on.
“I think we’re at an (important) time in our development (with) the work that’s going on between the city and the county,” council member Sharon Cumbie said. “I think this project has great potential.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wyomingbusinessreport/industry_news/construction/here-we-grow-again-city-county-begin-planning-process-for-unincorporated-areas/article_5ecdbfd6-cd54-11ec-9909-a3a6d6ac803c.html | 2022-05-06T16:54:54Z |
CHEYENNE – Laramie County School District 1 officials gathered with community members Thursday afternoon to break ground on the new Coyote Ridge Elementary.
The celebration was more than two years in the making, after nearly $25 million for the fifth and sixth grade building was approved by the Wyoming Legislature in 2020. An additional $5 million was appropriated during the 2022 budget session to accommodate for inflation and supply chain issues, which guaranteed the completion of the project.
Students are now expected to walk through the doors of the 73,000-square-foot facility at the start of 2024.
“One of the exciting things about opening a school, really, is that you get to watch from the ground up what it looks like, and how that impacts the future of our community, the future of our region and our state, and most of all our students and education,” LCSD1 Superintendent Margaret Crespo told attendees. “So when we think about these spaces and these new and innovative ways that our community engages with the world, we’re mirroring that as we build this building.”
Coyote Ridge is a part of an effort to relieve capacity issues in the district for at least four to five other elementaries in the Central triad, which LCSD1 Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Jim Fraley said was a notion introduced with the construction of Meadowlark Elementary in the East triad six years ago. He said he is excited to see students have access to the amenities and space that the new school will offer.
District facilities director Andy Knapp said the design was meant to create a more cohesive environment than industrial-style schools from six or seven decades ago. Natural light, open and collaborative spaces and newer technology were all implemented in the plans.
Fraley also told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle the location on Powderhouse Road gave students a greater chance to branch out. He said there are biking trails nearby, open fields, and they won’t be stacked up on top of each other. The school site is approximately 15 acres in size.
“Students get to go out and explore the great, wide open Wyoming,” he said.
Other attendees were also excited for the chance to give students in Cheyenne the space they needed, including Rep. Landon Brown, R-Cheyenne. He’s been working within the Legislature to get the facilities needed for school districts struggling with overcrowding and deteriorating buildings. He said with the continued population growth in the Capital City, it was fantastic to see a new school building constructed for greater learning capabilities.
But he said finding the funding for these opportunities across the state is getting more and more difficult, which the Legislature has to address in the coming years.
“Wyoming is going to have to determine how it funds itself without coal bonus money. It’s becoming tougher. We used to build five to 10 schools a year, or replace them or furnish them,” he said. “Now, it’s one, if we’re lucky.” | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wyomingbusinessreport/industry_news/construction/school-officials-break-ground-on-coyote-ridge-elementary/article_a417fd0e-cd54-11ec-9d7c-7fc5e8ed6fef.html | 2022-05-06T16:55:00Z |
Students in Laramie County Community College’s nursing program receive direction from Cheyenne Regional Medical Center staff to assist with a 2021 surge of patients at the hospital. Courtesy
CHEYENNE – Wyoming is among 14 states taking part in a project to try to address health workforce challenges, Gov. Mark Gordon has announced.
The goal is "growing and strengthening the state’s health care workforce," according to a Tuesday news release from the governor's office. The U.S. and Wyoming are grappling with a shortage of workers, including in health care.
The project is called the Next Generation of the Healthcare Workforce Learning Collaborative. It is described as a six-month initiative being launched by the National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices.
Participating governors’ offices and states' officials will work to "develop innovative and evidence-based policies, programs, and practices to strengthen an enduring health care workforce," the announcement said.
In Wyoming, this collaborative will include officials from the departments of Health, Workforce Services and Education, along with Gordon's office. The University of Wyoming and the state’s community colleges will also take part. This effort also reflects the priorities of the governor’s Wyoming Innovation Partnership.
“Wyoming is not unique in facing health care workforce shortages, an issue that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic,” Gordon said. “Long-term solutions will require a coordinated effort that will benefit from this collaborative approach.”
Gordon’s Health Task Force has been targeting nursing shortages through via utilizing traveling nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as by using federal money for recruitment and retention. And the Wyoming Legislature has approved funds for health workforce-related issues.
"During a series of virtual and in-person convenings in multiple states, Learning Collaborative participants will work together to assess their current operating environment; share successes and best practices; learn from national, state and local experts; exchange ideas with other states; and develop and execute an action plan to achieve program and policy change based on state-identified goals," the release said.
This collaborative aims to publish findings and recommendations later this year. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wyomingbusinessreport/industry_news/economy_and_labor/wyoming-among-states-in-a-project-about-health-workforce-challenges/article_88e81dc0-cd54-11ec-8a9c-af679a67b996.html | 2022-05-06T16:55:07Z |
UVA Health postpones some procedures due to shortage
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - The COVID-19 lockdown in China is affecting supply chains, including tools for hospitals.
UVA Health says it is experiencing a shortage of the imaging tool, IV Contrast.
“This is due to a manufacturing shutdown in China that’s related to the COVID-related lockdown in the country. So it’s a ripple effect, sort of nationwide and, and worldwide, actually,” University of Virginia Medical Center CEO Wendy Horton said Thursday, May 5.
IV Contrast is used for a lot of things around the hospital: “This is important because it improves our ability to really look at different blood vessels and organs and tissues within various imaging procedures,” Horton explained. “We’re really concerned to make sure that we have availability for life-saving procedures. So what this means for our community is that non-critical imaging needs are being redirected and postponed.”
UVA Health says it may have to wait until July before things get back to normal.
“If it’s sooner, we would love that, but we just know that to get ramped back up nationwide it’s going to take some time,” Horton said.
UVA says it is working on how to manage as the shortage continues: “We are absolutely making plans of, you know, how we will prioritize patients. And that includes life-saving procedures and making sure that we tried to use that this very scarce resource and the most important way that we can to save lives,” Horton said.
Copyright 2022 WVIR. All rights reserved.
Do you have a story idea? Send us your news tip here. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/05/uva-health-postpones-some-procedures-due-shortage/ | 2022-05-06T17:04:02Z |
The Arts Council of the Valley hosting ‘First Fridays’ event
Published: May. 6, 2022 at 10:41 AM EDT|Updated: 2 hours ago
HARRISONBURG, Va. (WHSV) - Since 2009, The Arts Council of the Valley has been hosting First Friday events and they continue to take place on the first Friday of each month.
17 venues throughout the Harrisonburg area will be participating on May 6 to showcase local art and businesses.
“These are businesses we have a real estate office, Harrisonburg Homes Team participates, we have banks, restaurants, and all kinds of retail shops that participate in First Fridays and it’s wonderful for them because it brings the community into their locale,” Arts Council of the Valley Executive Director Jenny Burden said.
Click here for a list of participating venues and their activities.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/arts-council-valley-hosting-first-fridays-event/ | 2022-05-06T17:04:08Z |
Be aware of on-ramp closures on I-81 in Rockbridge County starting Sunday
ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, Va. (WHSV) - The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has scheduled overnight southbound on-ramp closures for Sunday through Thursday nights, May 8-12, at the interchange of Interstate 81 and Route 606 (Raphine Road) at exit 205 in Rockbridge County.
The ramp from Route 606 onto southbound I-81 will be closed each night from 8 p.m. through 6 a.m. the following morning.
Virginia State Police will help enforce the overnight ramp closures. Digital message signs will guide motorists on a detour route.
VDOT says the ramp closures are for repositioning of concrete barriers and paving operations, as part of a $4.7 million interchange improvement project. All work is weather permitting.
Improvements to I-81 exit 205 and Route 606 are designed to reduce traffic congestion and enhance safety, VDOT adds. Virginia’s SMART SCALE program and the I-81 Corridor Improvement Program fund the project. It includes ramp extensions, turn lanes, shoulder widening and turning radius improvements.
In July 2021, VDOT awarded a $4,695,094.60 contract to A & J Development and Excavation Inc. of Mount Crawford, Va. The project is scheduled for completion in fall 2022.
Additional information about the I-81 Exit 205 project can be found on the VDOT website.
Virginia traffic alerts and traveler information can be obtained by dialing 511 or clicking here.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/be-aware-on-ramp-closures-i-81-rockbridge-county/ | 2022-05-06T17:04:16Z |
Brother of Clemson coach accused of distributing child porn
CLEMSON, S.C. (FOX Carolina/Gray News) – The brother of the Clemson Tigers head football coach was one of three men arrested in connection to child sexual exploitation investigations, the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office announced Thursday.
WHNS reports Henry Ervil Swinney III of Clemson, who is the brother of coach Dabo Swinney, was arrested on April 23 after a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children prompted an investigation.
The South Carolina Attorney General’s Office said Henry Swinney distributed child sexual abuse material through a “Mega” file sharing link.
He is charged with sexual exploitation of a minor.
Investigators also arrested 22-year-old Carson Alexander Radlein, who they said was in possession of multiple files of child sex abuse material after a separate investigation.
He is facing 11 charges connected to the sexual exploitation of minors.
Additionally, 55-year-old Gordon Helton Jr. was arrested for distribution and possession of child sex abuse material.
Helton is facing 10 charges connected to the sexual exploitation of a minor.
Copyright 2022 FOX Carolina via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/brother-clemson-coach-accused-distributing-child-porn/ | 2022-05-06T17:04:23Z |
Bus video gives more info about Pittsburgh bridge collapse
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Video footage from a bus of the bridge collapse in Pittsburgh this year shows one end of the structure had already fallen when an expansion joint at the other end was pulling apart, federal investigators said Thursday.
The National Transportation Safety Board issued an update on the Fern Hollow bridge collapse, saying the video is giving them more information about the sequence of events.
So far there’s no evidence of “widespread deficiencies” in the “rigid K-frame superstructure types” that form the bridge’s basic structure, the report said.
The investigative update said that all aspects of the disaster are still being looked at and that the cause has yet to be determined. Investigators plan mechanical and chemical testing on material samples and will examine plate dimensions and weld quality.
A preliminary report issued less than two weeks after the Jan. 28 collapse had found the collapse began at the structure’s west end and noted there had been no primary fractures in sections of welded steel girders considered “fracture critical.” A fracture critical area in a beam is the part most likely to show damage if the bridge has suddenly given way.
When the Forbes Avenue bridge gave way, it sent a city bus and four-passenger cars down some 100 feet (30 meters) to a ravine carved by Fern Hollow Creek. Another vehicle drove off the east bridge abutment and landed on its roof.
Although the preliminary report had said a total of 10 vehicle occupants had been injured, the agency has now concluded that there were nine people in six vehicles. Two were injured seriously, two had minor injuries, four were not hurt, and the injury status of one person is uncertain, the agency said Thursday. No one was killed.
Natural gas lines ruptured and required the evacuation of nearby homes.
The 447-foot-long (136-meter) bridge, about 50 years old, showed some deterioration during an inspection in September, but not enough to require its closure. The bridge has had a 26-ton (24,000 kilogram) weight limit since 2014.
The future of the bridge is the topic of a virtual meeting Thursday night in which city officials and neighbors are expected to participate.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has said up to $25.3 million in National Highway Performance Program funds is being used to rebuild the structure. The contractor began gearing up for construction last month, and early foundation work is about to begin, PennDOT spokesperson Alexis Campbell said Thursday.
The state agency has posted images of the replacement bridge’s “overall design concept.”
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/bus-video-gives-more-info-about-pittsburgh-bridge-collapse/ | 2022-05-06T17:04:31Z |
College grads expect to make $50,000 more at their first job than they actually will, survey finds
(CNN) - A new survey shows the next crop of college graduates have unrealistic expectations about their first job.
The survey by Real Estate Witch shows students expect to make a six-figure salary at their first job, when the reality is less than half of that.
In fact, the survey shows the undergraduate class of 2022, across all majors, overestimate their starting salaries by 88%, expecting to make at least $50,000 more than they actually will.
The average starting salary for college graduates is $55,260, but current college students expect to make nearly $104,000 in their first job, Real Estate Witch found.
Journalism grads had the most unrealistic expectations, overestimating their starting salaries by 139% – they expected to make $107,000 their first year, when the actual average is below $45,000.
Only 15% of 2022 graduates have accepted a job offer.
The survey also found that 52% of students do not believe college is worth the debt, and 40% regret attending.
Copyright 2022 CNN Newsource. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/college-grads-expect-make-50000-more-their-first-job-than-they-actually-will-survey-finds/ | 2022-05-06T17:04:38Z |
Community members organize “Cheers for Charity” event
WAYNESBORO, Va. (WHSV) - Organizers of the Cheers for Charity event are hoping to raise money for the Valley Children’s Advocacy Center (Valley CAC), helping children who have been victims of abuse.
“The Valley Children’s Advocacy Center provides free resources for children that have been emotionally, physically, or sexually abused and free resources to their nonoffending family members or caretakers. No child should have to go through something like that,” event organizer, Jodi Davis explained.
For a separate cause, the event will also be raising funds for a 4-year-old girl named Shae Blackwell through an online auction.
Davis says Shae has been diagnosed with a rare disease called CLOVES Syndrome which causes malformations, primarily in her abdomen around her major organs and her spinal column.
“She will have ongoing medical treatments for her entire life. She is only four years old and she is the sweetest brightest little girl. She just lights up the room when she enters it,” Davis added.
The Cheers for Charity event will be on May 21 at the Event Center at Turk Mountain in Waynesboro. Davis says all the money raised from the event will go to the Valley CAC and the money raised from the auction will support Shae’s medical bills.
For more information on the event, click here. If you are interested in donating, reach out to Jodi Davis at resultsthatmove.va@gmail.com.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/community-members-organize-cheers-charity-event/ | 2022-05-06T17:04:47Z |
Dead shark hung from ceiling at Florida high school is senior prank gone too far, police say
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. (WJXT) – Senior pranks are common in high schools this time of year, but police say what may have been a senior prank in Florida went too far.
A dead shark was found hanging over a stairwell at Ponte Vedra High School, where the mascot is a shark.
Sophomore Cooper Gottfried said he saw the shark Thursday morning and couldn’t believe it.
“I was going to first period and there was this massive shark hanging from the ceiling and it smelled really bad,” Gottfried said.
Students started sharing pictures of the shark on social media, saying it was a senior prank. But there could be some major consequences.
Both the St. John’s County Sheriff’s Office and the Florida Fish and Wildlife are investigating.
The school gave surveillance video to the sheriff’s office but won’t release the video publicly because it could impede the investigation. Any students found to be involved in the incident could face suspension or even expulsion. Criminal charges are also possible.
Custodians at the school took the shark down.
Copyright 2022 WJXT via CNN Newsource. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/dead-shark-hung-ceiling-florida-high-school-is-senior-prank-gone-too-far-police-say/ | 2022-05-06T17:04:53Z |
Explosion damages hotel in Cuban capital; 4 deaths reported
Published: May. 6, 2022 at 12:55 PM EDT|Updated: 9 minutes ago
HAVANA (AP) — A powerful explosion has badly damaged a hotel in the Cuban capital and officials report at least four people have died.
The office of Cuba’s president said in a tweet that Friday’s blast at the five-star Hotel Saratoga in Old Havana apparently was due to a gas leak.
It said search and rescue efforts were underway for people possible trapped.
Photos published by government news media show severe damage to the 96-room hotel, with clouds of dust billowing into the sky.
The website Cubadebate reported that a school next door had been evacuated.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/explosion-damages-hotel-cuban-capital-4-deaths-reported/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:00Z |
Family mistakes coyote pup for dog, takes it home
(CNN) - A Massachusetts family took home what they thought was a lost dog, only to later realize it was actually a coyote pup.
They called a wildlife center for help.
The pup is a young male who was separated from his family, the center said.
Health officials helped determine the coyote, fortunately, did not pose a risk of rabies exposure.
Coyotes are a rabies vector species and if any of the family members had been bitten, scratched, or had extended contact with the pup, it would have been euthanized and tested.
It is recovering in isolation but will soon be joined by a foster sibling.
The pups will be raised together and given a chance to grow and learn natural behaviors in large, outdoor caging.
Copyright 2020 CNN Newsource. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/family-mistakes-coyote-pup-dog-takes-it-home/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:10Z |
Indiana man charged with murder wins township primary race
LEBANON, Ind. (AP) — A central Indiana man charged with murder in connection with the March death of his wife has won a primary election for township board.
Andrew Wilhoite, 40, of Lebanon received 60 of the 276 total votes Tuesday for Republicans for three positions on the Clinton Township Board, Boone County election results show.
Wilhoite was arrested in late March in the death of 41-year-old Elizabeth “Nikki” Wilhoite. He’s been held since then in the Boone County Jail without bond.
Indiana State Police have said Andrew Wilhoite struck Nikki Wilhoite in the head with a blunt object, knocking her out. He then put her in a vehicle and drove to a creek a few miles from their home and dumped her body there, police said.
Police found Nikki Wilhoite’s body on March 26 partially submerged in about 3 feet (1 meter) of water.
Court records indicate Nikki Wilhoite filed for divorce on March 17. The couple had been married for 12 years.
Andrew Wilhoite’s jury trial is scheduled for Aug. 29, online court records show.
If he is convicted of a felony before the Nov. 8 general election, he would automatically be removed from the ballot. No Democrats have filed for the Clinton Township Board.
“Under our legal system, every person is innocent until proven guilty,” said Brad King, co-director of the Indiana Election Division.
A message seeking comment on the charges Wilhoite faces was left Friday by The Associated Press for Wilhoite’s attorney.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/indiana-man-charged-with-murder-wins-township-primary-race/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:17Z |
Local fire departments accepting applications for annual Camp L.I.T.
The annual camp is led by the Harrisonburg Fire Department and Rockingham Fire and Rescue
HARRISONBURG, Va. (WHSV) - “According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) less than five percent of firefighters in the United States, career-wise, are women. Obviously, it is a male-dominated service and we are trying to promote and change that,” Erin Stehle with the Harrisonburg Fire Department explained.
The Harrisonburg Fire Department along with Rockingham County Fire and Rescue is bringing back their fourth year of the Camp L.I.T. (Leadership, Integrity, Trailblazer) program.
Young women from 14 to 16 years old will have a chance to participate in the free week-long program, learning what it takes to be a first responder.
“The idea is to inspire young women to get into this line of work. Even more so, it is about empowering young women. Being a woman is hard sometimes, I think this is an opportunity for them to learn self-confidence, learn about themselves and what kind of characteristics they trying to develop in themselves. All of us are trying to find ourselves, even as adults,” Stehle added.
Led by local firefighters and department leaders, over the course of the week the group will learn the history of the service, run drills and watch presentations from the police department and the emergency communications center.
“For me personally, it is just about leaving a better legacy than what you found, making the fire service better. I know that with the instructors that we have helping, the same goes for them. This is a chance for them to really kind of stop for a moment and think about their journey and reflect on their journey,” Stehle said.
Applications are due by May 20 and the camp runs from July 18 through July 22.
“This is a really great opportunity to take girls from all over the Valley and really just inspire them to work together to learn about themselves, highs and lows, challenges, challenging themselves to do things that they probably never would have any other time,” Stehle said.
Apply or find more information by clicking here. For more information on the Harrisonburg Fire Department, click here.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/local-fire-departments-accepting-applications-annual-camp-lit/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:24Z |
Nearly 1 million COVID-19 deaths: A look at the US numbers
(AP) - Doug Lambrecht was among the first of the nearly 1 million Americans to die from COVID-19. His demographic profile — an older white male with chronic health problems — mirrors the faces of many who would be lost over the next two years.
The 71-year-old retired physician was recovering from a fall at a nursing home near Seattle when the new coronavirus swept through in early 2020. He died March 1, an early victim in a devastating outbreak that gave a first glimpse of the price older Americans would pay.
The pandemic has generated gigabytes of data that make clear which U.S. groups have been hit the hardest. More than 700,000 people 65 and older died. Men died at higher rates than women.
White people made up most of the deaths overall, yet an unequal burden fell on Black, Hispanic and Native American people considering the younger average age of minority communities. Racial gaps narrowed between surges then widened again with each new wave.
With 1 million deaths in sight, Doug’s son Nathan Lambrecht reflected on the toll.
“I’m afraid that as the numbers get bigger, people are going to care less and less,” he said. “I just hope people who didn’t know them and didn’t have the same sort of loss in their lives due to COVID, I just hope that they don’t forget and they remember to care.”
ELDERS HIT HARD
Three out of every four deaths were people 65 and older, according to U.S. data analyzed by The Associated Press.
About 255,000 people 85 and older died; 257,000 were 75 to 84 years old; and about 229,000 were 65 to 74.
“A million things went wrong and most of them were preventable,” said elder care expert Charlene Harrington of the University of California, San Francisco. Harrington, 80, hopes the lessons of the pandemic lead U.S. health officials to adopt minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes, “then maybe I can retire.”
SPOUSES LEFT BEHIND
In nearly every 10-year age group, more men have died from COVID-19 than women.
Men have shorter life expectancies than women, so it’s not surprising that the only age group where deaths in women outpaced those in men is the oldest: 85 and older.
For some families who lost breadwinners, economic hardships have added to their grief, said Rima Samman, who coordinates a COVID-19 memorial project that began as a tribute to her brother, Rami, who died in May 2020 at age 40.
“A widow is losing her home, or she’s losing the car she drove the kids to school with, because her husband died,” Samman said. “Little by little, you’re getting pulled down from middle class to lower class.”
RACE, ETHNICITY AND AGE
White people made up 65% of the total deaths, the largest proportion of any race by far.
This isn’t that surprising because there are more white people in the U.S. than any other race. American Indians, Pacific Islanders and Black people had higher death rates when looking at COVID-19 deaths per capita.
Death rates per capita still leave out a characteristic that is crucial to understanding which groups were disproportionately affected — COVID-19 is more deadly for the elderly.
In the U.S. there are many more elderly white people than elderly people of other races. To evaluate which race has been disproportionately affected, it’s necessary to adjust the per-capita death rate, calculating the rates as if each race had the same age breakdown.
After the share of COVID-19 deaths are age-adjusted in this way, we can compare that with the race’s share of the total population. If the age-adjusted share of COVID-19 deaths is higher than the share of the U.S. population, that race has been disproportionately affected.
When considering age, it’s apparent that Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and Native American people suffered disproportionately more from COVID-19 deaths than other groups in the U.S.
Looking at deaths per capita, Mississippi had the highest rate of any state.
“We’ve lost so many people to COVID,” said Joyee Washington, a community health educator in Hattiesburg. “The hard thing in Mississippi was having to grieve with no time to heal. You’re facing trauma after trauma after trauma. ... Normal is gone as far as I’m concerned.”
Communities pulled together. Churches set up testing sites, school buses took meals to students when classrooms were closed, her city’s mayor used social media to provide reliable information. “Even in the midst of turmoil you can still find joy, you can still find light,” she said. “The possibilities are there if you look for them.”
Native Americans experienced higher death rates than all other groups during two waves of the pandemic. For Mary Francis, a 41-year-old Navajo woman from Page, Arizona, the deaths reinforce a long-held value of self-sufficiency.
“It goes back to the teachings of our elders,” said Francis, who helps get vaccines and care packages to Navajo and Hopi families. “Try to be self-sufficient, how to take care of ourselves and how to not rely so much on the government (and) other sources that may or may not have our interests at heart.”
RURAL VS URBAN
The surge that began in late 2020 was particularly rough for rural America.
Americans living in rural areas have been less likely to get vaccinated than city dwellers, more likely to be infected and more likely to die.
“I’ve had multiple people in my ambulance, in their 80s and dying,” said paramedic Mark Kennedy in Nauvoo, Illinois. “Some did die, and when you ask if they’ve been vaccinated, they say, ‘I don’t trust it.’”
Surges swamped the thin resources of rural hospitals. During the delta surge, Kennedy transferred patients to hospitals in Springfield, which is 130 miles away, and Chicago, 270 miles away.
“Every day you had multiple transfers three and four hours away in full protective gear,” Kennedy said.
The recent omicron wave felt even harder to David Schreiner, CEO of Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital in Dixon, Illinois.
“In the first wave, there were signs throughout the community about our health care heroes. ... People loved us the first time around,” Schreiner said. But by this past winter, people had COVID-19 fatigue.
“Our people have been through so much. And then we would get a patient or a family member who would come to the hospital and refuse to put a mask on,” Schreiner said. “It’s a little bit hard to take.”
___
AP writer Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/nearly-1-million-covid-19-deaths-look-us-numbers/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:30Z |
New photos released of escaped inmate, former corrections officer
LAUDERDALE COUNTY, Ala. (WAFF/Gray News) - Every day, authorities are releasing new details on the escaped Lauderdale County inmate and former corrections officer in hopes of locating the two.
U.S. Marshals released new photos on Thursday of Casey White and Vicky White. The photos show Casey White with tattoos on his chest, arms and upper back, including some affiliated with the Alabama-based white supremacist prison gang Southern Brotherhood.
WAFF EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Marshal provides insight on nationwide manhunt
Vicky White has long blonde hair, but newly released photos show what the former corrections officer would look like with dyed or longer/shorter hair.
Vicky is 5-feet, 5-inches tall, weighs approximately 145 pounds and reportedly has a waddling gait. While Casey stands 6-feet, 9-inches and weighs approximately 330 pounds. According to an official with the U.S. Marshals, Casey also has a tattoo of eyeballs on the back of his head.
On April 29, the inmate and the former Assistant Director of Corrections were reported missing. Vicky and Casey left the Lauderdale County Detention Center at 9:30 a.m. allegedly heading to the courthouse. Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton said Vicky was taking Casey White to a mental health evaluation at the time of the escape. Singleton later confirmed there was not a scheduled mental health evaluation.
A warrant has been issued for Vicky White’s arrest on first-degree permitting or facilitating escape charges.
According to WAFF’s independent investigation, the two had a “special relationship.”
The U.S. Marshal Service announced via Twitter that it will be offering up to $10,000 for information regarding Casey White. The Marshal Service is also offering up to $5,000 for information regarding Vicky White.
Investigators said they believe the two are driving a 2007 copper Ford Edge with damage to the left rear bumper.
Vicky and Casey White are considered armed and dangerous. If you see them, you should not approach them and call 911.
To submit information regarding the Casey White or Vicky White, call 1-800-336-0102 or download the U.S. Marshals Tip App.
Copyright 2022 WAFF via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/new-photos-released-escaped-inmate-former-corrections-officer/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:39Z |
‘No Mow May’ puts lawnmowers on pause to help bees
PORTLAND, Maine (WMTW) - A movement aimed to help bees survive and thrive is underway during the month of May.
“No Mow May” encourages people to cut back on mowing their lawns or even skip it altogether.
“When I see a lawn covered in dandelions, I don’t see weeds. I see bee food,” said Meghan Gave, owner of The Honey Exchange.
Natural growth provides bees with nectar that they need to grow and pollinate flowers, but many of us are used to seeing and unmowed lawn as a sign of neglect.
“No Mow May” could help change that narrative.
“I think the average person wants to have a beautiful lawn, and when they see lawn just let grown, they think maybe they’re not taking care of the space,” said Jeff Tarling, Portland city arborist. “And I think ‘No Mow May’ is really promoting that it’s OK to pause for that month.”
The city of Portland has taken “No Mow May” to a whole new level. They have more than 30 acres of park space that they only mow once a year.
“And particularly for urban communities like Portland, if you can make a three-acre meadow, it’s a good thing,” Tarling said.
Tickborne illness experts warn that higher grass could create more tick exposure, but that still doesn’t mean that you necessarily must break out the mower.
“Anything we can do to, you know, increase pollinator survival and help them thrive is really critical,” said Griffin Dill of Maine Tick Lab. “But if you are going to take part, certainly just be cognizant of the potential threat of ticks, and take those personal protection measures.”
You can help your local ecosystem and save yourself some yard work while you’re at it.
“And ‘No Mow May,’ I’m all for it. Also, I don’t like mowing,” said Meghan Gave, owner of The Honey Exchange.
Copyright 2022 WMTV via CNN Newsource. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/no-mow-may-puts-lawnmower-pause-help-bees/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:46Z |
Rockingham County Fair receives $10,000 from VA Tourism Grant
HARRISONBURG, Va. (WHSV) - The Rockingham County Fair was just one of 250 organizations across the state who received funding through the Virginia Tourism grant.
The fair received $10,000 to go toward marketing and advertising, along with funding grandstand events and items like lights, microphones, and other technical equipment.
Staff are hopeful it will help bring back pre-pandemic attendance numbers.
“Last year in 2021 we had 60,000 people. Prior to COVID-19 we had over 80,000 people hit our grounds so our goal this year is to get back in that number of 80,000 people on our grounds either to come to see our livestock shows, our performances in the grandstands, our tractor pulls, just the exhibits and just get them to Rockingham County,” Rockingham County Fair General Manager Rebecca Holloway said.
One big name that will be a part of the Grandstand lineup is country music singer Dustin Lynch, who will be performing on August 17.
The fair runs August 15-20.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/rockingham-county-fair-receives-10000-va-tourism-grant/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:52Z |
Virginia COVID-19 cases rise by 2,677 Friday
13,535,041 total PCR tests have been run for the virus in Virginia, with 1,715,478 positive cases.
Due to the number of vaccinations across our region, we will no longer be updating the COVID-19 hotline.
As of Friday, May 6, Virginia has had 1,715,478 total cases of COVID-19, including confirmed lab tests and clinical diagnoses, according to the Virginia Department of Health.
The Virginia Department of Health reports a 11.0% 7-day positivity rate for total PCR testing encounters.
10 additional deaths were reported this Friday, leaving the death toll at 20,280.
For a comprehensive summary of COVID-19 cases and testing in Virginia, you can visit the Virginia Department of Health’s website and view their COVID-19 dashboard.
On Sunday, April 18, 2021, vaccine eligibility expanded to all individuals in the Commonwealth age 16 and above.
On Thursday, April 22, 2021, former Governor Northam announced an ease in some of the COVID-19 restrictions for social gatherings that began on Saturday, May 15:
- Social gatherings: The maximum number of individuals permitted in a social gathering will increase to 100 people for indoor settings and 250 people for outdoor settings. Social gatherings are currently limited to 50 people indoors and 100 people outdoors.
- Entertainment venues: Indoor entertainment and public amusement venues will be able to operate at 50 percent capacity or 1,000 people, up from 30 percent capacity or 500 people. Outdoor venues will be able to operate at 50 percent capacity — up from 30 percent — with no specific cap on the number of attendees.
- Recreational sporting events: The number of spectators allowed at indoor recreational sporting events will increase from 100 to 250 spectators or 50 percent capacity, whichever is less. Outdoor recreational sporting events will increase from 500 to 1,000 people or 50 percent capacity, whichever is less.
- Alcohol sales: Restaurants may return to selling alcohol after midnight, and dining room closures will no longer be required between midnight and 5:00 a.m.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Thursday, May 13, 2021, vaccinated individuals are no longer required to wear a mask in most circumstances. On Friday, May 14, 2021, Former governor Ralph Northam announced the mask mandate in Virginia would be lifted, and capacity and social distancing restrictions will end on May 28.
Statewide case totals and testing numbers as of May 6
By May 6, the Virginia Department of Health had received reports of 1,230,451 confirmed cases and 485,027 probable cases of COVID-19 across the commonwealth.
Those positive test results are out of 13,535,041 total PCR tests administered in Virginia.
At this point, 50,256 Virginians have been hospitalized due to the disease caused by the virus, and at least 20,280 have died of causes related to the disease.
Where are our local cases?
Here’s a breakdown of cases for our region as of 10:00 a.m. May 6.
Central Shenandoah Health District: 67,898 total cases
Beginning March 10, 2022, the Locality dashboard is no longer being published. Cases by report date and cases by date of illness can be viewed by locality on the Cases dashboard.
Total PCR tests: 433,135
Lord Fairfax Health District: 54,977 total cases
Total PCR tests: 368,990
Northwest Total Outbreaks: 1,040 reported, including 336 in long term care facilities, 103 in K-12 settings, 75 in healthcare settings, 44 in correctional facilities, 331 in congregate settings, 66 in colleges/universities, and 85 in child care settings.
Note: VDH has changed the way it tracks outbreaks. They are now grouped by regions instead of health districts.
COVID-19 Vaccine in Virginia
The Virginia Department of Health has launched a data dashboard showcasing the number of COVID-19 vaccines that have been distributed and administered throughout the commonwealth.
According to the data dashboard, as of May 6, 7,038,887 people have been vaccinated with at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and 6,301,344 people are fully vaccinated.
19,040,625 total vaccine doses have been distributed throughout the state.
Recovery
The Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association’s online dashboard indicates that, as of May 6, at least 108,400 COVID-19 patients have been discharged from the hospital.
Unlike the VDH data that reports cumulative hospitalizations, their data on hospitalizations reflects hospitalized patients confirmed positive for COVID-19, and that number is 218.
West Virginia updates
Here at WHSV, we cover Grant County, Hardy County and Pendleton County. The below information is the most recent data from each counties’ health department. You can find West Virginia’s COVID-19 dashboard here.
There are 502,930 total cases in West Virginia as of May 6.
Grant County: 3,787 total COVID-19 cases (+2 from Thursday)
Hardy County: 4,192 total COVID-19 cases
Pendleton County: 1,979 total COVID-19 cases (+2 from Thursday)
For the latest factual information on COVID-19, you’re encouraged to check both the Virginia Department of Health and the CDC.
Copyright 2021 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/virginia-covid-19-cases-rise-by-2677-friday/ | 2022-05-06T17:05:59Z |
WNBA superstar Brittney Griner still detained amid start of the regular season
(CNN) - The WNBA’s new season tips off Friday, but the detainment of superstar Brittney Griner is weighing heavily over the league.
Russian authorities in Moscow arrested Griner in February.
Griner, who plays for the Phoenix Mercury, is accused of smuggling cannabis oil in her luggage, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
It remains unconfirmed what substance was actually in the vape pen she had.
To highlight her detainment, every WNBA team will display a special court decal with Griner’s initials and number.
Earlier this week, the U.S. State Department classified her arrest as a “wrongful detention.”
Griner is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic committee is also working to get her released.
Copyright 2022 CNN Newsource. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/wnba-superstar-brittney-griner-still-detained-amid-start-regular-season/ | 2022-05-06T17:06:05Z |
Woman who drove down garage stairwell claims she was ‘just following her GPS,’ police say
PORTLAND, Maine (Gray News) – A woman who drove through a police department garage and down a stairwell claimed she was “just following her GPS instructions,” police in Maine said.
The Portland, Maine, Police Department said the 26-year-old woman drove through the parking garage, across a pedestrian plaza and then tried to drive down a stairwell, where her vehicle got stuck.
Police said they don’t believe it was the fault of the GPS but, rather, the woman’s “excessive blood alcohol level.”
The woman was issued a summons for operating while under the influence.
No one was injured in the incident, and police said there was only a small amount of property damage.
“Please don’t drink and drive,” the police department wrote in a Facebook post.
Copyright 2022 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/05/06/woman-who-drove-down-garage-stairwell-claims-she-was-just-following-her-gps-police-say/ | 2022-05-06T17:06:12Z |
Sponsored - The following content is created on behalf of Middle River Veterinary Hospital and does not reflect the opinions of Gray Media or its editorial staff. To learn more about Middle River Veterinary Hospital, visit https://middlerivervet.com.
Curious Kittens? Precocious Puppies? Digging Dogs? It’s hard to tell what your companion pet might get into next. That’s why roundworms and hookworms are two intestinal parasites that commonly infect and cause disease in dogs and cats – particularly young puppies and kittens. And these parasites are also zoonotic, which means they can be transmitted from pets to people. Yuck!
Dogs and cats are infected with these worms through the oral route, and while it’s a rather complicated cycle, the short version is this: Your furry friend eats or licks stuff contaminated with worm eggs, the eggs hatch into larvae which migrate through your pet’s body and eventually into their intestines where they mature into adult worms. The adult worms produce more eggs, which starts the cycle over again. Click here for a cool diagram of the roundworm life cycle.
Small children, like our pets, tend to explore the world by putting things into their mouths, so young children are at highest risk of becoming infected with roundworms. Hookworm larvae can also enter both people and pet bodies by boring through the skin. So if you have an infected animal pooping in your yard, it is possible to get infected with hookworms just by walking barefoot in the grass! The worms cannot reproduce in the human body, but as the larvae migrate through the body’s tissues, they can cause significant symptoms, including coughing, skin rash, abdominal pain, vision impairment, tremors and seizures. This is called “visceral larval migrans” – Not Fun!
But now for a little good news – oral and topical heartworm preventives also kill hookworms and roundworms! Every time you administer a dose of heartworm prevention to your dog or cat, you are also killing any hookworms or roundworms your pet may have picked up since their last dose.
So what’s the bottom line? To protect your pets, your family, friends and neighbors from roundworms and hookworms, give your companion pets heartworm preventives all year round! At Middle River Veterinary Hospital, we can help you choose the best product for your furry friends – in most cases, we prefer Interceptor Plus for dogs and Revolution Plus for cats for the most broad spectrum parasite control. Have questions?
Please give us call at 540-248-7203 and we’ll be glad to help! | https://www.whsv.com/sponsored/middle-river-veterinary-hospital/what-you-cant-see-might-hurt-you/ | 2022-05-06T17:06:18Z |
$250K FHLB Dallas Subsidy Helps Convert Historic New Orleans Building
NEW ORLEANS — A $250,000 Affordable Housing Program subsidy awarded to the Leona Tate Foundation for Change from Home Bank and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas in 2019 has helped convert a historic school building in the Lower 9th Ward into 25 affordable apartments for very low-income seniors and a center for anti-racism training.
Representatives from the organizations gathered for a May 4 ribbon-cutting ceremony and grand opening celebration to celebrate the newly renovated building, which was previously McDonogh 19 Elementary School, the first New Orleans school integrated by court order of a U.S. District Court judge.
“This historic building will play a critical role in helping our organization live our mission to promote civil rights and anti-racism education, while also providing affordable housing opportunities,” said Leona Tate, executive director of the Leona Tate Foundation for Change, in a press release. “We are grateful to have received the funds from Home Bank and FHLB Dallas and to complete this project for our residents.”
Home Bank Senior Vice President and Community Development Director Kelvin Luster said he’s excited for the future of the Tate Etienne and Prevost Center.
“It’s such an honor to be part of this project,” he said. “Not only is it reviving a piece of history, but it also creates affordable housing for seniors in New Orleans.”
George Dupuy, senior commercial relationship manager at Home Bank, said this project will be very rewarding to the community.
“A lot of heart went into this process,” said Dupuy. “We are excited to see the culmination of everyone’s hard work come to fruition with the Tate Etienne and Prevost Center, and it could not have happened without the tremendous efforts of so many people and organizations.”
AHP funds are intended to assist FHLB Dallas members in financing the purchase, construction and/or rehabilitation of owner-occupied, rental or transitional housing, and housing for homeless individuals. The funds must be used to benefit households with incomes at or below 80% of the median income for the area.
In 2021, FHLB Dallas awarded $18.5 million in subsidies to 26 affordable housing projects. The subsidies will help create 2,113 new or rehabilitated housing units, including $3 million for 323 units in Louisiana.
Between 1990 and 2021, FHLB Dallas has awarded $344.6 million in AHP and Homeownership Set-Aside Programs and has assisted nearly 60,000 households.
“We are thrilled to join Home Bank in celebrating the grand opening of the Tate Etienne and Prevost Center,” said Greg Hettrick, first vice president and director of community investment at FHLB Dallas. “I commend Home Bank for the support and commitment to affordable housing and the Leona Tate Foundation for Change for the work it is doing in the New Orleans community.”
For more information about the AHP, visit fhlb.com/ahp. | https://www.bizneworleans.com/250k-fhlb-dallas-subsidy-helps-convert-historic-new-orleans-building/ | 2022-05-06T17:25:01Z |
CenterWell Primary Care Celebrates Opening in Hammond
HAMMOND, La. — On April 28, CenterWell Senior Primary Care celebrated its grand opening at 2240 W. Thomas Street in Hammond. The “senior-focused, value-based care provider” is owned by Humana. This is the third center to open in the greater New Orleans area and the seventh to open in Louisiana.
“We do things a little differently from the traditional primary-care center,” said Brienne Loy, the company’s primary care regional medical director for Louisiana, in a 2021 press release. “Rather than a transactional model of healthcare, in which a healthcare professional treats one specific condition, we take a more holistic view, in which we assess all of the patient’s needs, including their emotional wellbeing, their access to food and transportation and other factors that can affect their health. Then we develop a plan to address each of those needs.” | https://www.bizneworleans.com/centerwell-primary-care-celebrates-opening-in-hammond/ | 2022-05-06T17:25:07Z |
Commercial Real Estate Firm Celebrates 7 Years in Business
NEW ORLEANS – From SVN | Urban Properties:
SVN | Urban Properties, a local commercial brokerage, property management and development firm, is celebrating its seventh anniversary.
Led by its four managing directors — Eugene Schmitt, Tyler Robinson, Timothy Thompson and Michael Bucher — the company offers commercial real estate brokerage, development and property/asset management services across southeast Louisiana. This anniversary marks numerous milestones for the company:
- The firm’s total real estate transactions eclipsed $300 million.
- The property/asset management team now manages more than 550,000 square feet and asset manages more than $100 million in real estate assets.
- The firm’s development/project management team has seven active projects with a large-scale development on the horizon this summer.
- This past year, the firm’s partners also launched the Urban Venture Fund with plans to deploy capital into regional real estate investments over the next several years.
This positive trajectory and momentum led the firm to join SVN. Operating as SVN | Urban Properties, and becoming the New Orleans franchise, the firm is capitalizing on the expanded reach of SVN International, headquartered in Boston, and joins an international network of 1,600+ Advisors in 200 offices serving over 500 markets. The strategic partnership allows the firm to gain unlimited access to industry-leading commercial real estate tools, technology, and systems that maximize clients’ time and returns.
“We formed Urban Properties during Jazz Fest 2015, so our anniversary always has an extra vibrancy and meaning to it,” said Tyler Robinson, partner and managing director. “We are delighted to be able to celebrate back at the fest this year with our larger-than-life team. We are amazed at how far we’ve come and are excited about everything we will continue to achieve. We would not be where we are today without the team we’ve built and our clients believing in and investing in us along the way.”
To service the increased business opportunities over the last year, the firm has grown its team to 11 professionals and is actively hiring – both in operations and on its licensed agent advisory team. SVN | Urban Properties is located at 1582 Magazine Street. | https://www.bizneworleans.com/commercial-real-estate-firm-celebrates-7-years-in-business/ | 2022-05-06T17:25:14Z |
Hibernia Bank Celebrates New Veterans Branch
METAIRIE — Hibernia Bank employees gathered with local officials and community members on May 3 to celebrate the debut of a new full-service bank branch at 5620 Veterans Memorial Boulevard. Hibernia has served the greater New Orleans area since 1886. It was initially founded as Union Homestead to provide residential mortgage loans to homeowners. Over the years, it has grown to become a full-service bank offering a range of financial services. It has five branches in the New Orleans. For more information, visit https://www.hibernia.bank/. | https://www.bizneworleans.com/hibernia-bank-celebrates-new-veterans-branch/ | 2022-05-06T17:25:20Z |
New Orleans Physical Therapy Clinic Expands to Baton Rouge
BATON ROUGE (press release) — The Stride Shop, a physical therapy clinic on St. Claude Avenue in New Orleans, is excited to announce its expansion to Baton Rouge. The Stride Shop has a niche focus on running and was founded by Ryan Hill and Niraj Vora in 2019.
The Stride Shop believes physical fitness is a primary indicator of an individual’s overall mood and wellness and aims to help athletes achieve their current fitness goals and provide them with the tools they need to reach healthy longevity in their sport. Hill and Vora opened The Stride Shop with a mission of offering patients PT in a revolutionary way outside of the traditional healthcare system.“We were frustrated with traditional physical therapy,” says Vora, who’s been a runner for more than 15 years. “We didn’t – and don’t – want to just sell our services. We want to truly get into the nuts and bolts of what’s wrong with an individual.”
That mission has served them well as they look to open their second location.
“There are so many programs out there that are one size fits all, but for many people that doesn’t work,” Hill says. “We’re excited to be able to expand through our personalized approach.”
The Stride Shop Baton Rouge will begin seeing patients June 1. Until then, Vora and Hill are offering “Stride with Strength,” their signature 8-week strength training program held bi-annually. Open to a limited number of individuals, the class will help runners run more efficiently, reduce and delay fatigue during runs and improve maximum speed. The group will meet once a week on Mondays and focus on workouts, progressions and education. Stride with Strength starts May 16 at Cypress Fitness (625 Celeste Street, New Orleans). Visit www.thestrideshop.com. | https://www.bizneworleans.com/new-orleans-physical-therapy-clinic-expands-to-baton-rouge/ | 2022-05-06T17:25:26Z |
Passco Acquires 2 Multifamily Communities in Louisiana
NEW ORLEANS — From Passco Companies
Passco Companies has acquired two luxury multifamily communities totaling 602 units: Canal 1535, a 330-unit asset in downtown New Orleans, and Sawgrass Point, a 272-unit asset in Gonzales, La. Both assets closed at contract pricing despite a volatile capital markets environment. Passco is a privately held California-based commercial real estate company that specializes in real estate acquisition, development, and asset management throughout the U.S.
These acquisitions bring Passco’s current holdings in the state to 1,690 units and exemplifies the firm’s strategy of identifying highly amenitized, best-in-market multifamily properties poised to benefit from strong fundamentals and growing renter demand, according to Colin Gillis, senior vice president of acquisitions at Passco.
“Based on our long-standing relationships and deep experience in multifamily throughout market cycles, our team has continued to successfully identify and secure top assets in growing business and cultural hubs throughout the country,” said Gillis.
Caleb Marten of KeyBank Real Estate Capital’s Commercial Mortgage Group arranged acquisition financing on behalf of Passco for both transactions.
Passco’s two recent acquisitions include:
Canal 1535
Passco Companies has acquired Canal 1535, a 330-unit luxury Class A multifamily high-rise community situated within the heart of historic Downtown New Orleans, marking the firm’s first asset in the city.
“This community is a one-of-a-kind property in an irreplaceable location, situated within a market that rarely sees apartment trade activity,” said Gillis. “We were able to take advantage of a truly once-in-a-generation opportunity to acquire a property of this caliber for a basis far below today’s replacement cost.”
Gillis adds that New Orleans has an oft-overlooked, high-end demographic that is paying rents for top-end assets that are on par with the country’s gateway markets.
“Canal 1535 is one of the most special and unique assets in the Passco portfolio that offers elevated, convenient living with easy access to the vibrancy of New Orleans,” said Gillis. “Residents at the community benefit from the region’s diverse, thriving economy and exceptional walkability, by being embedded within one of the best dining, entertainment, and cultural destinations in the country.”
Gillis said that the Passco team identified an opportunity to obtain a Green Globes certification, which help secure competitive financing terms. Both Passco and the seller were represented by Mike Kemether of Cushman & Wakefield and Larry Schedler, Cheryl Short, and Christian Schedler of Larry G. Schedler & Associates, Inc.
The property, which will be managed by Greystar, provides residents with garage parking, a well-appointed clubhouse with resident lounge, a resort-style heated swimming pool, a state-of-the-art fitness center, resident business center with PC and Mac computers, a private conference room, a community kitchen and courtyard entertainment area, a 5th-floor deck overlooking Canal Street, a covered putting green, a covered outdoor dog park and dog grooming station, bike storage, package lockers, rentable storage rooms, valet dry cleaning delivery services, a furnished guest suite, and trash chutes on each floor.
Unit amenities include panoramic city views, quartz countertops, espresso kitchen cabinetry, GE stainless steel appliances, built-in microwave ovens, tiled backsplash, undermount sinks, high arc faucets, full-size washer and dryer appliances, smart home locks with keyless entry, Nest thermostats, USB ports throughout, private balconies, garden tubs, walk-in showers with frameless glass doors, and walk-in closets.
Sawgrass Point
Passco Companies has also purchased Sawgrass Point, a 272-unit luxury, Class AA multifamily community in Gonzales. This acquisition brings the firm’s portfolio in the Baton Rouge metropolitan area to three multifamily properties exceeding 800 units.
“We’ve identified greater Baton Rouge as a market with solid fundamentals that is poised for significant long-term growth,” said Gillis. “This asset is situated within one of the best submarkets, Ascension Parish, which has the highest per capita income in Louisiana and ranks #1 in the state for population growth. Further, we will continue to benefit from amassing economies of scale in the market, with all three of our Baton Rouge assets managed by Arlington Properties.”
“This is an exceptionally crafted community that is well aligned with our strategy to acquire multifamily properties in secondary and tertiary markets that capture the lifestyle-oriented, renter-by-choice demographics,” said Gillis. “The developer had the foresight to incorporate several next-generation amenities, as well as build the asset to the highest National Green Building Standard.”
Passco and the seller were represented by Chad Rigby and Saban Sellers of Stirling Investment Advisors (SIA) and Telly Fathaly of Walker & Dunlop.
Sawgrass Point, which has maintained an occupancy of 97% and higher since lease-up, provides residents with immediate access to Interstate 10 and is located within a 20-minute drive of the major employment centers of East Baton Rouge, and an approximately 45-minute drive from New Orleans.
The gated community offers a car wash station, 24/7 package lockers, a resort-style pool, a large fitness center and yoga room, group fitness classes with fitness on demand, an outdoor kitchen pavilion, a spacious dog park, a dog washing salon, a playground, 24-hour emergency maintenance, pool table, elevator service, air-conditioned interior corridors, a gift-wrapping room, ice machines, an on-site coffee bar, and a business center.
Best-in-market unit amenities include quartz countertops, stainless steel appliance packages, walk-in showers and soaking tubs, kitchen islands, spacious balconies, walk-in closets, faux wood blinds, and garages with select townhomes.
Sawgrass Point is located at 2163 Veterans Boulevard in Gonzales. | https://www.bizneworleans.com/passco-acquires-2-multifamily-communities-in-louisiana/ | 2022-05-06T17:25:32Z |
‘Success Space’ to Bring Retail-Based Co-working Space to N.O. Suburbs
NEW ORLEANS – Success Space, a coworking concept developed under the umbrella of eXp Holdings, announced it has signed a franchise agreement with Michael and Rebecca Robb to open a Success Space location in New Orleans in the fall of 2022. The franchise concept includes co-working spaces, a cafe, coaching services and technology that allows for virtual collaboration.
“An investment with Success Space was an easy choice, especially given the concept is backed by the incredibly Successful eXp World Holdings and its founder, Glenn Sanford,” said Rebecca Robb in a press release. “This concept brings new meaning to work from home, as our facilities and services are unlike any other traditional office or co-working concept — with key differentiators including the certified business and professional coaching, co-working space by the month or minute and a complete cafe offering. I’m confident that this location will be an incredibly valued addition to the community, and will foster both personal and professional growth among the people who live here.”
By targeting suburbs, Success Space aims to support professionals closer to home. The concept includes rent-by-the-minute office space. Success Space co-working environments hope to facilitate conversation and collaboration across communities through certified coaching services and by offering contemporary event space designed to bring local professionals together.
“We’re excited to welcome Michael and Rebecca Robb to the Success Space team and bring a location to New Orleans,” said Ted Laatz, Success Space president. “Like us, they truly believe in the Success Space mission to combine coworking and coaching in local communities. I’m confident that their strong background in management and realty will pair well with our model, and that they will play a critical role in establishing a strong local brand presence.”
Click here to learn more. | https://www.bizneworleans.com/success-space-to-bring-retail-based-co-working-space-to-n-o-suburbs/ | 2022-05-06T17:25:38Z |
AP sources: Donald Trump Jr. speaks with Jan. 6 committee
WASHINGTON (AP) — The oldest son of former President Donald Trump has met with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The interview Tuesday with Donald Trump Jr. comes as the bipartisan House committee moves closer to the former president’s inner circle of family members and political advisers.
The younger Trump is of likely interest to the committee because of his proximity to his father on the day of the riot. Donald Trump Jr. was seen backstage at the rally on the White House Ellipse that took place shortly before supporters of the then-president marched to the Capitol and breached the building.
In several social media videos posted at the time of the Jan. 6 attack, Trump Jr. was seen with Kimberly Guilfoyle — then his girlfriend, now his fiancee — and other members of his family as his father prepared to make a speech that investigators believed rallied supporters to act violently that day.
The House committee has also released text messages from Jan. 6 in which Trump Jr. pleaded with the White House to get his father to forcefully condemn the riot.
“We need an Oval address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand,” Trump Jr. wrote to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Trump Jr. is one of nearly 1,000 witnesses the committee has interviewed as it works to compile a record of the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries. He is the second of Trump’s children known to speak to the committee; sister Ivanka Trump sat down with lawmakers for eight hours in early April. Her husband, Jared Kushner, has also been interviewed by the committee.
Other allies of the former president have defied subpoenas from the committee and been referred to the Justice Department for potential prosecution on contempt of Congress charges. One of them, Stephen Bannon, was indicted last year after he refused to cooperate. That case is pending.
The committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans is looking to wrap up its nearly 11-month investigation and shift into the public hearing phase. Hearings are set to begin June 9 and go on for four weeks. Lawmakers expect to bring out witnesses and present evidence in an effort to educate the public on the full scope of the attack and Donald Trump’s role in it.
Trump Jr. is no stranger to congressional investigations, having testified at least three times in House and Senate investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The two people who confirmed Trump Jr.’s interview with the Jan. 6 committee were granted anonymity to discuss the private session, which was not announced by the committee.
____
Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/ap-sources-donald-trump-jr-speaks-with-jan-6-committee/ | 2022-05-06T17:35:01Z |
Blinken tests positive for COVID, has mild symptoms
WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department said Wednesday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has tested positive for COVID-19 after attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and related events over the weekend.
Spokesman Ned Price said Blinken tested positive in a PCR test on Wednesday afternoon. Price said Blinken is fully vaccinated and is experiencing only mild symptoms.
Blinken tested negative Tuesday and again earlier Wednesday morning with antigen tests but took the PCR test after devloping symptoms. Blinken has not met in person with President Joe Biden for “several days” and is not considered a close contact of the president, according to the White House and State Department.
Before testing positive, Blinken met Wednesday at the State Department with the Swedish foreign minister and on Tuesday with the Mexican foreign secretary. Price said the department is tracking all close contacts that Blinken has had over the past several days and notifying them of the situation.
Blinken had been scheduled to give a speech Thursday about the Biden administration’s China policy, but Price said that speech has been indefinitely postponed.
Price said Blinken, who attended the White House Correspondents Association dinner on Saturday as well as a number of receptions related to it through the weekend, would isolate at home and work virtually until the quarantine period is over.
He is the latest Biden administration figure to test positive. Vice President Kamala Harris was cleared to return to to the White House on Tuesday after testing positive last week.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/blinken-tests-positive-covid-has-mild-symptoms/ | 2022-05-06T17:35:08Z |
DHS disinformation board’s work, plans remain a mystery
WASHINGTON (AP) — There is little credible information about the new Disinformation Governance Board.
And that has made it an instant target for criticism.
The board, part of the Department of Homeland Security, was announced last week. But DHS has released few details on how the board will function and what powers it will have.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was attacked again Wednesday by Republican members of Congress who have already called for the board to be disbanded. Some civil liberties advocates also worry the group could violate freedom of speech.
With disinformation campaigns working to shape opinions on everything from the war in Ukraine to the presidential election in the United States, the rocky start for the board may undermine its effectiveness and hurt the efforts to staunch the harm that false narratives can cause.
“It is just an episodic failure,” said Brian Murphy, a former director of DHS’ intelligence arm, of the board’s launch. “And it has set the true disinformation professionals, wherever they live, back.”
Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, Mayorkas said the board would examine how DHS currently counters disinformation and make sure the agency “does not infringe on freedom of speech, rights of privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.” DHS already has an office of civil rights and civil liberties.
“It is going to establish what should have been established years ago: standards, definitions, guidelines and policies,” he said.
The board’s bungled rollout could also hurt existing efforts to identify and stop foreign disinformation campaigns, which have been labeled a national security threat by both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Russia, China and other adversaries have used social media to push messages at U.S. audiences that stoke division and spread conspiracy theories or falsehoods. In recent months, Russia has waged an aggressive disinformation campaign across platforms to claim images and reports of dead bodies and attacks in Ukraine are fake.
The top Republicans on two key congressional panels wrote to the department on Friday demanding more information. Even privately, congressional staffers say they know little about the board or how it’s being funded beyond the spare public announcements made by the department’s leadership.
“Given the complete lack of information about this new initiative and the potential serious consequences of a government entity identifying and responding to ‘disinformation,’ we have serious concerns about the activities of this new Board,” wrote Reps. Mike Turner of Ohio and John Katko of New York, the top Republicans on the House Intelligence and Homeland Security committees.
DHS that same day held a call with congressional staffers and the board’s new director, Nina Jankowicz, an author and expert on Russian disinformation.
According to one person on the call, Jankowicz said there was a broad vision for what the board would do but did not offer specifics to some questions, including how her organization would work with existing anti-disinformation efforts with DHS. The department also has not provided Congress with detailed written plans beyond a summary it sent to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the same day the department publicly announced the creation of the board.
The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation last year as a problem when they’re trying to access important information, according to a poll conducted by The Pearson Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
But the difference between opinion and disinformation is often contested — and many argue the government shouldn’t be responsible for drawing the line.
The board’s creation spurred outrage across social media, with dozens of conservative pundits and Republican politicians dubbing it the “Ministry of Truth,” a reference to the government agency responsible for creating propaganda in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” The term “Ministry of Truth” trended on Twitter for hours.
Thousands of posts focused on Jankowicz, including past social media posts that criticized Republicans and questioned the veracity of stories about Hunter Biden, the president’s son. Other posts used anti-Semitic language to attack Jankowicz, who is not Jewish, and Mayorkas, who was born to Jewish parents.
While the board was set up in part to combat Russian disinformation, it instead fueled conspiracy theories and more stories in Russian state media. One Kremlin-backed piece carried the headline: “Biden’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ is another propaganda tool.”
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah on Wednesday echoed that point to Mayorkas directly on Wednesday, calling the board a “terrible idea” that “communicates to the world that we’re going to be spreading propaganda in our own country.”
Homeland Security initially said the board would have the two-part mission of countering Russian disinformation activities and false narratives smugglers use to induce people in Latin America to try to reach the U.S.-Mexico border.
“For anyone who’s out there who may be concerned about the increase in migrants to the border, this is the kind of apparatus that’s working to address disinformation,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during a briefing on Monday.
On Monday, the department also announced it would provide quarterly reports to Congress.
Trying to tamp down concerns about “thought police,” Mayorkas said in a television interview to CNN on Sunday that “we in the Department of Homeland Security don’t monitor American citizens.”
In fact, DHS does. The sprawling department, created in response to the security failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has broad authorities to track and collect data on American citizens. It has repeatedly been accused of misusing those powers. In a bulletin earlier this year, DHS said it was using social media to identify potential conspiracy theories that might inspire domestic violence or terrorism. In a statement on Monday, the agency also released examples of how it has responded to misinformation in the past, including during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 when falsehoods spread about drinking water and shelter locations.
And organizations tracking disinformation monitor social media, where it’s sometimes impossible to determine the nationality or location of individual users. Disinformation researchers often identify popular conspiracy theories and trending falsehoods in the U.S. by monitoring public social media groups, pages and accounts.
DHS won’t have the ability to remove posts or accounts that it deems are spreading disinformation. That power still rests with the tech companies themselves, said Katie Harbath, a former public policy director for Facebook who is now the International Republican Institute’s technology and democracy director.
The new disinformation board could help the platforms spot some information operations they might be missing, she said.
“DHS is going to have to do what they normally do,” Harbath said. “If there’s a post they think should be taken down or fact-checked, they can report that to the platforms, but the platforms are going to make their own call.”
___
Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri and Ben Fox contributed to this report.
___
In a story published May 4, 2022, The Associated Press reported that social media posts used anti-Semitic language to attack Disinformation Governance Board Director Nina Jankowicz and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for their Jewish heritage. The story should have made clear that Jankowicz is not Jewish and Mayorkas was born to Jewish parents.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/dhs-disinformation-boards-work-plans-remain-mystery/ | 2022-05-06T17:35:16Z |
Fed raises key rate by a half-point in bid to tame inflation
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve intensified its fight against the worst inflation in 40 years by raising its benchmark interest rate by a half-percentage point Wednesday — its most aggressive move since 2000 — and signaling further large rate hikes to come.
The increase in the Fed’s key short-term rate raised it to a range of 0.75% to 1%, the highest point since the pandemic struck two years ago.
The Fed also announced that it will start reducing its huge $9 trillion balance sheet, made up mainly of Treasury and mortgage bonds. Reducing those holdings will have the effect of further raising borrowing costs throughout the economy.
Speaking at a news conference after the Fed’s latest meeting, Chair Jerome Powell took the unusual step of saying the central bank’s officials understood the financial pain that high inflation is causing ordinary Americans. But Powell stressed that the Fed is sharply raising rates for that very reason — to rein in high inflation, sustain the economy’s health and ease the stress that millions of households are facing.
“Inflation is much too high,” he said, “and we understand the hardship it is causing.”
With prices for food, energy and consumer goods accelerating, the Fed’s goal is to cool spending — and economic growth — by making it more expensive for individuals and businesses to borrow. The central bank hopes that higher costs for mortgages, credit cards and auto loans will slow spending enough to tame inflation yet not so much as to cause a recession.
It will be a delicate balancing act. The Fed has endured widespread criticism that it was too slow to start tightening credit, and many economists are skeptical that it can avoid causing a recession.
At his news conference, Powell said he was confident that the economy is resilient enough to withstand higher borrowing rates. Job openings are at a record high. There are two available jobs, on average, for each unemployed person. Wages are rising at a historically rapid pace, and businesses are continuing to invest in equipment and software.
“I see a strong economy,” he said. “Nothing about it says it’s close to or vulnerable to a recession.”
Powell also made clear that further large rate hikes are coming. He said that additional half-point increases in the Fed’s key rate “should be on the table in the next couple of meetings” in June and July.
But he also sought to downplay any speculation that the Fed might be considering a rate hike as high as three-quarters of a percentage point.
“A (three-quarters of a point) hike is not something that the committee is actively considering,” he said — a remark that caused stock indexes to jump. Before he spoke, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up only modestly. By the close of trading, the Dow had soared 930 points, or 2.8% — its best single-day gain since May 2020.
In their statement, the central bank’s policymakers noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worsening inflation pressures by raising oil and food prices. It added that “COVID-related lockdowns in China are likely to exacerbate supply chain disruptions,” which could further boost prices.
Inflation, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge, reached 6.6% last month, the highest in four decades. It has been accelerated by a combination of robust consumer spending, chronic supply bottlenecks and sharply higher gas and food prices.
Starting June 1, the Fed said it would allow up to $48 billion in bonds to mature without replacing them for three months, then shift to $95 billion by September. At September’s pace, its balance sheet would shrink by about $1 trillion a year. The balance sheet more than doubled after the pandemic recession hit as the Fed bought trillions in bonds to try to hold down long-term borrowing rates.
At the news conference, Powell said the Fed wants to “expeditiously” raise its key rate to a level that neither stimulates nor restrains economic growth, which the Fed has said is about 2.4%. The central bank’s policymakers have suggested that they will reach that point by year’s end.
Once the rate reaches that level, Powell said that “if we do believe that it’s appropriate” to raise their short-term rate further, to a level that would restrict growth, “we won’t hesitate.”
Economists warn that some of the factors fueling inflation — notably, shortages of supplies and workers — are outside the Fed’s ability to solve.
“The Fed can’t fix supply-side challenges with higher interest rates,’’ said Jim Baird, chief investment officer at Plante Moran Financial Advisors. “Fed tightening doesn’t re-open Chinese factories, increase grain shipments from Ukraine, re-position container ships to where they are needed or hire truckers to move goods.’’
Powell said, however, that he thinks the Fed can cool booming demand and thereby help slow inflation.
The Fed’s credit tightening is already having some effect on the economy. Sales of existing homes sank 2.7% from February to March, reflecting a surge in mortgage rates related, in part, to the Fed’s planned rate hikes. The average rate on a 30-year mortgage has jumped 2 percentage points just since the start of the year, to 5.1%.
Powell has pointed to the widespread availability of jobs as evidence that the labor market is tight “to an unhealthy level” and that fuels inflation. The Fed chair is betting that higher rates can reduce those openings, which would presumably slow wage increases and ease inflationary pressures, without triggering mass layoffs.
For now, with hiring robust — the economy has added at least 400,000 jobs for 11 straight months — and employers grappling with labor shortages, wages are rising at a roughly 5% annual pace. Those pay raises are driving steady consumer spending despite spiking prices. In March, consumers increased their spending 0.2% even after adjusting for inflation.
Financial markets are pricing in a Fed rate as high as 3.6% by mid-2023, which would be the highest in 15 years. Shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet will add another layer of uncertainty surrounding how much the Fed’s actions may weaken the economy.
Complicating the Fed’s task is a slowdown in global growth. COVID-19 lockdowns in China are threatening to cause a recession in the world’s second-largest economy. And the European Union is facing higher energy prices and supply chain disruptions after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What’s more, other central banks around the world are also raising rates, a trend that could further imperil global growth. On Thursday, the Bank of England is expected to raise its key rate for the fourth straight time. The Reserve Bank of Australia increased its rate Tuesday for the first time in 11 years.
And the European Central Bank, which is grappling with slower growth than in the United States or the United Kingdom, may raise rates in July, economists expect.
___
AP Economics Writer Paul Wiseman contributed to this report.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/fed-raises-interest-rate/ | 2022-05-06T17:35:23Z |
‘I heard rapid firearm discharges really close to the house.’ neighbors react to drive-by shooting in Bluefield
BLUEFIELD, W.Va. (WVVA) - On Tuesday, Neighbors reported hearing a flurry of shots fired just after five-thirty on Frederick street in Bluefield, West Virginia. A home in the ‘800 block’, appeared to be the target.
Detective Kenneth Adams with Bluefield West Virginia Police Department said multiple cars and firearms were involved and children got caught in the line of fire. A 7-year-old had shrapnel wounds to the face, and a 16-year-old had a bullet graze wound on his left shoulder.
Adams said this isn’t a random act of gun violence. The people involved were related to each other.
Bluefield West Virginia Police arrested 27-year-old Deliezhea Gravely in connection with the shooting. He is currently being held in Southern Regional Jail. His bond is set at 200,000 dollars. Adams believes the recent numbers of shootings in the area are the by-product of questionable parenting.
Police say they are currently on the search for 2 more suspects involved. We’ll continue to bring you more updates on this case as we receive them.
Copyright 2022 WVVA. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/i-heard-rapid-firearm-discharges-really-close-house-neighbors-react-drive-by-shooting-bluefield/ | 2022-05-06T17:35:32Z |
Judge overseeing Chauvin civil rights case accepts plea deal
Published: May. 4, 2022 at 12:59 PM EDT|Updated: May. 4, 2022 at 6:23 PM EDT
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — The judge overseeing the federal civil rights cases of four former Minneapolis police officers in the killing of George Floyd has accepted the terms of Derek Chauvin’s plea agreement and will sentence him to 20 to 25 years in prison.
Chauvin pleaded guilty Dec. 15 to violating Floyd’s civil rights. The white former officer admitted he kept his knee on Floyd’s neck, resulting in the Black man’s death in May 2020.
Judge Paul Magnuson deferred accepting the agreement pending a presentence investigation.
He said in an order Wednesday that the report is complete, but did not set a sentencing date.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/judge-overseeing-chauvin-civil-rights-case-accepts-plea-deal/ | 2022-05-06T17:35:39Z |
Kimberly man faces felony charges in sexual assault case
Published: May. 4, 2022 at 5:59 PM EDT
FAYETTE COUNTY, W.Va. (WVVA) - A Kimberly man was arrested in Fayette County Wednesday, May 4, following an investigation into an alleged sexual assault.
Clayton A. Smith, 20 of Kimberly, is charged with the felony offense of sexual assault in the third degree. During the investigation, authorities found that Smith was having consensual sexual relations with a female who was under the age of 14.
Smith was arraigned by a Fayette County Magistrate where he posted a $50,000 bond. He will now await further court proceedings.
Copyright 2022 WVVA. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/kimberly-man-faces-felony-charges-sexual-assault-case/ | 2022-05-06T17:35:48Z |
Kitten recovering after being rescued from Las Vegas dumpster fire
Published: May. 4, 2022 at 4:54 PM EDT
LAS VEGAS, Nev. (KVVU/Gray News) - A 4-week-old kitten was rescued from a dumpster fire in Las Vegas.
The Animal Foundation of Las Vegas is treating the kitten, which they named Savannah, in their kitten nursery. The shelter doesn’t have many details on how Savannah was caught in the fire, but she suffered burnt paws, singed fur and whiskers, KVVU reported.
Savannah is on medication to help with pain and is in an incubator to warm her up. The Animal Foundation said she will be going to a foster home to heal.
To donate to Savannah’s care, visit animalfoundation.com/savannah.
Copyright 2022 KVVU via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/kitten-recovering-after-being-rescued-las-vegas-dumpster-fire/ | 2022-05-06T17:35:54Z |
Oath Keeper from NC pleads guilty to seditious conspiracy
A North Carolina man pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiring with other members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group to forcefully halt the peaceful transfer of power after President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.
William Todd Wilson, 44, of Newton Grove, North Carolina, is the third Oath Keepers member to plead guilty to a seditious conspiracy charge stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Brian Ulrich, 44, of Guyton, Georgia, pleaded guilty to the same charge last Friday. Joshua James, 34, of Arab, Alabama, was the first Oath Keepers member to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, 55, of Granbury, Texas, and eight others linked to the group have pleaded not guilty to seditious conspiracy and other charges. A trial for some of them is scheduled to start in July.
Unlike James and Ulrich, Wilson wasn’t charged in the initial January 2022 indictment for the seditious conspiracy case.
The charge is rarely employed. Before January, the last time U.S. prosecutors brought such a seditious conspiracy case was in 2010 in an alleged Michigan plot by members of the Hutaree militia to incite an uprising against the government.
Wilson was an Oath Keeper member since 2016 and a Sampson County leader of the group’s North Carolina chapter, according to a court filing. The filing describes him as a military and law enforcement veteran but doesn’t include any details of his service.
“Some members of the Oath Keepers, like Wilson, believe that the federal government has been coopted by a cabal of elites actively trying to strip American citizens of their rights,” the filing says.
Wilson brought a rifle, pistol, ammunition and other combat gear when he drove to the Washington area on Jan. 5. He left the weapons in a Virginia hotel room but was armed with a pocketknife and wearing a neck gaiter and beanie hat to mask his appearance when he and other Oath Keepers entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, prosecutors said.
Oath Keepers members dressed in paramilitary clothing stormed the Capitol in “stack” formations. Others amassed firearms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C, and were prepared to bring the weapons into the city on Jan. 6 if Rhodes or his associates believed the need arose, according to prosecutors. In the end, the group’s “quick reaction force” teams didn’t bring guns into Washington.
Before he left the Capitol, Wilson joined a mob of people trying to push open the Rotunda Doors from inside the building, according to prosecutors.
Later that afternoon, according to a court filing, Wilson joined Rhodes and others in a hotel’s private suite, where Rhodes called somebody over a speaker phone and repeatedly implored the person to tell Trump to ‘”call upon groups like the Oath Keepers to forcibly oppose the transfer of power.” The unidentified person on the phone refused to let Rhodes speak directly with Trump.
“After the call ended, Rhodes stated to the group, ‘I just want to fight,’” the filing says.
Several days after he returned home, Wilson tossed his cellphone into the Atlantic Ocean to keep its contents out of law enforcement’s hands, prosecutors said.
Wilson also pleaded guilty to a charge of obstructing an official proceeding, the joint session of Congress for certifying Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump.
Four other people connected with the Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty to obstruction of Congress and a lesser conspiracy charge, A conviction under the seditious conspiracy charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years, compared with five years on the lesser conspiracy charge.
More than 780 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Jan. 6 riot. Over 270 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors. More than 160 of them have been sentenced.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/oath-keeper-nc-pleads-guilty-seditious-conspiracy/ | 2022-05-06T17:36:04Z |
Police: 4-month-old baby dies, parents arrested after witness spots grave in backyard
LAS VEGAS (KVVU/Gray News) - Las Vegas police are investigating a homicide where a 4-month-old baby was found dead inside a home last month.
KVVU reports Miles Stano Jr. and Lindsey Bello were arrested in connection with the death of their child on April 1.
A witness told police they thought the baby’s death was planned and they were going to bury him as a grave was spotted in their backyard a week after his death, according to a police arrest report.
Police said they were originally called on April 1 to a home, with the caller telling them an infant was found cold and not breathing.
The mother, Bello, reportedly put her baby down for a nap that morning and then found him not breathing about six hours later, the arrest report said.
The Clark County Coroner observed multiple bruises and abrasions on the baby and described the child as “emaciated.” The child also had two skull fractures. The boy’s death was ruled a homicide from blunt force trauma, the report said.
Bello told police she was in a relationship with the boy’s father, Stano Jr., for about a year. She said she believed she was “exposed” to methamphetamine and cocaine while pregnant but described the baby as healthy since being born.
The police report said when Bello was told of the injuries to her baby; she said she didn’t know how the child was injured. Bello reportedly asked Stano Jr. about the injuries, but he didn’t know where they came from either.
Bello said she never observed Stano Jr. being rough with the baby, and Stano Jr. said the same about Bello, the report said.
Police said they found the boy’s mattress in a dumpster along with a wipe with blood on it and a bloody blanket.
A witness later told police that Bello said she gave Stano Jr. “permission” to throw the child against a wall, the report said.
Police said that during a polygraph exam on April 2, Bello told them that Stano Jr. had killed the baby. When Stano Jr. did a polygraph, police said he became belligerent, incessantly chanting, “I did not hurt my son.”
A witness told police they overheard Bello saying Stano Jr. killed the baby and she was taking the blame so he could raise his other children, the report said. Other witnesses said they heard Bello say she had killed the baby.
Police said Stano Jr. later reportedly screamed and said he didn’t harm his son and that Bello had lied to him about how his son died. Bello was “calm and jovial” before she was interviewed by police, according to the arrest report, until she realized Stano Jr. was also arrested.
The couple was not granted bail in a court hearing on May 3, according to court records. Their next hearing is currently scheduled for May 10.
Copyright 2022 KVVU via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/police-4-month-old-baby-dies-parents-arrested-after-witness-spots-grave-backyard/ | 2022-05-06T17:36:13Z |
Rapper Kidd Creole sentenced to 16 years for fatal stabbing
NEW YORK (AP) — Rapper Kidd Creole, who was a founding member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, was sentenced Wednesday to 16 years in prison for stabbing a homeless man to death on a New York City street.
The 62-year-old rapper, born Nathaniel Glover, was found guilty of manslaughter last month for the death of John Jolly, who was stabbed twice in the chest with a steak knife in midtown Manhattan in August 2017.
Prosecutors accused Glover of stabbing Jolly after becoming enraged because he thought Jolly was gay and was hitting on him. After stabbing Jolly, who was 55, Glover headed to his workplace nearby, changed his clothes and washed the knife, prosecutors said. Glover was arrested the following day.
“Mr. Jolly’s death was devastating to his family and those who knew him,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a news release after the sentencing. “Every life we lose to violent crime ripples throughout our entire city, and we will continue to ensure everyone in our borough can live their lives with the sense of safety and security they deserve.”
The New York Times reports that Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Michele Rodney appeared to take issue with arguments made by Glover’s lawyer, Scottie Celestin, who said during the trial that Glover had felt threatened in part because Jolly was homeless.
“A life is a life is a life,” Rodney said, adding as she sentenced Glover that the killing was not “somehow justified because the person is homeless.”
Celestin said he would appeal the conviction.
Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five formed in the late 1970s in the Bronx. The group’s best-known song is “The Message” from 1982. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, the first rap group to be included.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/rapper-kidd-creole-sentenced-16-years-fatal-stabbing/ | 2022-05-06T17:36:25Z |
Rattlesnake handler dies after snake bite during show, family says
FREER, Texas (Gray News) - A rattlesnake handler died over the weekend in Texas while handling a snake during a show at the Freer Rattlesnake Roundup event.
Eugene Roberto DeLeon, 60, was bitten by a rattlesnake on April 30 while performing at the annual show, according to his family. DeLeon was flown to a hospital in Corpus Christi where he later died.
DeLeon was a veteran snake handler and part of the Snake Busters Snake Handlers. His sister, Monica Dimas, shared on social media that he had a passion for snake handling and died doing what he loved.
According to the Mauro P. Garcia Funeral Home, DeLeon graduated from Freer High School in 1981. He was a volunteer firefighter for the Freer Fire Department and a custodian at Freer High School.
Dimas wrote for those to keep her family in prayer while she helps raise money to pay for her brother’s funeral expenses.
DeLeon was a loving husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle and friend who will be sadly missed by all who knew him, according to his obituary.
Services for DeLeon are scheduled to be held on May 7 at the Mauro P. Garcia Funeral Home Chapel in San Diego, Texas.
Copyright 2022 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/rattlesnake-handler-dies-after-snake-bite-during-show-family-says/ | 2022-05-06T17:36:32Z |
Satanic Temple asks Boston to fly flag after Supreme Court ruling
BOSTON (AP) — The Satanic Temple is requesting to fly a flag over Boston City Hall after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week that the city violated the free speech rights of a conservative activist seeking to fly a Christian flag outside the downtown building.
The Salem-based group tweeted a request filed Tuesday with the city property management department to raise a flag marking “Satanic Appreciation Week” from July 23-29.
Mayor Michelle Wu’s office declined to comment on the group’s request other than to say it’s reviewing the high court’s decision while also evaluating its flag-raising program.
Lucien Greaves, the organization’s co-founder, said in an email Wednesday that the group wants to show that religious liberty must mean respect for “all forms” of religious practice and religious opinion.
“When government officials are able to impose arbitrary restrictions on claims of conscience, or to abridge the civic capacities of some based on their religious identity, we fail to be a free, democratic republic,” he wrote in part.
The organization hasn’t decided which of its official flags it will ask the city to fly, Greaves said, but one likely option echoes the American flag, only with black and white stripes and an emblem of a pentagram and goat skull where the 50 stars would be.
The Satanic Temple is separate from the Church of Satan, which was founded in the 1960s. Founded in 2013, the Satanic Temple doesn’t believe in Satan and describes itself as a “non-theistic religious organization” that advocates for secularism.
It has lodged freedom of religion challenges nationwide, including a federal lawsuit arguing the Boston City Council’s traditional opening prayer at its public meetings is discriminatory and unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that Boston discriminated against activist Harold Shurtleff because of his “religious viewpoint,” even though it had routinely approved other flag raising requests.
In 2017, Shurtleff and his Camp Constitution wanted to fly a white banner with a red cross on a blue background called the Christian flag to mark Constitution Day on Sept. 17.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/satanic-temple-asks-boston-fly-flag-after-court-ruling/ | 2022-05-06T17:36:43Z |
Team USA honored at White House
WASHINGTON (Gray DC) - The White House honored more than 600 U.S. Olympic athletes today.
Olympians and Paralympians from the 2020 and 2022 games traveled to D.C. and were welcomed by the President on the south lawn.
Washington News Bureau’s Brendan Cullerton reports, “As the White House has loosened COVID-19 restrictions, President Joe Biden has invited Team U.S.A. to the White House for the first time in his presidency.”
Hundreds of Team U.S.A. athletes were greeted with cheers from fans who attended the in-person celebration. It was a welcoming the team missed out on during the 2020 summer games in Tokyo due to the pandemic.
The 200 medalists were honored by President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden.
President Biden congratulated the athletes saying, “We believe in America anything is possible, and you are the explanation of what we mean.”
Elana Meyers Taylor, the most decorated black athlete in the history of the Winter Olympics, spoke on behalf of the athletes. “This team is resilient. We came together and we persevered. And we hope we’ve made this country proud.”
Cullerton spoke with some of the athletes after the ceremony. Watch their comments below.
Copyright 2022 Gray DC. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/team-usa-honored-white-house/ | 2022-05-06T17:36:51Z |
Thieves steal almost 10,000 gallons of gas as police warn about increase in thefts
LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5/Gray News) - Police in Las Vegas arrested three men in connection to the theft of almost 10,000 gallons of gas. They are warning residents about an uptick in gas thieves during the summer months.
Gas prices are up more than a $1.50 from this time last year even before the summer travel rush. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said sky-high prices are motivating thieves.
At a gas station off Interstate 15 and Blue Diamond, the Chevron gas station at Windmill and Las Vegas Boulevard, police reported that a fuel theft ring stole almost 10,000 gallons of gas, KVVU reported.
An employee at another gas station near Harry Reid International Airport noticed that a significant amount of gas was missing and reviewed surveillance video.
They spotted a large white truck at a gas station. Police said Raidel Amador Blanco, Luis Gomez Medero and Javier Ramos Gomez altered the truck which was parked at the pump for two hours.
The same evening, an off-duty officer walking by the Chevron on Las Vegas Boulevard noticed a Dodge Ram that had been parked at the pump nearly four hours.
Detectives stopped the truck and found sophisticated pipes, electric pumps, hoses, and nozzles with fuel bladders hidden in cargo areas.
Thieves are also drilling into gas tanks of individual cars. There have been more than a half a dozen incidents reported in just the last few months.
The cost to fix one small hole in your gas tank can be thousands.
“As gas prices continue to rise over the summer months, thieves are going to try and steal your liquid gold,” the department said in a statement.
Police said if you notice your car won’t run, look for small holes in your gas tank made by power tools.
Also, pay attention to the smell of gas when approaching your vehicle or liquid puddles underneath.
To help prevent theft, park in a covered or well-lit area and avoid public parking for extended periods of time.
The LVMPD Financial Crime section has been investigating fuel thefts that have been occurring all around the Las Vegas valley.
Metro said these types of crimes occur around the clock and often in plain sight. Call police or advise gas station employees if you see a gas crime happening.
Copyright 2022 KVVU via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/thieves-steal-almost-10000-gallons-gas-police-warn-about-increase-thefts/ | 2022-05-06T17:36:58Z |
US quietly expands asylum limits while preparing to end them
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Biden administration has begun expelling Cubans and Nicaraguans to Mexico under pandemic-related powers to deny migrants a chance to seek asylum, expanding use of the rule even as it publicly says it has been trying to unwind it, officials said Wednesday.
The U.S. struck an agreement with Mexico to expel up to 100 Cubans and 20 Nicaraguans a day from three locations: San Diego; El Paso, Texas; and Rio Grande Valley, Texas, according to a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the effort.
The expulsions began April 27 and will end May 22, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the agreement has not been made public. They are carried out under Title 42 authority, which was named for a public health law and used to expel migrants on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. Title 42 is due to expire May 23.
The U.S. and Mexico agreed April 26 to very limited expulsions of Cubans and Nicaraguans, according to a high-level Mexican official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. It was prompted by higher numbers of migrants from those two countries coming to the U.S. border.
Another Mexican official, also not authorized to comment publicly, confirmed that up to 100 Cubans and 20 Nicaraguans were being expelled from San Diego under Title 42 under an agreement that runs through May 22.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Until last week, Mexico only agreed to take Guatemalans, Hondurans and El Salvadorans — in addition to Mexicans — under Title 42 authority. Other nationalities are subject to Title 42 but costs, strained diplomatic ties and other considerations often make it difficult to send them back to their home countries.
It’s next to impossible for the U.S. to expel migrants to Cuba or Nicaragua due to poor relations with those governments. That has posed an acute challenge for the Biden administration as more people from those countries seek haven in the United States.
Cubans were stopped by U.S. authorities more than 32,000 times on the Mexican border in March, double the number in February and more than five times October’s count, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Nicaragua eased travel restrictions from Cuba in November, making it easier for Cubans to continue by land to the U.S. border. Most enter the U.S. in or near Yuma, Arizona, and Del Rio, Texas.
Last month, Cuba and the United States took a tentative step toward thawing relations and resuming joint efforts to address irregular migration during the highest-level talks between the two countries in four years.
There were no major breakthroughs, but the mere fact that the U.S. was holding substantive talks was a sign relations might be looking better under President Joe Biden after going into deep freeze under his predecessor, Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said Friday.
“They seem committed. They ratified that they are committed to the agreements in place,” Fernandez de Cossio said. “So we have no reason to mistrust what they’re saying, but time will tell.”
Nicaraguans were stopped more than 16,000 times in March, more than double September’s level. The vast majority enter in South Texas.
Lifting Title 42 has proven controversial as midterm elections near, even for Biden’s Democratic Party, amid concerns that the U.S. is unprepared for an anticipated increase in migrants seeking asylum. Authorities stopped migrants more than 221,000 times in March, the highest mark in 22 years.
The White House and Homeland Security Department have publicly stood behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision to end the measure because it could no longer be justified on grounds of protecting public health.
But the practice of expelling Cubans and Nicaraguans runs counter to the administration’s public statements that it was phasing out use of the pandemic powers to prepare for May 23. The Washington Post reported earlier Wednesday that U.S. and Mexico struck an agreement to do so for Cubans and Nicaraguans.
The U.S. has expelled migrants more than 1.8 million times under Title 42 authority since March 2020, effectively overriding rights to seek asylum under U.S. law and international treaty. In doing so, migrants are not subject to immigration law, which include rights to seek protection from persecution at home.
The administration said in court filings that it began processing more Central American adults under immigration laws after the CDC’s announcement on April 1. But a federal judge in Louisiana ruled last week that it couldn’t start unwinding Title 42 while it was still in effect.
U.S. District Judge Robert Summerhays strongly criticized the CDC’s decision, suggesting he would try to keep Title 42 in effect after May 23. A hearing is scheduled May 13 for oral arguments.
Marisa Limón, senior director of advocacy and planning at the Hope Border Institute, said advocates began learning about expulsions of Cubans and Nicaraguans from El Paso on Monday and later confirmed the new practice with U.S. officials.
Limón said the administration is “trying to get every last bit out of Title 42″ before it expires. She called it “sobering” but consistent with the administration’s efforts to have other countries in the Western hemisphere take more responsibility for hosting people fleeing their homes.
___
Sherman reported from Mexico City.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/05/04/us-quietly-expands-asylum-limits-while-preparing-end-them/ | 2022-05-06T17:37:05Z |
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