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- Dr. Stefan Bean, Veteran Educational Administrator and Leader, Named Executive Director
- Mrs. Sandy Small, Popular Returning Teacher, Elevated to Assistant Principal
IRVINE, Calif., Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Irvine International Academy announced today the appointment of Dr. Stefan Bean as Executive Director and Mrs. Sandy Small as Assistant Principal for the 2022-23 school year. The Mandarin Immersion and STEAM Charter School is preparing to begin its' second year of operation, with school beginning on August 18.
"Dr. Bean brings a breadth of knowledge and experience with charter schools that will prove valuable to our students and teachers, and Mrs. Small played an invaluable role during our inaugural school year," said Dough Husen, IIA Board President. "Together, their leadership and institutional knowledge will benefit our students, teachers and parents."
Dr. Bean also will serve as the school's new Principal. A longtime educational administrator and leader, Dr. Bean brings more than two decades of experience as a teacher, principal, assistant superintendent, and most recently, superintendent of a leading charter organization in California. He has served on the boards of numerous educational organizations, including the Orange County Classical Academy, Los Angeles Coalition for Excellent School and the W.A.Y.S. Academy for Young Scientist Charter School.
Mrs. Small begins her second year at Irvine International Academy. Last year she served as a teacher, and is very familiar with the students, staff and inner workings of the school, and her depth of passion and commitment to the students and their learning environment made her a perfect fit for this new role.
"We are very fortunate to add Dr. Bean and Mrs. Small in these key roles as we strive to build the best Mandarin immersion and STEAM charter school in the region," said Husen. "There were a lot of lessons learned during our first year, and that knowledge – combined with this team's talents – position us for future success."
"I'm very excited about the opportunity to lead the Irvine International Academy," said Dr. Bean. "Last year's academic achievement – with our student's math and science scores exceeding the local public school's average and the highest of any dual immersion charter school in Irvine – demonstrates the unique opportunity our students have to learn at the premier Mandarin Immersion and STEAM charter school in the region," said Dr. Bean.
He added, "Our specialty classes, including PE, art and STEAM, STEAM Lab and the dedication and commitment from our teachers and staff are a game-changer for parents seeking the best dual immersion education for their children in Irvine."
About Irvine International Academy
Irvine International Academy is a Mandarin Immersion and STEAM charter school located in Irvine, California. IIA provides a unique learning environment for students to learn in both English and Mandarin Chinese, and provide students with the best path for educational success. Additionally, students are steeped in the STEAM educational disciplines, including science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. For more information on the Irvine International Academy, visit: https://irvineia.org/.
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SOURCE The Irvine International Academy | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/irvine-international-academy-announces-new-leadership-team-2022-2023-school-year/ | 2022-08-12T21:47:59Z |
Courts continue to scrutinize J&J's controversial bankruptcy ploy to avoid liability
MONTGOMERY, Ala., Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Legal experts say the decision by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) to halt future sales and distribution of talc-based products worldwide, including its iconic Johnson's Baby Powder, points to mounting pressure on the company to resolve tens of thousands of legal claims brought by ovarian cancer and mesothelioma victims.
Numerous scientific studies spanning decades have established the carcinogenic effects of cosmetic talc, while U.S. and Canadian governmental regulators have called for enhanced testing techniques for products containing the mineral, particularly after independent testing by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration revealed asbestos in consumer samples of talc-based powders. Meanwhile, internal corporate documents presented in trials during the past several years have shown that J&J and its consultants knew of the dangers of the company's products and took steps to deny or otherwise cover up those findings to avoid legal liability.
"J&J has finally done the right thing. Throughout decades of selling talc-based products, the company knew talc could cause deadly cancers to unsuspecting women and men around the world," says Leigh O'Dell of the Beasley Allen Law Firm in Montgomery. "They stopped sales in North America more than two years ago and blamed that move on the litigation. The delay in taking this step is inexcusable. I can only hope J&J will now do the next right: take responsibility and adequately compensate the victims they have needlessly harmed."
The vast majority of the more than 38,000 cases filed by ovarian cancer victims against J&J were consolidated in multidistrict litigation in New Jersey federal court, and bellwether trials had been scheduled to begin last spring. Those proceedings were put on hold in late 2021 when the company chose to pursue a controversial "Texas Two-Step" bankruptcy.
That scheme involved creating a new corporate shell company to hold all talc-related liabilities before taking that entity into bankruptcy. If successful, the tactic would allow Johnson & Johnson to avoid paying cancer victims and protect a market capitalization of approximately a half-trillion dollars. Because of the bankruptcy, all trials in the MDL and others filed in state courts are currently suspended.
The two-step move has raised eyebrows in Congress, where representatives have begun discussing potential changes to the bankruptcy laws that would prevent this sort of consumer harm in future cases.
"The potential loss of a jury trial is not a mere by-product of the filing; the sole purpose of the bankruptcy is to remove tort claimants from the tort system and strip them of their rights against extraordinarily wealthy and highly solvent entities," wrote Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California's Berkeley School of Law, in a brief filed with the bankruptcy court.
"The Debtor is a newly created shell, with no business to restructure, no operations to rehabilitate, and no customers or genuine employees to serve. In short, the Debtor has no reorganizational purpose," he noted in the brief, one of many filed by constitutional scholars raising concerns about the "Two-Step."
The propriety of the bankruptcy and accompanying halt to litigation imposed by the bankruptcy court will be reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in a hearing Sept. 19.
About Beasley Allen Law Firm
Headquartered in Montgomery, Ala., Beasley Allen is comprised of more than 70 attorneys and 200 support staff. One of the largest Plaintiffs law firms in the country, Beasley Allen is a national leader in civil litigation, with verdicts and settlements in excess of $26 billion. Beasley Allen was one of only 12 firms in the nation named by Law360 to its Most Feared Plaintiffs Firms list in 2015, and the firm was included on the National Law Journal Midsize Law Firm Hot List and the NLJ Elite Trial Lawyers List in 2014. For more information about our firm, please visit our website at www.beasleyallen.com.
Media Contact:
Barry Pound
800-559-4534
Barry@androvett.com
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SOURCE Beasley Allen Law Firm | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/johnson-amp-johnson-ends-global-sales-cancer-causing-baby-powder-amid-increased-scrutiny-consumer-litigation-science/ | 2022-08-12T21:48:06Z |
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- King's Hawaiian is voluntarily recalling its Pretzel Slider Buns, Pretzel Hamburger Buns and Pretzel Bites products out of an abundance of caution following a recall of an ingredient used in the pretzel products from one of its suppliers, Lyons Magnus. Lyons Magnus is recalling this ingredient due to the potential for it to cause microbial contamination including from the organisms Cronobacter sakazakii and Clostridium botulinum. While no illnesses associated with King's Hawaiian pretzel bread have been reported, and no pathogens have been found in any King's Hawaiian products to date, the recall is being conducted to ensure consumer safety.
This recall does not impact any other King's Hawaiian products, as no other products use this ingredient from Lyons Magnus. King's Hawaiian will resume producing all pretzel products once the company has ensured all current product has been disposed of and has confirmed the safety of all ingredients.
Consumers in possession of any King's Hawaiian Pretzel Slider Buns, King's Hawaiian Pretzel Hamburger Buns or King's Hawaiian Pretzel Bites should dispose of the product. Consumers can contact King's Hawaiian at 877-695-4227, Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. PT, if they have any questions, or to request replacement product.
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King's Hawaiian advises that consumers in possession of any King's Hawaiian Pretzel Slider Buns, King's Hawaiian Pretzel Hamburger Buns or King's Hawaiian Pretzel Bites should dispose of the product. If there is a concern about specific Lot Codes, below is a list of Lots affected:
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SOURCE King's Hawaiian | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/kings-hawaiian-issues-voluntary-recall-pretzel-slider-buns-pretzel-hamburger-buns-pretzel-bites-due-recall-an-ingredient-supplier-lyons-magnus/ | 2022-08-12T21:48:12Z |
LEHIGH COUNTY, Pa., Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- AARP Pennsylvania joined Lehigh County officials and PA Dole Fellow Georgette Wenton as Lehigh County became a Hidden Heroes County, joining the Elizabeth Dole Foundation's network of nearly 200 communities nationwide committed to identifying military caregivers and increasing awareness and support.
The Hidden Heroes Cities and Counties Program is part of The Elizabeth Dole Foundation's Hidden Heroes Campaign. The program was launched in 2016 by Senator Elizabeth Dole, Campaign Chair Tom Hanks, and nearly 200 military caregivers representing virtually every state in the union as a way to engage with leaders at the local level to raise awareness about the issues military caregivers face, bring critical resources to our nation's "hidden heroes" caring for wounded, ill and injured service members and veterans, and connect military caregivers to a community of their peers.
AARP has a long history of supporting those who have served in the United States armed forces and has partnered with the Dole Foundation for several years. This partnership has included creating the Respite Relief Program for Military and Veteran Caregivers nationwide in February 2021. This free program grants family caregivers access to no-cost, short-term assistance to help those caring for wounded, ill or injured veterans or service members at home.
"Whether a parent, spouse, sibling, or other loved one, a veteran's caregiver needs to know they are supported as they help those who sacrificed the most for us," said AARP PA State Director Bill Johnston-Walsh. "On behalf of our 1.8 million members, AARP Pennsylvania is proud that another Keystone State community is making that support more visible in Lehigh County."
Lehigh County Executive Philips Armstrong signed the Resolution Friday, making Lehigh County the 5th Hidden Heroes county in Pennsylvania, joining the counties of Allegheny, Berks, Monroe and Wyoming, along with the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
"Lehigh County is pleased to have been recognized for our work to help veterans and members of our armed services," said Armstrong. "These brave men and women fought for us, so in Lehigh County, we fight for them."
As a 2021 Dole Caregiver Fellow, Georgette Wenton represents a select group of Dole Foundation in a formal capacitity, including advocacy, sharing their stories, and connecting other caregivers with information and resources. In recognition of the Lehigh County designation as a Hidden Heroes County, Ms. Wenton commented, "Being a part of the Hidden Heroes Caregiver Community reinforces that I am not alone in this journey—in both the emotions I feel and the challenges of being a caregiver… Being my husband's caregiver means I have the opportunity to make sure he feels loved and cared for on a daily basis."
Individuals caring for someone who served, or those who wish to support the campaign can visit HiddenHeroes.org for more information.
The Elizabeth Dole Foundation is the preeminent organization empowering, supporting, and honoring our nation's 5.5 million military caregivers – the spouses, parents, family members, and friends — who care for America's wounded, ill or injured service members and Veterans at home. Founded by Senator Elizabeth Dole in 2012, the Foundation adopts a comprehensive approach in its support and advocacy, working with leaders in the public, private, nonprofit, and faith communities to recognize military caregivers' service and promote their well-being. The Foundation's Hidden Heroes campaign brings vital attention to the untold stories of military caregivers and provides a network for military caregivers to connect with their peers and access carefully vetted resources. Visit www.hiddenheroes.org for more information.
AARP is the nation's largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering people 50 and older to choose how they live as they age. With a nationwide presence and nearly 38 million members - including 1.8 million in Pennsylvania - AARP strengthens communities and advocates for what matters most to families: health security, financial stability and personal fulfillment. AARP also produces the nation's largest circulation publications: AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. To learn more, visit www.aarp.org, www.aarp.org/espanol or follow @AARP, @AARPenEspanol @AARPadvocates and @AliadosAdelante on social media.
CONTACT: TJ Thiessen, (202) 374-8033, tthiessen@aarp.org
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SOURCE AARP Pennsylvania | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/lehigh-county-joins-growing-movement-nearly-200-communities-nationwide-committed-empowering-military-caregivers-their-hometowns/ | 2022-08-12T21:48:19Z |
(All dollar amounts are in United States dollars unless otherwise indicated)
TSXV: MTA
NYSE American: MTA
VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Metalla Royalty & Streaming Ltd. ("Metalla" or the "Company") (TSXV: MTA) (NYSE: MTA) announces its operating and financial results for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022. For complete details of the condensed interim consolidated financial statements and accompanying management's discussion and analysis for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022, please see the Company's filings on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) or EDGAR (www.sec.gov). Shareholders are encouraged to visit the Company's website at www.metallaroyalty.com.
Brett Heath, President, and CEO of Metalla, commented, "In the second quarter of 2022, we saw several significant advancements and milestones achieved within our royalty portfolio. G Mining's Tocantinzinho project secured a $481M financing package, expected to reach production in the second half of 2024. Wasamac's production profile was increased to 250k oz Au per year by Yamana Gold, making it an expected top 10 gold producer in Canada. We also saw discoveries made at Moneta's Garrison project and Canadian Malartic's Camflo property that look to provide even more potential upside. We are pleased to see our assets continue to advance and benefit from our strong counterparties at a time when equity and debt markets remain constrained."
During the six months ended June 30, 2022, and the subsequent period up to the date of this news release, the Company:
- Noted the following key milestones announced by operators of certain properties in its portfolio of royalties and streams (please see the 'Asset Updates' section of this press release for the details of these announcements):
- Amended an existing 1.0% NSR royalty on Monarch's Beaufor Mine. In consideration for $1.0 million paid in cash to Monarch, Monarch agreed to waive a clause stipulating that payments under the NSR royalty were only payable after 100 Koz of gold have been produced by Monarch following its acquisition of Beaufor Mine. Payments under this NSR royalty will commence shortly as Monarch announced the start of production during July 2022 (see below).
- For the three months ended June 30, 2022, received or accrued payments on 560 attributable Gold Equivalent Ounces ("GEOs") at an average realized price of $1,844 and an average cash cost of $9 per attributable GEO (see non-IFRS Financial Measures). For the six months ended June 30, 2022, received or accrued payments on 1,284 attributable GEOs at an average realized price of $1,839 and an average cash cost of $7 per attributable GEO (see non-IFRS Financial Measures);
- For the three months ended June 30, 2022, recognized revenue from royalty and stream interests, including fixed royalty payments, of $0.5 million, net loss of $1.4 million, and adjusted EBITDA of negative $0.2 million (see non-IFRS Financial Measures). For the six months ended June 30, 2022, recognized revenue from royalty and stream interests, including fixed royalty payments, of $1.1 million, net loss of $3.6 million, and adjusted EBITDA of negative $0.2 million (see non-IFRS Financial Measures);
- For the three months ended June 30, 2022, generated operating cash margin of $1,835 per attributable GEO, and for the six months ended June 30, 2022, generate operating cash margin of $1,832 per attributable GEO, from the Wharf, Joaquin, and COSE royalties, the New Luika Gold Mine ("NLGM") stream held by Silverback Ltd. ("Silverback"), the Higginsville derivative royalty asset, and other royalty interests (see non-IFRS Financial Measures);
- For the three months ended June 30, 2022, recognized payments due or received (not included in revenue) from the Higginsville derivative royalty asset of $0.6 million, and for the six months ended June 30, 2022, recognized payments due or received from the Higginsville derivative royalty asset of $1.2 million (see non-IFRS Financial Measures);
- On May 12, 2022, the Company filed a new final short form base shelf prospectus and a corresponding registration statement on Form F-10 that replaced the base shelf prospectus and Form F-10 registration statement previously filed by the Company in 2020, and to enhance the Company's financial flexibility. In connection with this transition, the Company terminated its At-The-Market ("ATM") program announced on May 14, 2021 (the "2021 ATM Program"). From inception on May 14, 2021, to the termination on May 12, 2022, the Company distributed 1,990,778 common shares under the 2021 ATM program at an average price of $8.18 per share for gross proceeds of $16.3 million, of which 20,170 common shares were sold during the three months ended June 30, 2022, at an average price of $7.13 per common share for gross proceeds of $0.1 million;
- On May 27, 2022, the Company announced that it had entered into a new equity distribution agreement with a syndicate of agents to establish an ATM equity program (the "2022 ATM Program") under which the Company may distribute up to $50.0 million (or the equivalent in Canadian Dollars) in common shares of the Company. From inception to the date of this press release, the Company did not distribute any common shares under the 2022 ATM program; and
- In August 2022, the Company and Beedie Capital entered into an agreement to extend the maturity date of its loan facility from April 21, 2023, to January 22, 2024 (the "Loan Extension"). In consideration for the Loan Extension the Company incurred a fee of 2.0% of the currently drawn amount of C$8.0 million, the C$160,000 fee will be convertible into common shares at a conversion price of C$7.34 per share, calculated based on a 20% premium to the 30-day Volume Weighted Average Price of the Company's common shares on the trading day immediately prior to the effective date of the Loan Extension. The Loan Extension is subject to stock exchange approvals which are pending.
Beaufor Mine
On July 5, 2022, Monarch announced that it had begun processing ore from its Beaufor Mine at its wholly-owned Beacon Mill, it reported it had stockpiled a total of 30,549 tonnes of ore averaging 4.76 g/t gold and would start feeding the mill with that ore and expected to pour its first bar of gold in July 2022. On July 27, 2022, Monarch further announced the production of its first gold bar from the Beaufor Mine, and announced it expects to reach commercial production in the coming months.
On June 16, 2022, Monarch reported results from recent drilling at the Q Zone where significant intercepts include 122 g/t over 1.4 meters, 20.74 g/t over 3.3 meters, 83.2 g/t gold over 0.5 meters and 18.87 g/t gold over 1.2 meters. On July 25, 2022, Monarch reported high grade results from drilling at the Q Zone that included 37.59 g/t gold over 2.5 meters, 29.79 g/t gold over 2.45 meters and 418 g/t gold over 0.63 meters, highlighting the potential to expand the Q Zone at depth.
Metalla holds a 1.0% NSR royalty on the Beaufor mine.
Wharf Royalty
On August 3, 2022, Coeur Mining Inc. ("Coeur") reported second quarter production of 20.4 Koz gold at 0.47 g/t gold, in line with the 70-80 Koz full year guidance for Wharf disclosed by Wharf on February 16, 2022. During the quarter, one reverse circulation ("RC") drill rig had completed a resource conversion program at the Portland-Ridge-Boston claim group and at the Flossie area.
On February 16, 2022, Coeur reported that Wharf's updated Proven and Probable Reserves totaled 852 Koz at 0.73 g/t. Total Measured and Indicated Resources were reported at 412 Koz at 0.63g/t with an Inferred Resource estimate of 90 Koz at 0.75 g/t. In addition, Coeur reported in their Q4 2021 financial statements, an updated mine life of 8 years for Wharf. Additionally, Coeur reported the continued exploration success at Wharf where a total of 6,625 meters of drilling was completed in the Portland Ridge – Boston claim group, Flossie and Juno areas. Coeur spent $4 million on exploration at the mine in 2021, its largest since acquiring the asset in 2015.
Metalla holds a 1.0% GVR royalty on the Wharf mine.
New Luika Silver Stream
On July 21, 2022, Shanta Gold Limited ("Shanta") reported that it produced 17.5 Koz of gold at its NLGM in Tanzania in the second quarter of 2022, in line with full year production guidance of 68-76 Koz gold. On July 19, 2021, Shanta announced a new mine plan for NLGM, where average annual production is expected to be 73.6 Koz gold with the potential to extend mine life beyond 2026 through conversion of significant known resources and the expanded 2,450 tpd mill throughput. Shanta expects total gold production from NLGM for the five-year plan to total 368 Koz from both open pit and underground mine sources from the mining license.
Metalla holds a 15% interest in Silverback, whose sole business is receipt and distribution of a 100% silver stream on NLGM at an ongoing cost of 10% of the spot silver price.
Côté-Gosselin
On August 3, 2022, IAMGOLD Corporation ("IAMGOLD") reported that construction had reached 57% completion at the Côté Gold Project. It also reported completion in the second quarter of 2022 of approximately 10,500 meters of the 16,000 meter drill program is planned in 2022 to further delineate and expand the Gosselin mineral resources and test selected targets along the deposit corridor. In addition, IAMGOLD completed a project update to the Côté life-of-mine plans where the update proposes an 18-year mine life with initial production expected in early 2024. Average annual production during the first six years is expected to be 495 Koz gold and 365 Koz over the life-of-mine.
Metalla holds a 1.35% NSR royalty that covers less than 10% of the Côté reserves and resources estimate and covers all of the Gosselin resource estimate.
Castle Mountain
Castle Mountain is slated to become one of Equinox Gold's ("Equinox") largest assets. Metalla's 5.0% NSR royalty covers the South Domes portion of the deposit which will be part of the Phase 2 expansion slated to begin in 2026.
On August 3, 2022, Equinox reported production in the second quarter of 6.7 Koz gold and exploration expenditure in the second quarter of $0.5 million at the Castle Mountain property. This was in addition to the exploration announced on May 3, 2022, where drilling in the first quarter included 7,948 meters of RC drilling across the South dump area to assess the continuity and distribution of grade. Equinox also completed 1,448 meters of RC drilling in the area between the JSLA and South Domes pits.
Equinox also announced that in March 2022 it had submitted applications to amend existing permits to accommodate the Phase 2 expansion. On February 24, 2022, Equinox announced they expect to spend $7 million for Phase 2 permitting, optimization studies and metallurgical test work and nearly $2 million for exploration. As of August 3, 2022, the Phase 2 permitting timeline was on schedule with the San Bernardino County having determined the application was complete. Equinox expects the U.S. Bureau of Land management to complete its completeness review by the end of July with the application reviews to run through to the end of 2022. Both agencies will determine the appropriate level of state and federal environmental review required with the resulting review process anticipated to begin by early 2023.
Metalla holds a 5.0% NSR royalty on the South Domes area of the Castle Mountain mine.
Garrison
On July 7, 2022, Moneta released the results of exploration drilling at the Garrison deposit in their Tower Gold project. Drilling results tested new areas all within the Tower Gold project, including east and west of the Garrcon resource, south of the Westaway resource at South Basin, east of the Windjammer South resource at Halfway, and west of the 55 deposit. Drilling has confirmed significant gold mineralization beyond the current resource. Highlights include a drill hole that intercepted significant mineralization with 50.09 g/t gold over 5.05 meters and 0.66 g/t gold over 16 meters. The holes highlight the potential to expand the Garrcon resource pit shells and open new targets for future exploration drilling.
On May 11, 2022, Moneta released an updated resource estimate for the Tower Gold project, including 4.27 Moz gold in the Indicated category and 7.5 Moz gold in the Inferred category. Moneta plans to complete a Preliminary Economic Assessment on the project scheduled for completion later in the second quarter of 2022. The Garrison deposit forms part of the Tower project and is comprised of three zones, Garrcon, Jonpol, and 903. At Garrcon, the open pit Indicated Resource is 841 Koz at 1.02 g/t gold with an Inferred Resource of 15Koz at 0.67 g/t gold, the underground portion has an Indicated Resource of 87 Koz at 5.08 g/t gold with an Inferred Resource of 120 Koz at 4.98 g/t gold. The Jonpol zone has an Indicated Resource of 297 Koz at 1.4 g/t gold and an Inferred Resource of 114 Koz at 0.99 g/t gold. The 903 zone has an Indicated Resource of 610 Koz at 1.01 g/t gold and an Inferred Resource of 600 Koz at 0.74 g/t gold. The Garrison starter pit now has an Indicated Resource of 1.75 Moz at 1.07 g/t gold. Moneta is slated to release a PEA in the second half of 2022.
Metalla holds a 2.0% NSR royalty on the Garrison project.
Wasamac
On July 7, 2022, Yamana announced the approval of the Wasamac bulk sample program, providing for earlier access to the deposit and to increase the level of confidence in the future mining of the project. Permit approvals are expected in early 2023 with ramp development potentially beginning in Spring 2023. A reassessment of the Wasamac project highlighted an improved gold production profile compared to the feasibility study with new projections of ramp-up to 200 Koz in 2027 and up to 250 Koz in 2028. Ongoing mine design and sequence optimizations could position Wasamac with the option for future incremental expansion of the mill to 9,000 tpd from 7,000 tpd in year 3 of operations which will extend the gold production profile of 250 Koz per year until at least 2030. Yamana also highlighted additional opportunities not included in the strategic plan which include processing flow sheet optimization to increase metallurgical recoveries by approximately 3%, optimized configuration of the tailings filter plant and paste backfill plant. Yamana also announced that bulk sample permits are scheduled for submission in the third quarter of 2022, with the approval expected in early 2023 and ramp development could begin in spring 2023.
On July 27, 2022, Yamana announced positive results from infill drilling at the Wasamac project where grades continue to exceed expectations with significant results include 5.05 g/t gold over 54.06 meters and 5.45 g/t gold over 16.8 meters. Exploration drilling at the Wildcat South target continued to expand on the discovery with a significant intercept of 7.31 g/t gold over 3.37 meters and 1.46 g/t gold over 12.3 meters.
Metalla holds a 1.5% NSR royalty on the Wasamac project subject to a buy back of 0.5% for C$7.5 million.
Amalgamated Kirkland Property
On July 27, 2022, Agnico Eagle Mines Limited ("Agnico") reported that an assessment was ongoing at the Amalgamated Kirkland deposit to provide incremental ore feed to the Macassa mill with annual production of 40 Koz as soon as 2024. The Macassa underground ramp had been extended by 615 meters and twenty-four drill holes had been completed in the higher-grade portion of the deposit. Significant intercepts from the underground drill program include 14.1 g/t gold over 6.5 meters, 23.9 g/t gold over 2.0 meters and 14.9 g/t gold over 3.0 meters. Drilling from the surface drill program designed to infill near surface mineralization proves to be successful in confirming grade thicknesses with significant intercepts of 6.9 g/t gold over 6.7 meters, 5.9 g/t gold over 6 meters and 9 g/t gold over 9.2 meters.
In 2022, Agnico plans to spend $8.6 million on a 1.3 kilometre exploration ramp from the Macassa near surface zones, designed to carry out infill drilling and a bulk sample of the higher-grade regions of the Amalgamated Kirkland deposit. On April 28, 2022, Agnico reported that the Amalgamated Kirkland deposit hosts an Indicated Resource estimate of 265 Koz gold at 6.51 g/t gold and an Inferred Resource of 406 Koz at 5.32 g/t gold. The deposit remains open at depth and extends laterally.
Metalla holds a 0.45% NSR royalty on the Amalgamated Kirkland property.
El Realito
On July 27, 2022, Agnico reported that pre-stripping of the El Realito pit was approximately 81% compete. Pre-stripping activities at El Realito pit are in line with forecast are expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2022. The production guidance in Agnico's February 23, 2022, press release for the La India mine which hosts the El Realito pit were positively revised to 82.5 Koz gold in 2022, 70 Koz gold in 2023 and 22.5 Koz gold in 2024. The increase in the production guidance was due to pit optimization and increase in mineral reserves at the El Realito deposit.
Metalla holds a 2.0% NSR royalty on the El Realito deposit which is subject to a 1.0% buyback right for $4.0 million.
Del Carmen
On May 4, 2022, Barrick Gold Corporation reported that drilling at Del Carmen resumed in the second quarter of 2022, drilling will continue until the winter season. Results received at Carmen Norte, located to the north of the Rojo Grande target, confirmed gold mineralization with an intercept of 0.5 g/t gold over 39 meters, which opens up a new area with upside potential to add resources to Del Carmen. In addition, all geological models grade estimates and geometallurgical models with be updated and rebuilding in the second quarter to inform future steps for the project.
Metalla holds a 0.5% NSR royalty on the Del Carmen project which is the Argentine portion of the Alturas-Del Carmen project in the prolific El Indio belt.
Fifteen Mile Stream
On July 27, 2022, St. Barbara Limited reported that the Fifteen Mile Stream project has been extended to include all four identified resource open pits and enable development of the full potential of the project. Permitting application for Fifteen Mile Stream under the Canadian Federal protocol have been made and will be determined in August 2022.
Metalla holds a 1.0% NSR royalty on the Fifteen Mile Stream project, and 3.0% NSR royalty on the Plenty and Seloam Brook deposits.
Tocantinzinho
On July 18, 2022, G Mining announced a $481 million financing package, which included a gold stream, term-loan, and equity placement from Franco-Nevada Corporation for $353 million, for the development of the TZ Gold Project located in Para State, Brazil, providing for full financing required for the project. In addition, Eldorado Gold and La Mancha participated for $89 million in equity placements. Project financing is now in place for full construction to begin in Q3 2023 and targeting production for the second half of 2024.
G Mining had previously announced a feasibility study for the TZ Gold Project was completed in the previous quarter, which confirmed a 10.5-year mine life producing 1.8 Moz of gold in total resulting in an average annual gold production profile of 174,700 ounces at an all-in sustaining cost of $681/oz.
Economics were favourable, at a $1,600/oz gold price the study demonstrated an after-tax NPV5% of $622 million and generated an after-tax IRR of 24%. Also of note, G Mining increased the reserves at TZ by 12% to 2.0 Moz and saw an increase in the capital cost at the project of only 7% since the last study was conducted. Project optimization and detailed engineering is expected to occur from Q4 2021 through to Q4 2022. G Mining also expects to complete two drilling campaigns totaling 10,000 meters beginning in Q4 2021 through to Q1 2022, these include a grade control drilling program to de-risk early years of production and an exploration drilling program to test for potential extensions of the known mineralization at depth and below the current pit.
G Mining is a precious metals development company with a leadership team which has built four mines in South America, including the Merian mine for Newmont Corporation and Fruta Del Norte for Lundin Gold.
Metalla holds a 0.75% GVR royalty on the Tocantinzinho project.
Fosterville
On July 27, 2022, Agnico reported that gold production from Fosterville for the first six months of the operation was 168 Koz gold. During the quarter, the Robbins Hill and Phoenix exploration declines were completed allowing for the advancement of exploration drilling in the prospective areas.
On February 23, 2022, Agnico reported that they expect to spend $34.6 million for 121,400 metres of drilling and development to replace mineral reserve depletion and to add mineral resources at the Fosterville mine. Agnico announced that another $19.7 million will be spent on underground and surface exploration with the aim to discover additional high-grade mineralization, with $2.9 million to be spent on regional exploration drilling on the land package surrounding the mine.
Metalla holds a 2.5% GVR royalty on the Northern and Southern extensions of the Fosterville mining license and other areas in the land package.
CentroGold
On July 25, 2022, Oz Minerals stated that the relocation plan required for progressing the court injunction removal for CentroGold was still in review with the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). In addition, exploration expenses of $0.9 million were spent on the project for the quarter.
Metalla holds a 1.0-2.0% NSR royalty on the CentroGold project.
Camflo
On July 27, 2022, Yamana reported the Canadian Malartic partnership has identified porphyry hosted gold mineralization that could potentially be mined via an open pit at the Camflo property and provide tonnage to the Canadian Malartic operation. Additional studies are underway to fully evaluate the mineralization and additional potential in adjacent rock types. An aggressive drill program is planned in 2023. The Camflo property covers the past producing Camflo mine which had historical production of approximately 1.6 Moz of gold.
Metalla holds a 1.0% NSR royalty on the Camflo mine, located ~1km northeast of the Canadian Malartic operation.
Montclerg
Through press releases dated July 20, 2022, and June 23, 2022, GFG Resources Inc. ("GFG") reported high grade intervals at the Montclerg Gold Project located 48 km east of the Timmins Gold District. Significant intercepts include 1.32 g/t gold over 33.5 meters, 1.6 g/t gold over 70.4 meters and a 4.95 g/t gold over 8.3 meters. Step-out drilling has demonstrated the Montclerg deposit continues for 530 meters to the east and remains open. GFG are planning to complete a 8,000-10,000 meter drill program in 2022.
Metalla holds a 1.0% NSR royalty on the Montclerg property.
Detour DNA
On July 28, 2022, Agnico reported that exploration plans will investigate the Sunday Lake deformation zone along strike to the west and east of the mine. In addition, step out drilling two kilometres west of the current pit out has encountered significant intersections including 32.3 g/t gold over 4.8 meters outlining the potential for an underground operation.
Metalla holds a 2.0% NSR royalty on the Detour DNA property which is ~7km west of the Detour West reserve pit margin.
Green Springs
On August 9, 2022, Contact Gold reported results from the first 3 drill holes from the 2022 step-out drill program at the Green Springs oxide gold project in the Cortez Trend, Nevada. Significant results from the X-Ray zone include 1.66 g/t gold over 28.96 meters and 0.82 g/t gold over 35.05 meters. Results from the remaining 20 holes are pending.
Metalla holds a 2.0% NSR royalty on the Green Springs project.
Red Hill
On June 21, 2022, NuLegacy Gold Corporation reported an updated exploration plan for Red Hill for 2022-2023 with a 29-hole program expected to have begun in July 2022.
Metalla holds a 1.5% GOR royalty on the Red Hill property which is in close proximity to Nevada Gold Mines Cortez operations.
The technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Charles Beaudry, geologist M.Sc., member of the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario and of the Ordre des Géologues du Québec and a director of Metalla. Mr. Beaudry is a QP as defined in National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.
Metalla is a precious metals royalty and streaming company. Metalla provides shareholders with leveraged precious metal exposure through a diversified and growing portfolio of royalties and streams. Our strong foundation of current and future cash-generating asset base, combined with an experienced team gives Metalla a path to become one of the leading gold and silver companies for the next commodities cycle.
For further information, please visit our website at www.metallaroyalty.com
ON BEHALF OF METALLA ROYALTY & STREAMING LTD.
(signed) "Brett Heath"
President and CEO
Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
The items marked above are alternative performance measures and readers should refer to non-international financial reporting standards ("IFRS") financial measures in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022, as filed on SEDAR and as available on the Company's website for further details. Metalla has included certain performance measures in this press release that do not have any standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS including (a) attributable gold equivalent ounces (GEOs), (b) average cash cost per attributable GEO, (c) average realized price per attributable GEO, (d) operating cash margin per attributable GEO, which is based on the two preceding measures, and (e) adjusted EBITDA. In the precious metals mining industry, this is a common performance measure but does not have any standardized meaning. The Company believes that, in addition to conventional measures prepared in accordance with IFRS, certain investors use this information to evaluate the Company's performance and ability to generate cash flow. The presentation of these non-IFRS measures is intended to provide additional information and should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. Other companies may calculate these non-IFRS measures differently.
Metalla has limited, if any, access to the properties on which Metalla holds a royalty, stream or other interest. Metalla is dependent on (i) the operators of the mines or properties and their qualified persons to provide technical or other information to Metalla, or (ii) publicly available information to prepare disclosure pertaining to properties and operations on the mines or properties on which Metalla holds a royalty, stream or other interest, and generally has limited or no ability to independently verify such information. Although Metalla does not have any knowledge that such information may not be accurate, there can be no assurance that such third-party information is complete or accurate. Some information publicly reported by operators may relate to a larger property than the area covered by Metalla's royalty, stream or other interests. Metalla's royalty, stream or other interests can cover less than 100% and sometimes only a portion of the publicly reported mineral reserves, resources and production of a property.
Unless otherwise indicated, the technical and scientific disclosure contained or referenced in this press release, including any references to mineral resources or mineral reserves, was prepared in accordance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101"), which differs significantly from the requirements of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") applicable to U.S. domestic issuers. Accordingly, the scientific and technical information contained or referenced in this press release may not be comparable to similar information made public by U.S. companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements of the SEC.
"Inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Historical results or feasibility models presented herein are not guarantees or expectations of future performance.
This press release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. The forward-looking statements herein are made as of the date of this press release only, and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them except as required by applicable law.
All statements included herein that address events or developments that we expect to occur in the future are forward-looking statements. Generally, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects", "does not expect", "is expected", "budgets", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "predicts", "projects", "intends", "targets", "aims", "anticipates" or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases or may be identified by statements to the effect that certain actions "may", "could", "should", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements and information include, but are not limited to: the successful completion of certain milestones in respect to the CentroGold project; the satisfaction of future payment obligations and contingent commitments by Metalla; the effectiveness, and potential use and benefit of, the Company's final short form base shelf prospectus and Form F-10 registration statement; the future sales of common shares under the 2022 ATM program and the value of the gross proceeds to be raised; the completion by property owners of announced drilling programs, capital expenditures, and other planned activities in relation to properties on which the Company and its subsidiaries hold a royalty or streaming interest and the expected timing thereof; production and life of mine estimates or forecasts at the properties on which the Company and its subsidiaries hold a royalty or streaming interest; the closing of the Loan Extension; future disclosure by property owners and the expected timing thereof; the completion by property owners of announced capital expenditure programs; the estimated production at Beaufor, Wharf, Higginsville, Beta Hunt, NLGM and La India;; the results of the permitting application for Fifteen Mile Stream under the Canadian Federal protocol; the anticipated results from the recently completed RC drill rig resource conversion program at the Portland-Ridge-Boston claim group and at the Flossie area; the completion of the drill program to further delineate and expand the Gosselin mineral resources and test selected targets along the deposit corridor;; the completion of a Preliminary Economic Assessment on the Tower Gold Project, and the timing thereof; the completion of pre-stripping activities at El Realito and the expected timing thereof; the future start of mining operations at Beacon Mill and the expected timing thereof; the progression of the court injunction removal at the CentroGold property; expectation that the U.S. Bureau of Land management will compete its completeness review by the end of July with the application reviews to run through to the end of 2022 with respect to the Phase 2 permit application for Castle Mountain; future opportunities for Equinox Gold to move South Domes earlier in the mine plan at Castle Mountain; the potential for Castle Mountain mine to become one of Equinox Gold's largest assets; expected timing of the preliminary economic assessment at the Tower Gold project by Moneta; the completion of two drilling campaigns at Tocantinzinho and the anticipated timing thereof; anticipated results of the completed exploration declines at Fosterville mine, including the feasibility for the advancement of exploration drilling in the prospective areas; the expectation that G Mining's $481 million financing package will fully fund the construction of the TZ Gold Project, and the anticipated timing thereof; the potential for product at the TZ Gold Project and the timing thereof; the anticipated timing of the bulk sample approvals in respect to the Wasamac Mine; engaging in ramp development at the Wasamac Mine and the timing thereof; the potential to significantly expand the Garrcon resource base and support an underground operation at the mine; the release an updated Preliminary Economic Assessment by Moneta with respect to the Garrison Project, and the anticipated timing thereof; the potential that the porphyry hosted gold mineralization identified by the Canadian Malartic partnership may be mined via an open pit from the Camflo property (1.0% NSR); continuation of the drilling at Del Carmen; receipt of permits for Fifteen Mile Steam under the Canadian Federal protocol, and timing thereof; investigation of the Sunday Lake deformation, and anticipated results thereof; the completion of project optimization and detailed engineering at Tocantinzinho and the anticipated timing thereof; the replacement of mineral reserve depletion and addition of mineral resources at the Fosterville mine; the potential production at the Wasamac project; the future production at the Amalgamated Kirkland deposit and the anticipated timing thereof; the amount and timing of the attributable GEOs expected by the Company in 2022; the future production at El Realito and the anticipated timing thereof; the increase of producing royalties to seven; future expectations regarding the royalties and streams of Metalla; royalty payments to be paid to Metalla by property owners or operators of mining projects pursuant to each royalty; the mineral reserves and resource estimates for the properties with respect to which the Company has or proposes to acquire an interest; future gold and silver prices; other potential developments relating to, or achievements by the counterparties for Metalla's stream and royalty agreements, and with respect to the mines and other properties in which Metalla has, or may acquire, a stream or royalty interest; and estimates of future production, costs and other financial or economic measures.
Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management. Forward-looking statements and information are based on forecasts of future results, estimates of amounts not yet determinable and assumptions that, while believed by management to be reasonable, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties, and contingencies. Forward-looking statements and information are subject to various known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the ability of Metalla to control or predict, that may cause Metalla's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied thereby, and are developed based on assumptions about such risks, uncertainties and other factors set out herein, including but not limited to: risks associated with the impact of general business and economic conditions; the absence of control over mining operations from which Metalla will purchase precious metals or from which it will receive stream or royalty payments and risks related to those mining operations, including risks related to international operations, government and environmental regulation, delays in mine development, construction and operations, actual results of mining and current exploration activities, conclusions of economic evaluations and changes in project parameters as plans are refined; problems related to the ability to market precious metals or other metals; industry conditions, including commodity price fluctuations, interest and exchange rate fluctuations; interpretation by government entities of tax laws or the implementation of new tax laws; regulatory, political or economic developments in any of the countries where properties in which Metalla holds a royalty, stream or other interest are located or through which they are held; risks related to the operators of the properties in which Metalla holds a royalty or stream or other interest, including changes in the ownership and control of such operators; risks related to global pandemics, including the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) global health pandemic, and the spread of other viruses or pathogens; influence of macroeconomic developments; business opportunities that become available to, or are pursued by Metalla; reduced access to debt and equity capital; litigation; title, permit or license disputes related to interests on any of the properties in which Metalla holds a royalty, stream or other interest; the volatility of the stock market; competition; future sales or issuances of debt or equity securities; inability to obtain stock exchange approvals or otherwise satisfy the conditions to close the Loan Extension; use of proceeds; dividend policy and future payment of dividends; liquidity; market for securities; enforcement of civil judgments; and risks relating to Metalla potentially being a passive foreign investment company within the meaning of U.S. federal tax laws, as the other risks and uncertainties disclosed under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's most recent Annual Information Form, annual report on Form 40-F and other documents filed with or submitted to the Canadian securities regulatory authorities on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on the EDGAR website at www.sec.gov. Although we have attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. We are under no obligation to update or alter any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable securities laws. For the reasons set forth above, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements.
Website: www.metallaroyalty.com
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GURUGRAM, India, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ReNew Energy Global plc ("ReNew" or "the Company") (Nasdaq: RNW) (Nasdaq: RNWWW), India's leading renewable energy company, today announced it will issue its first quarter fiscal year 2023 earnings report after the close of the market on August 18, 2022.
A conference call has been scheduled to discuss the earnings results at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time (6:00 p.m. IST) on August 19, 2022. The conference call can be accessed live via at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/qb3qf6a7 or by phone (toll-free) by dialing US/ Canada: (+1) 855 881 1339; UK: (+44) 0800 051 8245; India: (+91) 0008 0010 08443; Singapore: (+65) 800 101 2785; and Japan: (+81) 005 3116 1281 or +61 7 3145 4010 (toll). An audio replay will be available following the call on the ReNew Investor Relations website at https://investor.renewpower.in/news-events/events .
About ReNew
ReNew is one of the largest renewable energy Independent Power Producers (IPPs) in India and globally. ReNew develops, builds, owns, and operates utility-scale wind and solar energy projects, hydro projects and distributed solar energy projects. As of June 30, 2022, ReNew had a total capacity of 12.8 GW of renewable energy projects across India including commissioned and committed projects. For more information, please visit: https://renewpower.in/; Follow ReNew Power on Twitter @ReNew_Power
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TORONTO, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Restaurant Brands International Inc. (TSX: QSR) (NYSE: QSR) ("RBI") announced today that it has filed, and the Toronto Stock Exchange (the "TSX") has accepted, notice of RBI's intention to renew its normal course issuer bid (the "NCIB") for its common shares (the "Common Shares"). The NCIB is being conducted in furtherance of RBI's board-approved share repurchase authorization that allows RBI to purchase up to US$1.0 billion of its Common Shares until August 10, 2023 (the "Repurchase Authorization").
The TSX notice provides that RBI may, during the 12-month period commencing August 17, 2022 and ending on August 16, 2023, purchase up to 30,254,374 Common Shares, representing 10% of its public float of 302,543,742 Common Shares as of July 30, 2022 (a total of 306,106,637 Common Shares were issued and outstanding as of such date). Purchases under the NCIB will be made through the facilities of the TSX, the New York Stock Exchange (the "NYSE") and/or alternative trading systems in Canada and the U.S., if eligible, or by such other means as may be permitted by applicable securities laws, including private agreements. Any purchases made by private agreement under an issuer bid exemption order issued by a securities regulatory authority in Canada will generally be at a discount to the prevailing market price as provided in any such exemption order. In addition, RBI may also enter into derivative-based programs in support of its repurchase activities, including the writing of put options and forward purchase agreements, accelerated share repurchase transactions, other equity contracts or use other methods of acquiring shares, in each case as may be permitted by applicable securities laws or subject to regulatory approval.
Purchases under the NCIB made on the TSX will be made in compliance with the rules of the TSX at a price equal to the market price at the time of purchase or such other price as may be permitted by the TSX. In accordance with TSX rules, any daily repurchases (other than pursuant to a block purchase exception) on the TSX under the NCIB are limited to a maximum of 197,482 Common Shares, which represents 25% of the average daily trading volume on the TSX of 789,930 for the six months ended July 31, 2022. Purchases under the NCIB made on the NYSE will be made in compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 10b-18 and the U.S. federal securities laws.
Under its current NCIB which commenced on August 10, 2021 and expired on August 9, 2022 (the "2021 NCIB"), RBI previously sought and received approval from the TSX to repurchase up to 30,382,519 Common Shares. As of July 30, 2022, RBI has repurchased an aggregate of 15,042,882 Common Shares for cancellation under a NCIB in the past 12 months at a weighted average price of approximately C$72.58 per Common Share and approximately US$123 million remains available to RBI under the Repurchase Authorization. All repurchases under a NCIB within the past 12 months were conducted through the facilities of the NYSE, the TSX or an alternative stock exchange in the US or Canada. In addition, the plan agent under RBI's employee stock purchase plan purchased an aggregate of 5,870 Common Shares in the past 12 months for the benefit of plan participants at a weighted average price of approximately C$72.76 per Common Share.
RBI believes that the market price of Common Shares could be such that their purchase may be an attractive and appropriate use of corporate funds. Decisions regarding the amount and timing of future purchases of Common Shares will be based on market conditions, share price and other factors. RBI may elect to modify, suspend or discontinue the Repurchase Authorization, and its NCIB, at any time. Repurchases under the Repurchase Authorization will be funded using RBI's cash resources and all shares repurchased will be cancelled. RBI intends to enter into an automatic purchase plan to be effective on August 17, 2022 with a broker which will enable RBI to provide standard instructions in the future and then purchase Common Shares on the open market during self-imposed blackout periods. Outside of these blackout periods, Common Shares may be purchased in accordance with management's discretion.
Restaurant Brands International Inc. is one of the world's largest quick service restaurant companies with over $35 billion in annual system-wide sales and over 29,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries. RBI owns four of the world's most prominent and iconic quick service restaurant brands – TIM HORTONS®, BURGER KING®, POPEYES®, and FIREHOUSE SUBS®. These independently operated brands have been serving their respective guests, franchisees and communities for decades. Through its Restaurant Brands for Good framework, RBI is improving sustainable outcomes related to its food, the planet, and people and communities.
This press release includes forward-looking statements and information, which are often identified by the words "may," "might," "believe," "thinks," "anticipate," "plans," "expects," "intends," or similar expressions and reflect management's expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date hereof. These forward-looking statements include statements about RBI's expectations and beliefs regarding its normal course issuer bid purchases. The factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from RBI's expectations are detailed in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and on SEDAR in Canada, such as its annual and quarterly reports and current reports on Form 8-K, and include the following: risks related to RBI's substantial indebtedness, risks related to adverse economic and industry conditions and risks related to unforeseen events, such as adverse weather conditions, natural disasters, terrorist attacks or threats, pandemics, including coronavirus (COVID-19), the war in Ukraine or other catastrophic events, all of which could adversely affect its financial condition and prevent it from fulfilling its obligations. Other than as required under U.S. federal securities laws or Canadian securities laws, RBI undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof.
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NEW YORK, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --
If you own shares in any of the companies listed above and
would like to discuss our investigations or have any questions concerning
this notice or your rights or interests, please contact:
Joshua Rubin, Esq.
Weiss Law
305 Broadway, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10007
(212) 682-3025
(888) 593-4771
stockinfo@weisslawllp.com
Weiss Law is investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of law by the board of directors of Meridian Bioscience, Inc. (NASDAQ: VIVO), in connection with the proposed acquisition of VIVO by SD Biosensor, Inc. ("SDB") and SJL Partners LLC ("SJL"). Under the merger agreement, VIVO shareholders will receive $34.00 in cash for each share of VIVO stock owned, leaving SDB owning approximately 60% and SJL owning approximately 40% of Meridian. If you own VIVO shares and wish to discuss this investigation or your rights, please call us at one of the numbers listed above or visit our website: https://www.weisslaw.co/news-and-cases/vivo
Weiss Law, a national shareholders' rights law firm, is investigating possible false and misleading statements, accounting and reporting practices and breaches of fiduciary duty and violations of the federal securities laws by the Board of Directors and certain Company officers of Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) concerning NFLX growth and customer retention, leading to a significant stock price drop after NFLX revealed in April that it had lost more than 200,000 subscribers. If you own NFLX shares and wish to discuss this investigation or your rights, please call us at one of the numbers listed above or visit our website: https://www.weisslaw.co/news-and-cases/nflx
Weiss Law is investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of law by the board of directors of VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), in connection with the proposed acquisition of VMW by Broadcom Inc. ("Broadcom"). Under the terms of the merger agreement, VMW shareholders will receive $142.50 in cash or 0.2520 shares of Broadcom common stock for each VMW share owned, representing implied per-share merger consideration of approximately $283.62 based upon Broadcom's August 11, 2022 closing price of $545.43. If you own VMW shares and wish to discuss this investigation or your rights, please call us at one of the numbers listed above or visit our website: https://www.weisslaw.co/news-and-cases/vmw
Weiss Law is investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of law by the board of directors of CareMax, Inc. (NASDAQ: CMAX), in connection with the proposed transaction with Steward Health Care System ("Steward"). Upon completion of the transaction, CMAX will pay $25 million in cash and issue 23.5 million shares of CMAX's Class A common stock to the equity holders of Steward. If you own CMAX shares and wish to discuss this investigation or your rights, please call us at one of the numbers listed above or visit our website: https://www.weisslaw.co/news-and-cases/cmax
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CALGARY, AB, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - SNDL Inc. (NASDAQ: SNDL) ("SNDL" or the "Company") reported its financial and operational results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022. All financial information in this press release is reported in millions of Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated. All results for the second quarter of 2021 exclude the subsequent acquisitions of Inner Spirit Holdings ("Spiritleaf") and Alcanna Inc. ("Alcanna"), which closed on July 20, 2021, and March 31, 2022, respectively.
The Company will hold a conference call and webcast at 8:30 a.m. EDT (6:30 a.m. MDT) on Monday, August 15, 2022. Please see the dial-in details within the release and additional information about SNDL's website at www.sndl.com.
This press release is intended to be read in conjunction with the Company's Financial Statements and Notes for the period and the accompanying Management's Discussion and Analysis ("MD&A"). These reports are available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and EDGAR at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml.
SNDL has also posted a supplemental investor presentation on its website.
Following its Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders on July 25, 2022, Sundial Growers Inc. changed its legal name to SNDL Inc. In light of the evolution of SNDL's business over the past two years, management feels that this change more appropriately reflects the operating model and strategy of the Company.
Commenting on the rebrand, Zach George, SNDL's Chief Executive Officer, said: "The rapid and material changes to our business over the last two years have led to our original "Sundial Growers" identity becoming less relevant. We believe that the new SNDL brand better reflects our corporate activities and the undeniable impact that retail investor support has had on our survival and ability to build Canada's largest private sector distribution platform for liquor and cannabis. We continue to focus on delighting consumers with curated experiences and a robust selection of quality product offerings. SNDL embodies our path to the creation of a platform committed to excellence in the regulated products space."
SNDL has launched a new website that can be visited at www.sndl.com, along with a rebrand video at https://sndl.com/Overview/Videos/.
SECOND QUARTER 2022 FINANCIAL AND OPERATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS
- Record net revenue for the second quarter of 2022 of $223.7 million, compared to $9.2 million in the second quarter of 2021, representing a 2,344% increase.
- SNDL's second quarter of 2022 gross margin grew to $43.1 million, a record since its inception, up 1,627% from its second quarter of 2021 loss of $2.8 million.
- Net loss of $74.0 million for the second quarter of 2022, compared to a $52.3 million net loss in the second quarter of 2021, a 41% increase.
- Adjusted EBITDA loss of $25.9 million for the second quarter of 2022, including an adjusted EBITDA loss of $35.5 million from the Investments segment, compared to Adjusted EBITDA loss of $0.2 million in the second quarter of 2021. The change was significantly impacted by fair value adjustments from the SunStream joint venture in the second quarter of 2022.
- For the six months ended June 30, 2022, the Company purchased and cancelled 0.5 million common shares at a weighted average price of $3.86 (US$2.98) per common share for a total cost of $2.0 million.
- $900 million of cash, marketable securities, and long-term investments and no outstanding debt at June 30, 2022; $334.9 million of unrestricted cash at August 11, 2022.
"The SNDL team's dedication and perseverance have enabled us to make significant progress on our journey to becoming Canada's largest private sector distributor of both liquor and cannabis," said Zach George, Chief Executive Officer of SNDL. "We believe our unique asset base and balance sheet strength represent competitive advantages that we are determined to leverage for the benefit of our stakeholders. We are seeing market share gains through our retail network and this quarter our cannabis operations generated positive adjusted EBITDA for the first time in the Company's history. We continue to strengthen and transform our business while benefitting from vertical integration across our business segments under a shared services model with integration work expected to impact results over the next two quarters. Despite our encouraging results, we know there is still room for improvement, and we remain humbled by the opportunity before us. SNDL represents an opportunity for investors to gain exposure to North American regulated products in a manner that does not exist with any other public company today. We will continue to prioritize free cash flow generation with a focus on strengthening our distribution platform and using our credit portfolios to turn industry headwinds into long-term opportunities."
SECOND QUARTER 2022 KEY FINANCIAL METRICS
SNDL's business is operated and reported in four segments: Liquor Retail, Cannabis Retail, Cannabis Production and Cultivation, and Investments.
Liquor Retail
As a result of the Alcanna acquisition, SNDL is now Canada's largest private sector liquor retailer, operating 170 locations, predominantly in Alberta, under its three retail banners: "Wine and Beyond", "Liquor Depot" and "Ace Liquor". The Liquor Retail segment's stable and growing cash flow profile and best-in-class retail operations expertise have accelerated SNDL's retail growth and vertical integration strategy. The second quarter of 2022 is SNDL's first full quarter of reporting liquor retail revenue following the completion of the acquisition.
- Gross revenue for Liquor Retail sales for the three banners combined was $148.6 million for the second quarter of 2022.
- Gross margin in the Liquor Retail segment was $33.5 million, or 22.6% of sales. Despite fluctuations in sales due to market conditions and retail competition, the Company has stabilized its margin through a pricing and mix strategy in the second quarter of 2022. While customer count is down by 5% year-to-date, largely due to a return to on-premises consumption in a post COVID-19 environment, the average basket size is up 2%. The Company sees larger basket sizes at their Wine & Beyond locations, where consumers come for the experiential, destination shopping approach to liquor retail.
- SNDL's liquor banners' market share in Alberta was 17.6% in the second quarter of 2022, with Wine & Beyond representing 2.9% with only 11 stores, showcasing the continued and increasing popularity of the banner. SNDL is exploring opportunities to expand the Wine & Beyond store footprint in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.
- Moving forward, the Company will seek to optimize profitability and cash flow for the Liquor Retail segment by focusing on cost discipline, margin accretive products, monetizing intellectual property, and leveraging its retail footprint to develop an e-commerce platform.
- As of August 11, 2022, the Ace Liquor store count is 138, the Liquor Depot store count is 20 and the Wine and Beyond store count is 12.
Cannabis Retail
With the acquisition of our interest in Nova Cannabis Inc. ("Nova") through the Alcanna acquisition, SNDL's expanded retail network has significantly increased the Company's retail market share and its exposure to a broader consumer base. It also provides direct access to more comprehensive customer data, and the Company expects revenue increases from the continued integration of its distribution channels. Cannabis retail operating results include 100% of Nova's results as a majority owned subsidiary.
- Gross revenue from the Cannabis Retail segment for the second quarter of 2022 was $63.5 million, compared to $7.5 million in the first quarter of 2022, a 746% increase. Value Buds sales were the material driver of the increase with $56.3 million of revenue during the second quarter of 2022.
- Gross margin of $13.9 million, or 21.9% of sales, increased from $3.3 million, compared to Q1 2022 primarily due to Value Buds' pricing strategy.
- In the second quarter of 2022, Value Buds and Spiritleaf's combined market share represents 9.8% in the privatized provincial markets, solidifying SNDL's position as a leading national multi-banner cannabis retail operator.
- The Company successfully launched its first private label program with Spiritleaf Selects in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario in 3.5 gram dried flower and 3 x 0.5 gram pre-roll formats.
- As of August 11, 2022, the Spiritleaf store count is 103 (20 corporate stores and 83 franchised stores) and the Value Buds store count is 82.
Cannabis Cultivation and Production
SNDL remains committed to its cultivation and processing activities, including continuous improvement of its product offerings while focusing on cost optimization and the most competitive and profitable strains and brands.
- Gross revenue from the Cannabis Cultivation and Production segment for the second quarter of 2022 was $15.4 million, compared to $11.3 million in the first quarter of 2022, a 36% sequential improvement and a 21% year-over-year improvement.
- Net loss for the segment during the second quarter of 2022 was $8.0 million, compared to a $75.4 million loss in the second quarter of 2021
- Adjusted EBITDA was $3.4 million, in the second quarter of 2022, compared to negative $11.0 million in the same period of 2021. This represents SNDL's first positive Adjusted EBITDA quarter in the Cannabis Cultivation and Production segment. The significant improvement in Adjusted EBITDA can be attributed to higher sales volumes, improved margin on an adjusted basis, reductions to SMG&A, and greater discipline over inventory management driving a reduction in price discounts for provincial board sales during the first half of 2022.
- Average price per gram sold for the second quarter of 2022 was $3.18, compared to $1.69 for the second quarter of 2021. The increase of $1.49 per gram sold reflects an improved margin strategy as the Company has shifted its mix and increased its price per gram in select provinces through a disciplined revenue management initiative.
- Cost of sales per gram sold for the second quarter of 2022 was $2.64, compared to $1.76 for the second quarter of 2021. The increase of $0.88 per gram sold reflects the Company's move away from business-to-business bulk flower transactions that made up a larger portion of its sales mix in the second quarter of 2021.
- Gross margin results for the second quarter of 2022 was negative $4.3 million, compared to negative $2.8 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021. The gross margin results include a $3.9 million inventory impairment and fair value changes in the accounting for inventory and biological assets.
- Cultivation consistency also hit records in the second quarter of 2022 with the highest monthly weighted average potency in SNDL's history for June 2022 with 25.1% THC. The prior record month was May 2022, with 24.3% THC. SNDL's weighted average yield per square foot continues to increase with an average weighted yield of 57 grams per square foot.
- SNDL is tailoring its product innovation strategy based on increased use of data analytics and access to a broader consumer base. SNDL will be launching several new large-pack formats in an effort to monetize bulk inventory. The Company expects margin growth to be impacted in the short term as it brings these products to market primarily through its owned retail network.
- SNDL has received its international export permit and is on track to dispatch its first shipment to Israel in the third quarter of 2022. While SNDL continues to focus on the Canadian market, the Company is also looking at additional opportunities to increase revenue for its Cannabis Cultivation and Production segment.
- The Company has expanded its national footprint to all 10 provinces by introducing SNDL's branded products to Newfoundland and Labrador
Investments
- Revenue from the Investments segment for the second quarter of 2022 was a loss of $35.1 million, compared to $2.4 million in the second quarter of 2021. The decrease was primarily due to accounting fair value adjustments reflecting an increase in the assumed risk-free rate and the deterioration in overall cannabis credit market conditions.
- As of the end of the second quarter of 2022, the Company had deployed capital on several cannabis-related investments totaling $689 million, including $490 million to the SunStream Bancorp Inc. joint venture ("SunStream"). For the second quarter of 2022, the investment portfolio generated interest and fee revenue of $2.6 million ($3.3 million in the second quarter of 2021), share of the profit of equity-accounted investees generated from investments by SunStream of negative $38.0 million ($3.7 million in the second quarter of 2021), and an investment loss of $35.1 million (gain of $2.4 million in the second quarter of 2021) on marketable securities, which includes unrealized losses on publicly disclosed strategic investments in Village Farms International, Inc. and The Valens Company Inc.
Consolidated Financial Results
General and Administrative Expenses
General and administrative expenses for the three months ended June 30, 2022 were $40.3 million, compared to $10.1 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021. The increase of $30.2 million was mainly due to increases in salaries and wages and office and general expenses from the Alcanna and Inner Spirit acquisitions.
Net Loss
Net loss for the three months ended June 30, 2022 was $74.0 million, compared to a net loss of $52.3 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021. The increased loss of $21.7 million was largely due to investment losses of $37.4 million, share of loss of equity-accounted investees of $41.7 million, higher general and administrative expenses of $30.2 million, depreciation and amortization of $7.9 million and finance costs of $26.5 million, partially offset by an increase in gross margin of $45.8 million, lower asset impairment of $58.2 million, lower transaction costs of $8.7 million and a positive change in fair value of derivative warrant liabilities of $3.8 million.
Adjusted EBITDA
Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $25.9 million for the three months ended June 30, 2022, compared to a loss of $0.2 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021, driven primarily by the Sunstream equity pickup of a $38M loss.
The increased Adjusted EBITDA loss was primarily due to a decrease in share of profit of equity-accounted investees, an increase in general and administrative expenses due to the inclusion of Alcanna and Spiritleaf and a decrease in realized gain on marketable securities. The decrease was partially offset by an increase in gross margin including Alcanna and Spiritleaf.
Liquidity Position
- Effective July 25, 2022, the Company's common shares were consolidated on a one share for each ten shares outstanding basis pursuant to shareholder approval at the Company's annual and special meeting of shareholders.
- As at June 30, 2022, and August 11, 2022, the Company had an unrestricted cash balance of $363 million and $334.9 million, respectively, and a total of 238 million post-consolidation shares outstanding as at August 11, 2022.
- For the six months ended June 30, 2022, the Company purchased and cancelled 0.5 million common shares at a weighted average price of $3.86 (US$2.98) per common share for a total cost of $2.0 million. SNDL has $98 million remaining under its current buyback program allowing the Company to repurchase from time to time at prevailing market prices, enabling SNDL to opportunistically return value to shareholders. The share repurchase program expires on November 19, 2022.
STRATEGIC AND ORGANIZATIONAL UPDATE
SNDL remains focused on building long-term shareholder value through vertical integration, the accretive deployment of cash resources, the expansion of its retail distribution network, the further streamlining of the Company's operating structure, and the enhanced offering of high-quality brands.
- Through the acquisition of Alcanna, SNDL's retail footprint is expected to facilitate customer relationships and capture additional economies of scale.
- By gaining insight into thousands of daily shopper transactions at over 350 retail stores, SNDL has begun to optimize offerings, pricing, and promotions in both liquor and cannabis locations to better serve customers.
- Additionally, SNDL expects to continue accessing profitable opportunities and will launch a Value Buds private label flower product. SNDL will continue to develop various offerings and targeted merchandising strategies for its entire retail portfolio.
- Since the closing of the Alcanna transaction, the Company is on target to deliver $6.4 million in cost synergies. These synergies are due to consolidation in key areas such as retail operations, integrated supply and demand planning, and corporate expenses.
SPECIFIED FINANCIAL MEASURES
Certain specified financial measures in this news release are non-IFRS measures. These terms are not defined by IFRS and, therefore, may not be comparable to similar measures provided by other companies. These non-IFRS financial measures should not be considered in isolation or as an alternative for or superior to measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. These measures are presented and described in order to provide shareholders and potential investors with additional measures in understanding the Company's operating results in the same manner as the management team.
ADJUSTED EBITDA
Adjusted EBITDA is a non-IFRS measure which the Company uses to evaluate its operating performance. Adjusted EBITDA provides information to investors, analysts, and others to aid in understanding and evaluating the Company's operating results in a manner similar to its management team. Adjusted EBITDA is defined as net income (loss) from continuing operations before finance costs, depreciation and amortization, accretion expense, income tax recovery and excluding change in fair value of biological assets, change in fair value realized through inventory, unrealized foreign exchange gains or losses, unrealized gains or losses on marketable securities, change in fair value of derivative warrants, share-based compensation expense, asset impairment, gain or loss on disposal of property, plant and equipment and certain one-time non-operating expenses, as determined by management. The Company presents both consolidated or total Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA by operating segment.
CONFERENCE CALL
The Company will hold a conference call and webcast at 8:30 a.m. EDT (6:30 a.m. MDT) on Monday, August 15, 2022.
WEBCAST ACCESS
To access the live webcast of the call, please visit the following link:
https://services.choruscall.ca/links/sndl2022q2.html
REPLAY
A telephone replay will be available for one month. To access the replay, dial:
Canada/USA Toll Free: 1-800-319-6413 or International Toll: +1-604-638-9010
When prompted, enter Replay Access Code: 9296 #
The webcast archive will be available for three months via the link provided above.
SNDL is a public company whose shares are traded on Nasdaq under the symbol "SNDL."
SNDL is the largest private sector liquor and cannabis retailer in Canada with retail banners that include Ace Liquor, Wine and Beyond, Liquor Depot, Value Buds, and Spiritleaf. SNDL is a licensed cannabis producer that uses state-of-the-art indoor facilities to supply wholesale and retail customers under a cannabis brand portfolio that includes Top Leaf, Sundial Cannabis, Palmetto, Spiritleaf Selects, and Grasslands. SNDL's investment portfolio seeks to deploy strategic capital through direct and indirect investments and partnerships throughout the global cannabis industry.
For more information on SNDL, please go to www.sndl.com.
This news release includes statements containing certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law ("forward-looking statements"), including, but not limited to, statements regarding the Company's operational goals, demand for the Company's products, the Company's ability to achieve profitability or its goal of sustainable, positive gross margin and positive free cash flow, the development of the legal cannabis industry, performance of the Company's investments, including through the SunStream joint venture, any potential forms of shareholder value creation, the maintenance of production levels and maintenance or improvement in harvest THC levels (including during the COVID-19 pandemic), the expansion of product offerings, brand and market share and retail networks, and the integration and realization of expected benefits of the acquisition of Alcanna. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "continue", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "likely", "outlook", "forecast", "may", "will", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Various assumptions were used in drawing the conclusions or making the projections contained in the forward-looking statements throughout this news release. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Please see "Item 3.D.—Risk Factors" in the Company's annual report on Form 20-F, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") on April 28, 2022, and the risk factors included in our other SEC filings for a discussion of the material risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking information. The Company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law.
View original content to download multimedia:
SOURCE SNDL Inc. | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/sndl-reports-second-quarter-2022-financial-operational-results/ | 2022-08-12T21:48:51Z |
...FLOOD WATCH IN EFFECT FROM SATURDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY
EVENING...
* WHAT...Flash flooding caused by excessive rainfall is possible.
* WHERE...A portion of southeast Wyoming, including the following
areas, Central Laramie County, Central Laramie Range and Southwest
Platte County, East Platte County, Laramie Valley, South Laramie
Range and South Laramie Range Foothills.
* WHEN...From Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening.
* IMPACTS...Flooding may occur in poor drainage and urban areas.
Low-water crossings may be flooded.
* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...
- http://www.weather.gov/safety/flood
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
You should monitor later forecasts and be prepared to take action
should Flash Flood Warnings be issued.
&&
A male sage grouse struts on a Wyoming lek in April 2020.
A key timing restriction protecting some wintering greater sage grouse from oil and gas development doesn’t align with the imperiled birds’ use of the critical habitat, a University of Wyoming study shows.
Sage grouse generally move to winter range on Nov. 7 and stay through March 13, according to research by professor Jeff Beck and others who used data from hundreds of GPS-tagged sage grouse. But Wyoming’s restrictions on oil and gas activity in defined “winter concentration areas” start only on Dec. 1, according to Gov. Mark Gordon’s executive order protecting the bird.
The new information could lead to a revision of that executive order, members of the Sage Grouse Implementation Team said last week.
The understanding of grouse winter habits “has changed somewhat from what the assumptions were,” Beck told the team.
SGIT chairman Bob Budd agreed.
“We were using the best science available,” Budd said of the existing protective timeframe. However, “what we thought [to be correct] wasn’t right,” he said in an interview.
“Now it’s a matter of saying ‘do we need to change the way we are managing?’”
Another team member, Brian Rutledge, a consultant for Audubon , said science shows the grouse protection “has to occur earlier.”
Calling the research “big news to everybody,” he said winter concentration area protections may need to extend from November to April or May.
Beck and two associates plan to refine their findings and take them to the grouse-team’s winter concentration area subcommittee. The work has not yet been published. Should the WCA subcommittee call for expanded drilling restrictions, there’s a “pretty good chance” the full SGIT would forward that to the governor, Budd said.
Gordon could then change his executive order to revise when drilling would be allowed in WCAs.
Budd’s willingness to advance new protections, “that’s a big deal,” Rutledge said. “That’s responsiveness.”
Beck, a professor in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, along with post-doctoral research associates Kurt Smith and Aaron Pratt, used information from 540 grouse collected between 2008-2018. All told 900,000 GPS locations made up the data set.
The researchers tracked sage grouse movements in five general areas: the Tongue/Powder River area, Bighorn Basin, Wind/Sweetwater Rivers area, Upper Green River valley and northern Red Desert.
On average the data showed that 25% of the tagged grouse arrived at wintering grounds by Oct. 10, half by Nov. 7 and 75% by Nov. 25., researcher Pratt told the grouse team. The governor’s executive order drilling restrictions, however, begin “after most birds have already arrived,” Pratt said.
The existing protections end on May 15 when only half the population has left the winter habitat, he said.
Wyoming has defined only one WCA, which is largely located in an energy field approved for drilling and fracking. The Normally Pressured Lance, or NPL gas field and the corresponding wintering area lie in southern Sublette County near the Jonah gas field.
No drilling is expected to occur there this winter, SGIT member Paul Ulrich, a representative of Jonah Energy, which owns the rights to the NPL Field, told the team.
Gordon recognized and protected the lone WCA after a biologist discovered as many as 2,000 grouse there. Gordon designated the WCA because Wyoming’s general sage grouse core-area conservation strategy did not cover the Sublette County winter refuge.
Extending the protective dates for the Sublette WCA may not be enough, Rutledge said. That’s because un-designated WCAs — defined as places where 50 or more birds flock — exist inside protected core areas as well.
But those core areas, generally delineated around habitat used in other seasons, may not have adequate winter drilling restrictions, Rutledge said.
Wyoming also should better define what activities unsettle grouse on their winter range, Budd and Rutledge said. Those potentially disruptive activities include things like snowmobiling and antler hunting.
Greater sage grouse spend an average of 94 days a year in breeding habitat, 99 days in summer habitat and about 46 days on fall transitional range. But winter is the longest single season, the UW research shows, extending for 126 days.
Last week’s discussion came as the Wyoming Game and Fish Department prepares to release its annual summary of grouse population trends, derived from counts of strutting males at spring breeding grounds known as leks. That information and similar estimates from other Western states help inform the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as it monitors the struggling species for potential protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Wyoming’s core areas, WCAs and connectivity areas cover where an estimated 83% of the state’s population of birds live, according to the governor’s executive order. The designations cover about 24% of the state and are designed to encourage development elsewhere and limit the amount of surface disturbance in the protected zones.
Greater sage grouse tend to spend winter in gently rolling terrain, where sagebrush covers at least two-thirds of the landscape and is not completely covered by snow, the researchers told the team.
Rutledge said it is possible the sage grouse team could receive recommendations from its WCA subcommittee before this winter.
WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/news/research-shows-winter-grouse-efforts-miss-key-weeks/article_169df0d4-962f-534a-a901-155fab0ef17d.html | 2022-08-12T21:51:43Z |
Shenandoah County’s annual Route 11 Yard Crawl back this weekend
SHENANDOAH COUNTY, Va. (WHSV) - The annual Route 11 Yard Crawl is back this weekend.
“People are always looking for a good deal and as far as sellers everybody’s looking to declutter,” Bo Souders, a Yard Crawl Vendor said.
The official start is Saturday, but many vendors were already making sales Friday as others set up.
“It’s almost like a yearly family reunion here,” Souders said. “We just have a good time and socialize.”
Shenandoah County Chamber of Commerce says this is the largest yard sale in Virginia.
“Right now it’s a good time to sell because people’s looking for a deal with prices up and things high at the store, but we get a lot ... in the last couple of years it’s been down so with the COVID, but here this year its been good for a Friday,” Souders said.
They said this is a big revenue driver for the area and many local businesses will have special sales this weekend to go along with the yard crawl.
“The prices of everything in stores, I think people they’d rather shop and find something really good used for cheaper than what they get in the store and always looking for a deal,” Souders said.
The crawl officially begins in New Market and travels up Route 11 to Stephens City, however, Souders said many people start as far back as Harrisonburg to catch the tourist traveling in.
“It’s a big deal, it’s been going on for years now and I don’t know if it will stop,” he said.
There are cones and speed radars to remind drivers to slow down.
“If they see a lot of cars they figure they people have good stuff, or a lot of stuff and they’re gonna stop too,” he said.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/08/12/shenandoah-countys-annual-route-11-yard-crawl-back-this-weekend/ | 2022-08-12T22:04:04Z |
Sun Belt Conference Preview: Appalachian State
Published: Aug. 12, 2022 at 5:49 PM EDT|Updated: 12 minutes ago
HARRISONBURG, Va. (WHSV) - Our series taking a look at programs in the new-look Sun Belt Conference focuses on Appalachian State.
WHSV Sports Director TJ Eck talks with Adam Witten, the play-by-play announcer for App State football.
James Madison has joined the Sun Belt Conference ahead of the 2022-2023 academic year.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/08/12/sun-belt-conference-preview-appalachian-state/ | 2022-08-12T22:04:10Z |
France battles a "monster" wildfire that has forced thousands to flee their homes. Wildfires in Europe this summer have broken out as heat waves bake the continent and renew focus on climate change.
Copyright 2022 NPR
France battles a "monster" wildfire that has forced thousands to flee their homes. Wildfires in Europe this summer have broken out as heat waves bake the continent and renew focus on climate change.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/a-monster-wildfire-in-france-sends-thousands-out-of-their-homes | 2022-08-12T22:30:52Z |
Diaa Hadid chiefly covers Pakistan and Afghanistan for NPR News. She is based in NPR's bureau in Islamabad. There, Hadid and her team were awarded a Murrow in 2019 for hard news for their story on why abortion rates in Pakistan are among the highest in the world. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/after-decades-of-war-an-afghan-village-mourns-its-losses | 2022-08-12T22:30:58Z |
Belinda Huijuan Tang's debut novel A Map for the Missing is a story about family, forgiveness and the challenge of grappling with the past while charting a path for the future.
Copyright 2022 NPR
Belinda Huijuan Tang's debut novel A Map for the Missing is a story about family, forgiveness and the challenge of grappling with the past while charting a path for the future.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/belinda-huijuan-tangs-debut-novel-explores-family-forgiveness-in-times-of-change | 2022-08-12T22:31:04Z |
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Barbara McQuade, professor at University of Michigan Law School and a former U.S. attorney, about the unsealing of former President Donald Trump's search warrant.
Copyright 2022 NPR
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Barbara McQuade, professor at University of Michigan Law School and a former U.S. attorney, about the unsealing of former President Donald Trump's search warrant.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/former-u-s-attorney-gives-details-on-trumps-unsealed-warrants | 2022-08-12T22:31:10Z |
For the first two centuries of U.S. history, presidents pretty much decided what documents they wanted to take with them when they left the White House. But that changed with President Richard Nixon.
Copyright 2022 NPR
For the first two centuries of U.S. history, presidents pretty much decided what documents they wanted to take with them when they left the White House. But that changed with President Richard Nixon.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/heres-how-nixons-downfall-forever-changed-the-rules-around-presidential-documents | 2022-08-12T22:31:16Z |
David Finkelstein, former U.S. Army China specialist and director of Asian security affairs at CNA, talks about China's recent military demonstrations and the country's rising tensions with Taiwan.
Copyright 2022 NPR
David Finkelstein, former U.S. Army China specialist and director of Asian security affairs at CNA, talks about China's recent military demonstrations and the country's rising tensions with Taiwan.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/heres-what-chinas-show-of-force-could-mean-for-taiwan | 2022-08-12T22:31:22Z |
Juana Summers is a political correspondent for NPR covering race, justice and politics. She has covered politics since 2010 for publications including Politico, CNN and The Associated Press. She got her start in public radio at KBIA in Columbia, Mo., and also previously covered Congress for NPR.
Erika Ryan is a producer for All Things Considered. She joined NPR after spending 4 years at CNN, where she worked for various shows and CNN.com in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Ryan began her career in journalism as a print reporter covering arts and culture. She's a graduate of the University of South Carolina, and currently lives in Washington, D.C., with her dog, Millie.
Justine Kenin
Justine Kenin is an editor on All Things Considered. She joined NPR in 1999 as an intern. Nothing makes her happier than getting a book in the right reader's hands – most especially her own. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/heres-why-the-baltimore-beat-relaunched-as-a-black-led-nonprofit-publication | 2022-08-12T22:31:29Z |
A lot of franchise gunk and mythology has built up around the 1987 action flick, Predator — which featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and other he-men battling a vicious game hunter from outer space boasting thermal vision, a cloaking device, and big, nasty mandibles.
Prey, a new movie streaming on Hulu, stripped most of that plaque off and went back in time for an origin story, plopping the predator into the bucolic world of the Comanche people 300 years ago before the real-life invasion of alien colonists from Europe.
Prey's director Dan Trachtenberg, and producer Jhane Myers — a Comanche and Blackfeet American Indian herself — filled the cast with Native actors and even recorded a Comanche language dub. But Trachtenberg is also a gamer, and for the film's score he sought out a non-Native videogame composer he admired.
"He had been playing Assassin's Creed: Valhalla while they were in production on the film, and he really liked what he heard," says composer Sarah Schachner.
Schachner specializes in finding ancient, unusual instruments and weaving them into a modern action tapestry. She performs most of the stringed instruments herself — including a horsehead cello from Mongolia and a primitive violin from Kazakhstan.
"I just find with sci-fi projects, there's no boundaries," she says. "You can do anything you want. And, I mean, who wouldn't want to write some badass music for a new, feral predator?"
It was important for Schachner to collaborate with a Native musician on the score. "Just like everything in the film," says Myers, "I wanted it infused with authenticity." The producer made a list of Native musicians she knew, and Schachner was especially drawn to Grammy-winning Robert Mirabal after seeing him playing flute in a YouTube video.
Mirabal lives in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, and while not a Comanche himself, he had no qualms contributing to the film. ("It's irrelevant to me," he says.) He's a composer in his own right, and has worked on movies before — he scored the 2010 documentary Wild Horses and Renegades, and even acted in projects like Walker, Texas Ranger.
He was intrigued by the story of Prey, and saw in it something more than merely Hollywood high concept: "Living on a traditional Pueblo, with ancient stories and ancient philosophy, we have stories like this — of the star people," he says, "or the people of the heavens. So it just was something that we grew up with."
Mirabal draws on Native idioms and instruments, as well as modern jazz, hard rock, and hip-hop. His specialty is flute, including a double-barreled flute he invented himself. "It looks like a bassoon, and it sounds really unique because it's made from the traditional format of the native flutes, but then it's way larger than that," he explains. "It has a unique sound to it, especially when you start to do circular breathing with it, and then you start to pulse your breath into it."
With minimal prompts and a lot of freedom, Schachner worked with Mirabal remotely in a studio — this being mid-pandemic, he was in New Mexico, she was in Los Angeles — to improvise a library of free-ranging tones and notes.
"He has his own twist," Schachner says. "He has his own way of playing things. I think we both kind of share that love of music that can be both beautiful and unsettling at the same time. And everything he played... I was just in awe."
Schachner took those tracks and incorporated them throughout her score for Prey, sometimes plainly but often with the manipulation and distortion she applies to all the other elements in her music.
At the end of their one-day, remote recording session, she asked Mirabal if he also sang.
"And he was like, 'Yeah, I sing' — and he just sang something so honest and pure," she says. "It touched me when he sung it, and it was so unplanned. And it really just helped in certain moments of the film, give that kind of extra layer of depth."
"It's almost as if you're whispering the story," Mirabal says of creating music for film. "There's a visual aspect to it, but then there's a whole other mystical side of the story that is whispered to you through music."
So in this movie about a high-tech humanoid that dismembers its victims, listen for that whisper. In between all the screaming.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/how-a-grammy-winning-pueblo-musician-influenced-the-soundtrack-for-prey | 2022-08-12T22:31:35Z |
The Trump Organization and longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg will be tried on tax fraud charges. A judge refused to dismiss the charges and scheduled jury selection for October.
Copyright 2022 NPR
The Trump Organization and longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg will be tried on tax fraud charges. A judge refused to dismiss the charges and scheduled jury selection for October.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/judge-refuses-to-dismiss-tax-fraud-charges-for-trump-organization-former-cfo | 2022-08-12T22:31:41Z |
Megan Thee Stallion gets vulnerable on hot sophomore album 'Traumazine' By Ailsa Chang, Brianna Scott, Sarah Handel Published August 12, 2022 at 4:39 PM CDT Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Listen • 4:20 NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Sidney Madden from NPR Music about Megan Thee Stallion's sophomore album Traumazine. Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/megan-thee-stallion-gets-vulnerable-on-hot-sophomore-album-traumazine | 2022-08-12T22:31:47Z |
Two thousand Kaiser mental health workers plan to go on strike Monday. They say Kaiser has failed to follow California law and make sure patients with mental health needs are given prompt care.
Copyright 2022 NPR
Two thousand Kaiser mental health workers plan to go on strike Monday. They say Kaiser has failed to follow California law and make sure patients with mental health needs are given prompt care.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/mental-health-workers-say-they-plan-to-strike | 2022-08-12T22:31:53Z |
Juana Summers is a political correspondent for NPR covering race, justice and politics. She has covered politics since 2010 for publications including Politico, CNN and The Associated Press. She got her start in public radio at KBIA in Columbia, Mo., and also previously covered Congress for NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/sylvan-esso-ditches-its-guiding-principles-of-pop-for-its-new-album-no-rules-sandy | 2022-08-12T22:31:59Z |
The House votes Friday to give final congressional approval to a package of climate, health care and tax measures that Democrats have been negotiating for over a year.
Kelsey Snell is a Congressional correspondent for NPR. She has covered Congress since 2010 for outlets including The Washington Post, Politico and National Journal. She has covered elections and Congress with a reporting specialty in budget, tax and economic policy. She has a graduate degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. and an undergraduate degree in political science from DePaul University in Chicago. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/the-house-votes-on-the-inflation-reduction-act | 2022-08-12T22:32:05Z |
A growing shortage for neon is driving up its prices by 5000%. Neon production became highly concentrated in post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine and Russia. The world is paying for that concentration.
Copyright 2022 NPR
A growing shortage for neon is driving up its prices by 5000%. Neon production became highly concentrated in post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine and Russia. The world is paying for that concentration.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-08-12/the-war-in-ukraine-is-disrupting-the-worlds-supply-of-neon | 2022-08-12T22:32:11Z |
Dallas and Austin officials have declared monkeypox a public health emergency — bids both to get in line for federal funding and to send a message to residents that the virus is serious and painful and they should take precautionary measures while the vaccine is in short supply.
“As we’re running out of vaccine and medications, we want to engage our community and ask them to help us stem the tide, the spread of the disease,” Austin-Travis County Medical Director/Health Authority Dr. Desmar Walkes said on Tuesday. “And allow us the time to retool and refuel, as it were, and get what we need to treat people and to vaccinate people who are exposed to the virus."
Texas’ major cities have received thousands of monkeypox vaccine doses and expect thousands more in the coming weeks, but a national shortage of the shot has officials and the people they’re trying to protect begging for more.
“It is not enough,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said at a Tuesday news conference. “We need the federal government to do everything it can to increase the availability of medicine and vaccines to our community.”
There are 813 confirmed Texas cases of monkeypox, a contagious rash of painful lesions that can be debilitating but is not typically fatal, nor does it typically lead to hospitalization or long-term health problems. Some 9,491 cases have been documented in the U.S. during the current outbreak, more than any other country.
Monkeypox spreads through close, intimate skin contact with someone who has the virus, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that many, though not all, of the reported cases have been among men who have sex with men, although that is not historically the community where the virus is typically found.
It is not a sexually transmissible disease because it does not require sex to be transmitted, but sex is how it’s commonly being spread currently, health officials said.
While this outbreak has hit some 89 countries so far, the virus had been largely contained in Central and West Africa for decades.
And while it is still negatively impacting those people, as more cases are reported, other demographics are starting to show up in the numbers, according to state data. Two weeks ago, 100% of the cases were in men who have sex with men. On Thursday, that percentage was down to 95%.
The idea of a public health emergency declaration may rekindle concerns about the sorts of business closures and other measures enacted during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the orders over monkeypox include none of those measures.
The declarations signal to the federal government that those areas are in need of more vaccines and medical tools to beat back the contagion.
But those enacted in Dallas and Austin, officials say, are mainly to raise awareness of the disease and encourage those most at risk to do what they can to slow the spread while the community waits for more vaccine to become available.
Officials are asking residents to wash their hands, avoid direct skin-to-skin contact and isolate themselves if they get sick. They also want people to take precautions as a means of avoiding further financial strain in a tough economy amid inflation and rising housing costs.
“If you become ill, you will have to isolate at home until you recover,” Walkes said Tuesday. “That’s going to be a financial drain on you and your family.”
Rising cases and a vaccine shortage
The call for awareness comes as state and federal officials scramble for vaccine doses to contain the virus as it spreads faster each week.
Similar to the motives and messages behind the local orders, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra declared monkeypox a public health emergency in order “to unlock additional tools that will help us contain and end this outbreak, and to signal to the American people that we are taking our response to the next level,” Becerra said.
The monkeypox vaccine shortage is attributed to supply chain problems, with an unprecedented worldwide demand in countries that had rarely, if ever, seen the virus on their own soil.
The CDC has said more doses are being procured but that the vaccine may not be widely and easily available until at least next year.
The Texas Department of State Health Services is sending more than 28,000 doses doses to public health departments this month, officials said.
Federal officials are also holding additional doses for states in case they’re needed before the CDC can re-up this winter and “may be released later depending on the status of the outbreak and vaccine administration data,” according to a notice sent to local health officials earlier this week.
Houston, where more than 200 cases have been confirmed, has received nearly 12,000 doses of the vaccine. San Antonio, with 16 confirmed cases, has obtained 1,000 doses. Tarrant County has received 1,100. None of those localities are expected to declare public health emergencies over monkeypox in the near future. The state has several hundred in its stockpile to “for state facilities and filling in gaps that arise,” DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen said.
Austin has received more than 3,100 doses of the monkeypox vaccine. But given the spread of the disease in Austin, that supply is “running out,” Walkes said this week. The local supply of vaccine doses will be down to about 200 by the end of this week, Walkes told Austin’s city council on Thursday.
Strategies for deploying the vaccine in each public health region are up to the local officials and may vary, although state health officials are instructing providers to administer only to those who meet certain high-risk criteria or who have already been exposed through close contact, Van Deusen said.
Some counties, such as Dallas, are allowing appointments to be made only over the phone — with no current online appointment system — and are administering the vaccines in clinics where patients’ privacy can be protected.
Van Deusen said that because different communities have different needs, the state has not specified who each local department can authorize to administer vaccines.
“They know the communities and at-risk populations in their area,” Van Deusen said. “They may choose to administer the vaccine themselves or work with public or private providers who serve particular populations or both. I wouldn’t assume one approach will be the best approach everywhere.”
More people eligible
After weeks of limiting the vaccine only to people who have had intimate skin contact with someone who tested positive for the virus, the state on Tuesday began to allow providers to administer them to certain high-risk people before exposure — a move patient advocates have said would be critical in containing the virus.
Those the state considers to be currently at the highest risk are primarily men who have sex with men and who have had multiple or anonymous sex partners over the past 21 days.
The vaccine can prevent onset even after exposure, scientists say, and can mitigate symptoms in those who do contract it.
The state also now allows people under 18 to get the injections if they are at high risk.
Broader eligibility means potentially more vaccine recipients, but state and federal officials are trying to prepare for that, too.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week approved the administration of the vaccine in a shot injected under the skin, much like a tuberculosis test, as opposed to into body fat, like more traditional vaccines. By offering the shots in this way, only a fifth of the full dose is needed for each person.
“In recent weeks, the monkeypox virus has continued to spread at a rate that has made it clear our current vaccine supply will not meet the current demand,” said FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf. “This will increase the total number of doses available for use by up to five fold.”
The method can stretch a vial of vaccine, but it requires specialized training to administer and certain types of needles and syringes.
Dallas County, where more than 200 cases have been confirmed, has received more than 5,000 doses to date but will soon begin using the new injection method approved to stretch those doses and inoculate more people as officials expect numbers there to continue to rise rapidly, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins told The Texas Tribune.
North Texas has one of the highest concentrations of cases compared with the rest of the state, state officials said.
“We don’t have enough vaccine to get to all the populations who are at risk of monkeypox based on where the outbreak is right now,” Jenkins said. “That's the bottom line.”
Public health departments have personnel trained in the administration method but DSHS still has to procure enough specialized syringes and needles before they can start doing the shots intradermally, Van Deusen said.
When and if the vaccine is given to private providers, additional training will be needed, which could take more time, he said.
“We’re certainly recommending it as a way to stretch the supply, but it’s not an instant fix,” Van Deusen said.
Disclosure: Steve Adler, a former Texas Tribune board chair, has been a financial supporter of the Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune. | https://www.keranews.org/health-wellness/2022-08-12/as-monkeypox-cases-climb-and-vaccine-is-in-short-supply-some-texas-cities-declare-an-emergency | 2022-08-12T22:32:18Z |
53-year-old man indicted for cyberstalking after terrorizing women online, authorities say
ST. LOUIS (KMOV/Gray News) - A man who already served time in prison for harassing women online with violent fantasies again faces similar charges.
KMOV reports a grand jury has indicted 53-year-old Robert Merkle on charges accusing him of threatening and cyberstalking five people since October 2021.
Officials said Merkle had previously pleaded guilty in 2017 to multiple counts of misdemeanor and felony harassment in St. Louis and Jefferson County.
A woman, who wanted to go by the name Angela, shared that she met Merkle at a pub in 2017. They sat at the same table and talked about current events. Angela said a man named Rob then messaged the group organizer asking about her, saying the two found the message strange.
According to authorities, Angela said she received a disturbing message from a man named James through the Meetup app days later.
“It read, ‘I have the need to tell you I have been having sexually violent fantasies.’ It went on from there to describe rape,” Angela said.
According to Angela, the message also mentioned the meeting at the pub, and she then informed police of the situation.
Angela said another message came through the online group that described a violent sexual assault a few days later.
“I’m interested in female sexual response and sexual performance by young Caucasian women under 40 during specific nonconsensual sex acts,” Angela said the message read.
Angela said she connected the profiles of the men and gave the information to police. After working with St. Louis police, charges were filed against Merkle.
Authorities said a judge, Rex Burlison, ordered Merkle’s sentences to be run concurrently, meaning he would serve three years behind bars. Merkle was released from prison in October 2020 and completed his parole in October 2021.
According to police, Merkle faces the latest felony charge of harassment from January 2022. He allegedly texted a woman that he had made a copy of her key to her residence and that he was going to break in and rape her.
Copyright 2022 KMOV via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/08/12/53-year-old-man-indicted-cyberstalking-after-terrorizing-women-online-authorities-say/ | 2022-08-12T22:38:47Z |
Gunman in Montenegro kills 10 then shot dead by passerby
CETINJE, Montenegro (AP) — A man went on a shooting rampage in the streets of this western Montenegro city Friday, killing 10 people, including two children, before being shot dead by a passerby, officials said.
Montenegrin police chief Zoran Brdjanin said in a video statement shared with media that attacker was a 34-year-old man he identified only by his initials, V.B.
Brdjanin said the man used a hunting rifle to first shoot to death two children ages 8 and 11 and their mother, who lived as tenants in the attacker’s house in Cetinje’s Medovina neighborhood.
The shooter then walked into the street and randomly shot 13 more people, seven of them fatally, the chief said.
“At the moment, it is unclear what provoked V.B. to commit this atrocious act,” Brdjanin said.
Andrijana Nastic, the prosecutor coordinating the crime scene investigation, told journalists that the gunman was killed by a passerby and that a police officer was among the wounded. She said nine of those killed died at the scene and two died at a hospital where they were taken for surgery.
Cetinje, the seat of Montenegro’s former royal government, is 36 kilometers (22 miles) west of Podogrica, the current capital of the small Balkan nation.
Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic wrote on his Telegram channel that the incident was “an unprecedented tragedy” and urged the nation “to be, in their thoughts, with the families of the innocent victims, their relatives, friends and all the people of Cetinje.”
President Milo Djukanovic said on Twitter that he was “deeply moved by the news of the terrible tragedy” in Cetinje, calling for “solidarity” with the families who lost loved-ones in the incident.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/08/12/gunman-montenegro-kills-10-then-shot-dead-by-passerby/ | 2022-08-12T22:38:54Z |
Mom charged with second-degree murder after infant drowns in bathtub
Published: Aug. 12, 2022 at 5:11 PM EDT|Updated: 1 hour ago
LITHONIA, Ga. (WGCL/Gray News) – A Georgia mother has been charged with second-degree murder in the drowning death of her infant, officials said.
According to the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office, Shaquilla Feaster, 31, was arrested Thursday.
The sheriff’s office said Feaster left her child, Ja’Lonnie Small, unattended in a bathtub on July 30. Ja’Lonnie was taken to the hospital but died days later.
Officials said Feaster is being held without bond at the DeKalb County Jail.
Copyright 2022 WGCL via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/08/12/mom-charged-with-second-degree-murder-after-infant-drowns-bathtub/ | 2022-08-12T22:39:00Z |
Southern Baptists say denomination faces DOJ investigation
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention said Friday that several of the denomination’s major entities are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The SBC’s statement gave few details about the investigation, but indicated it dealt with sexual abuse. The SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., has been plagued by problems related to clergy sex abuse in recent years.
“Individually and collectively each SBC entity is resolved to fully and completely cooperate with the investigation,” the statement said. “While we continue to grieve and lament past mistakes related to sexual abuse, current leaders across the SBC have demonstrated a firm conviction to address those issues of the past and are implementing measures to ensure they are never repeated in the future.”
Earlier this year, an SBC task force released a blistering 288-page report from outside consultant, Guidepost Solutions. The firm’s seven-month independent investigation found disturbing details about how denominational leaders mishandled sex abuse claims and mistreated victims.
There was no immediate comment from the Justice Department about the investigation.
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/08/12/southern-baptists-say-denomination-faces-doj-investigation/ | 2022-08-12T22:39:07Z |
Traveling art exhibit to be unveiled ahead of Peak of the Bloom concert
CAMP CREEK, W.Va. (WVVA) -
A traveling art exhibit will be unveiled ahead of tomorrow evening’s Peak of the Bloom concert. After that it will travel across the state.
The Oakvale Area Outreach Team worked in collaboration with Harmony for Hope’s community liaison Karen Leathers to create this collective art exhibit.
Bringing people together is the theme of the piece, and it features work from both professional and amateur artists.
Debra Williby-Walker, Co-leader for the Oakvale Area Outreach Team:
“This art exhibit displays people connecting to people, communities connecting to communities, and generations connecting to generations”
The artwork on display comes from all age groups, ranging from 22 months old to 97 years old.
The Peak of the Bloom concert will start at 7 pm tomorrow night at Camp Creek State Park.
Copyright 2022 WVVA. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/08/12/traveling-art-exhibit-be-unveiled-ahead-peak-bloom-concert/ | 2022-08-12T22:39:13Z |
Two Mcdowell County deputies face federal lawsuit
VALLS CREEK, W.Va. (WVVA) - Two Mcdowell County deputies are facing a federal lawsuit for allegations of racial profiling.
The plaintiff’s suit spells out multiple civil rights violations that allegedly occurred on August 7th, 2020.
According to the criminal complaint, deputies Jordan Horn and Dalton Martin were investigating a reported “marijuana growth” near Baptist Drive in Valls Creek, West Virginia.
The criminal complaint states, that the deputies found marijuana growth by a nearby church located just off the property of Donnie and Ventriss Hairston.
The lawsuit states that the officers accused the Hairstons of growing marijuana. In the body camera footage, Ventriss Hairston refutes the claim that they were involved in growing marijuana.
Neighbor and owner of the land, Jason Tartt, was made aware of the situation by the Hairstons. He then went to check on the situation. He says he was immediately harassed by officers.
In the body camera footage, the officers ask Tartt for his name and date of birth. Tartt declined to give the officers his information. In the footage, you can hear Deputies Horn and Martin threaten Tartt with arrest.
Soon after, Donnie Hairston pulls out his cell phone to record the incident. One of the officers then is seen walking up Hairston’s porch and pushing him inside the door.
Tartt was arrested shortly after and charged with Obstruction. That charge was later dismissed in Magistrate Court. Tartt says the incident is a glaring example of the rift between law enforcement and people of color living in McDowell County.
If you would like to watch the full body camera footage, you can click the link below.
Link to full body camera footage.
Copyright 2022 WVVA. All rights reserved. | https://www.wvva.com/2022/08/12/two-mcdowell-county-deputies-face-federal-lawsuit/ | 2022-08-12T22:39:19Z |
France battles a "monster" wildfire that has forced thousands to flee their homes. Wildfires in Europe this summer have broken out as heat waves bake the continent and renew focus on climate change.
Copyright 2022 NPR
France battles a "monster" wildfire that has forced thousands to flee their homes. Wildfires in Europe this summer have broken out as heat waves bake the continent and renew focus on climate change.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/a-monster-wildfire-in-france-sends-thousands-out-of-their-homes | 2022-08-12T22:44:35Z |
Diaa Hadid chiefly covers Pakistan and Afghanistan for NPR News. She is based in NPR's bureau in Islamabad. There, Hadid and her team were awarded a Murrow in 2019 for hard news for their story on why abortion rates in Pakistan are among the highest in the world. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/after-decades-of-war-an-afghan-village-mourns-its-losses | 2022-08-12T22:44:41Z |
This photograph is good for your biceps. It's on the cover of a heavy, large, impressive catalogue for the National Gallery's exhibition "American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams." A perfect choice, this picture, to express Adams' obsession: the American landscape, and what's happened to it in the 85 years he's been looking at it.
Do you see the message in the photo? Notice that the word FRONTIER is missing its final R? The letter has disappeared just like the landscape itself: lost to over-development, clear-cutting, various human abuses.
"He's passionate about our relationship to the world around us," says National Gallery senior curator and head of the photography department (and friend) Sarah Greenough. I tell her I see Adams' pictures as doctrinaire — indictments of human avarice and neglect. "That's too harsh," Sarah says. He wants us to witness what has been, what's been lost, and the beauties that remain.
The tree announces its survival, shadowing the garage door in what could be a community of such houses, built on land once covered in trees.
Notice how gorgeous these photos are? The velvety blacks, the aggressive chalky whites. Robert Adams does all his own developing.
Ansel Adams (no relation), Robert's elder by some 30 years, is known for his glorious black-and-white work that celebrates the majesty of our landscape. Curator Greenough says that, in the 1970s, Robert Adams was part of a generation of Americans who looked at the landscape in a very different way. Instead, "they looked at the landscape as the place where we live," and what happens to it as our living takes root.
Robert Adams wrote, "go to the landscape that frightens you the most, and take pictures until you're not scared anymore." Greenough says he meant that we must confront the world that's developing around us. "He had to photograph it until he could come to terms with it." And find the beauty. Here, the landscape is wiped out by ticky-tacky houses. Adams shoots them at an angle that celebrates the architectural forms, and they're umbrella-ed by "a glorious sky."
As he gets older, the photographs seem more about beauty. He's looking for "the things that can give us hope." And Sarah says he's finding them.
Hope, especially, in the light. The exhibition is called "American Silence," she says, not because silence is so pervasive here. Rather, when you stand and look at one of our still glorious landscapes, it's the feeling of silence, "that sense of peace and awe that the beauty of nature can give you."
Art Where You're At is an informal series showcasing online offerings at museums you may not be able to visit.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/america-the-disappearing-beautiful | 2022-08-12T22:44:48Z |
Anne Heche has died of a brain injury and severe burns after speeding and crashing her car into a home in the residential Mar Vista neighborhood last Friday, Aug 5. The building erupted in flames and Heche was dragged out of the vehicle and rushed to the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles.
The 53-year-old, Emmy Award-winning actress is best known for her roles in 1990s films like Volcano, the Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho, Donnie Brasco and Six Days, Seven Nights.
Holly Baird, a spokesperson for Heche's family, sent NPR a statement Friday afternoon saying: "While Anne is legally dead according to California law, her heart is still beating, and she has not been taken off life support."
Baird added an organ procurement company is working to see if the actress is a match for organ donation, and that determination could be made as early as Saturday or as late as next Tuesday.
Heche launched her career playing a pair of good and evil twins on the long-running daytime soap opera Another World, for which she earned a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991.
In the 2000s, Heche focused on making independent movies and TV series. She acted with Nicole Kidman and Cameron Bright in the drama Birth; with Jessica Lange and Christina Ricci in the film adaptation of Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel's bestselling book about depression; and in the comedy Cedar Rapids alongside John C. Reilly and Ed Helms. She also starred in the ABC drama series Men in Trees.
Heche made guest appearances on TV shows like Nip/Tuck and Ally McBeal and starred in a couple of Broadway productions, garnering a Tony Award nomination for her performance in the remount of the 1932 comedy Twentieth Century.
In 2020, Heche launched a weekly lifestyle podcast, Better Together, with friend and co-host Heather Duffy and appeared on Dancing with the Stars.
Heche became a lesbian icon as a result of her highly-visible relationship with comedian and TV host Ellen DeGeneres in the late 1990s.
Heche and DeGeneres were arguably the most famous openly gay couple in Hollywood at a time when being out was far less acceptable than it is today. Heche later claimed the romance took a toll on her career. "I was in a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres for three-and-a-half years and the stigma attached to that relationship was so bad that I was fired from my multimillion-dollar picture deal and I did not work in a studio picture for 10 years," Heche said in an episode of Dancing with the Stars.
But the relationship paved the way for broader acceptance of single-sex partnerships.
"With so few role models and representations of lesbians in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Anne Heche's relationship with Ellen DeGeneres contributed to her celebrity in a significant way and their relationship ultimately validated lesbian love for both straight and queer people," said the Los Angeles-based New York Times columnist Trish Bendix.
Bendix said that while Heche was later in relationships with men — she married Coleman Laffoon in the early 2000s and they had a son together, and was more recently in a relationship with Canadian actor James Tupper with whom she also had a son — "her influence on lesbian and bisexual visibility can't and shouldn't be erased."
In 2000, Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed Heche in advance of her directorial debut on the final episode of If These Walls Could Talk 2, a series of three HBO television films exploring the lives of lesbian couples starring DeGeneres and Sharon Stone. In the interview, Heche said she wished she had been more sensitive about other people's coming out experiences when she and DeGeneres went public with their relationship.
"What I wish I would have known is more of the journey and the struggle of individuals in the gay community or couples in the gay community," Heche said. "Because I would have couched my enthusiasm with an understanding that this isn't everybody's story."
Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio in 1969, the youngest of five siblings. She was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household.
She had a challenging childhood. The family moved around a lot. She said she believed her father, Donald, was a closeted gay man; he died in 1983 of HIV.
"He just couldn't seem to settle down into a normal job, which, of course, we found out later, and as I understand it now, was because he had another life," Heche told Gross on Fresh Air. "He wanted to be with men."
A few months after her father died, Heche's brother Nathan was killed in a car crash at the age of 18.
In her 2001 Memoir Call Me Crazy, and in subsequent interviews, Heche said her father abused her sexually as a child, triggering mental health issues which the actress said she carried with her for decades as an adult.
In an interview with the actress for Larry King Live, host Larry King called Heche's book, "one of the most honest, outspoken, extraordinary autobiographies ever written by anyone in show business."
"I am left with a deep, wordless sadness," wrote Heche's son with Lafoon, Homer, in a statement shared with NPR via Baird. "Hopefully my mom is free from pain and beginning to explore what I like to imagine as her eternal freedom."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/anne-heche-legally-dead-at-53-a-week-after-a-fiery-car-crash | 2022-08-12T22:44:54Z |
Belinda Huijuan Tang's debut novel A Map for the Missing is a story about family, forgiveness and the challenge of grappling with the past while charting a path for the future.
Copyright 2022 NPR
Belinda Huijuan Tang's debut novel A Map for the Missing is a story about family, forgiveness and the challenge of grappling with the past while charting a path for the future.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/belinda-huijuan-tangs-debut-novel-explores-family-forgiveness-in-times-of-change | 2022-08-12T22:45:00Z |
We regularly answer frequently asked questions about life during the coronavirus crisis. If you have a question you'd like us to consider for a future post, email us at goatsandsoda@npr.org with the subject line: "Weekly Coronavirus Questions." See an archive of our FAQs here.
So you had dinner – indoors – with a friend and the next day got a call from your dining companion: "I hate to tell you – but I'm now testing positive for COVID." Uh oh, did you catch it from your friend?
Or you wake up in the middle of the night with a scratchy throat, a cough and a feeling that your head is going to float off your neck. Could it be COVID?
In both these scenarios, the question about whether or not you have COVID can be answered by a self-test or a PCR test. Many people opt for the self-test option since you can now easily pick up self-tests and get an answer in 15 minutes in the comfort of your home.
But if you take an at-home test and it's negative ... are you really in the clear?
That's a question the CDC and the FDA are addressing in guidance issued yesterday on COVID protocols. And there's a little bit of confusion.
The CDC says that if you were exposed to COVID or are sick with COVID to wear a mask and test 5 days later. If that test is negative, the CDC thinks you're good to go: "you can end your isolation."
The FDA, however, now says that one negative test isn't enough. Here's what the FDA advised in a "safety communication" released on August 11: If you have symptoms, you should take another test 48 hours later. If you don't have symptoms, you should take three tests, each 48 hours apart. Only if all those tests are negative should you consider yourself to be COVID-free.
And the FDA isn't the only one to think repeat testing is the way to go. Infectious disease experts agree that the only way to be sure you don't have COVID after a negative home test, is to test again – either with another home test or a more sensitive PCR.
Okay... so why am I being asked to redo my home tests if they're negative?
We get it, repeat testing isn't the most convenient thing. The problem is that those home tests aren't especially sensitive at the beginning of a COVID infection.
"There is a recognition that [at-home rapid antigen tests] are less sensitive than PCR tests," says Dr. Apurv Soni, professor at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine. "But it's not that they don't work, it's just that we need a better understanding of what an effective testing regimen should be."
The FDA made its recommendations based on a yearlong study it did in collaboration with the NIH and University of Massachusetts School of Medicine that was released preprint on medRxiv on August 6.
That study showed that if you take a home test on the day you get a COVID infection, there's a good chance it's going to come back negative – meaning you could be infectious but a home test won't yet show it.
"The data very convincingly show" that if you take another test or two, you can be pretty sure if you have COVID or not, says Soni, who was the lead author on that paper.
Soni says, "If you are concerned about having an infection and you have symptoms, you should take two tests 48 hours apart. If you do not have symptoms, you should take three tests, one every 48 hours. That's it."
So why aren't home tests great at picking up COVID infections? I thought that's what they were supposed to do.
Okay, so now that we know officially know that a single at-home rapid test isn't particularly great at detecting an early case of COVID, the question is: Why not?
Scientists estimate that 95% of the U.S. population has some amount of immunity to COVID due to vaccination or previous infection.
"We're more immune to the virus than we were in 2020," says Soni. "So the way your body reacts to the virus is different than it was in 2020. Antigen tests [home tests] are really good at detecting infection when the viral load is above a certain threshold." But because of the various degrees of immunity most people now have, "the rate at which the viral load increases in your body is slower."
After another few days though, the amount of virus in your body will probably be high enough to be picked up by a home test.
Does the FDA recommendation to repeat test have anything to do with omicron or the new subvariants?
The good news is that it doesn't seem like omicron is having any effect on the sensitivity of the tests. "The currently known variants do not affect the result of the rapid test," says Meriem Bekliz, postdoctoral researcher in emerging viruses at the University of Geneva.
Bekliz is the lead author on a paper published on August 8 in Microbiology Spectrum showing that there's not a difference in how a home test picks up the delta variant and the first subvariant of omicron, BA.1.
But what about the new BA.4 and BA.5 variants? New research shows that those variants are particularly adept at evading your immune system, but are they just as good at evading detection from your at-home rapid tests?
"The rapid home antigen-based tests can detect [all the] omicron subvariants," says Dr. Preeti Malani, professor of medicine at the University of Michigan. "The home tests do not rely on the spike protein, which is where the mutations occur in variants."
The spike protein is what our immune system looks for to identify and neutralize COVID. It's what many of the vaccines are based on. And its why changes in the spike protein have allowed new variants of COVID to somewhat evade detection by our vaccine-primed immune systems.
The home rapid antigen tests detect a different protein, the nucleocapsid. And all of the omicron subvariants have the same version of the nucleocapsid. What does that mean? "Theoretically, there should be no difference in detection sensitivity between omicron BA.1 and its sub-variants [including BA.4/BA.5]," Bekliz says.
What if after two tests 48 hours apart, I'm still sick and still testing negative?
So yeah, maybe you just don't have COVID. "There may be an alternative virus or even a bacterial infection like strep throat, causing illness and not COVID," says Malani.
Still, two negative tests 48 hours apart isn't 100% definitive. "Besides repeating the home test, you can also consider testing with PCR," Malani says.
PCR tests are more sensitive to lower viral loads than the at-home rapid antigen tests. So if you take a PCR test while sick and it comes back negative, then you can be fairly comfortable knowing it's not COVID.
However, just because you don't have COVID doesn't mean you are OK to head into the office. "If you are ill, whether due to COVID or some other virus, you should stay away from others," says Malani.
So does this really mean if I have dinner with a friend who then tells me they have COVID that I need to test three times over six days?
This is where things get a bit tricky. Even Soni admits that testing for that long, "is a little impractical." But he also says: "If you do repeat a test [ahead of whatever social event you want to go to] that gives you the highest confidence that you're not infected and therefore not passing infection on to others."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/coronavirus-faq-im-confused-by-the-new-testing-advice-do-it-once-twice-thrice | 2022-08-12T22:45:07Z |
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Barbara McQuade, professor at University of Michigan Law School and a former U.S. attorney, about the unsealing of former President Donald Trump's search warrant.
Copyright 2022 NPR
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Barbara McQuade, professor at University of Michigan Law School and a former U.S. attorney, about the unsealing of former President Donald Trump's search warrant.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/former-u-s-attorney-gives-details-on-trumps-unsealed-warrants | 2022-08-12T22:45:13Z |
Bond’s Brewing in Laramie recently got eighth place in this year’s U.S. Open Beer Championship. According to the Laramie Boomerang, it’s a prestigious competition with competitors ranging from household names to mere household brewers. Bond’s had four of its beers win, standing out among the more than 9,000 beers in 150 styles submitted to the competition.
The Shell Fire Hall recently received a large donation of all kinds of used, but still good, equipment from a New York City fire department. The Greybull Standard reports the boxes contained bunker gear, gloves, helmets, suspenders and Nomex hoods. Plus a brand new portable deck gun, which can better penetrate large fires. The donations came about because a retired New York City firefighter learned the Shell Fire Department receives no funding from government sources.
Slow Foods in the Tetons has a new discount program this year. According to the Jackson Hole News and Guide, it allows people to choose a 10, 25, or 50 percent discount on their produce, regardless of their income level. The program is trying to encourage people to purchase locally grown produce. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/friday-august-12 | 2022-08-12T22:45:19Z |
For the first two centuries of U.S. history, presidents pretty much decided what documents they wanted to take with them when they left the White House. But that changed with President Richard Nixon.
Copyright 2022 NPR
For the first two centuries of U.S. history, presidents pretty much decided what documents they wanted to take with them when they left the White House. But that changed with President Richard Nixon.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/heres-how-nixons-downfall-forever-changed-the-rules-around-presidential-documents | 2022-08-12T22:45:25Z |
David Finkelstein, former U.S. Army China specialist and director of Asian security affairs at CNA, talks about China's recent military demonstrations and the country's rising tensions with Taiwan.
Copyright 2022 NPR
David Finkelstein, former U.S. Army China specialist and director of Asian security affairs at CNA, talks about China's recent military demonstrations and the country's rising tensions with Taiwan.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/heres-what-chinas-show-of-force-could-mean-for-taiwan | 2022-08-12T22:45:32Z |
A lot of franchise gunk and mythology has built up around the 1987 action flick, Predator — which featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and other he-men battling a vicious game hunter from outer space boasting thermal vision, a cloaking device, and big, nasty mandibles.
Prey, a new movie streaming on Hulu, stripped most of that plaque off and went back in time for an origin story, plopping the predator into the bucolic world of the Comanche people 300 years ago before the real-life invasion of alien colonists from Europe.
Prey's director Dan Trachtenberg, and producer Jhane Myers — a Comanche and Blackfeet American Indian herself — filled the cast with Native actors and even recorded a Comanche language dub. But Trachtenberg is also a gamer, and for the film's score he sought out a non-Native videogame composer he admired.
"He had been playing Assassin's Creed: Valhalla while they were in production on the film, and he really liked what he heard," says composer Sarah Schachner.
Schachner specializes in finding ancient, unusual instruments and weaving them into a modern action tapestry. She performs most of the stringed instruments herself — including a horsehead cello from Mongolia and a primitive violin from Kazakhstan.
"I just find with sci-fi projects, there's no boundaries," she says. "You can do anything you want. And, I mean, who wouldn't want to write some badass music for a new, feral predator?"
It was important for Schachner to collaborate with a Native musician on the score. "Just like everything in the film," says Myers, "I wanted it infused with authenticity." The producer made a list of Native musicians she knew, and Schachner was especially drawn to Grammy-winning Robert Mirabal after seeing him playing flute in a YouTube video.
Mirabal lives in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, and while not a Comanche himself, he had no qualms contributing to the film. ("It's irrelevant to me," he says.) He's a composer in his own right, and has worked on movies before — he scored the 2010 documentary Wild Horses and Renegades, and even acted in projects like Walker, Texas Ranger.
He was intrigued by the story of Prey, and saw in it something more than merely Hollywood high concept: "Living on a traditional Pueblo, with ancient stories and ancient philosophy, we have stories like this — of the star people," he says, "or the people of the heavens. So it just was something that we grew up with."
Mirabal draws on Native idioms and instruments, as well as modern jazz, hard rock, and hip-hop. His specialty is flute, including a double-barreled flute he invented himself. "It looks like a bassoon, and it sounds really unique because it's made from the traditional format of the native flutes, but then it's way larger than that," he explains. "It has a unique sound to it, especially when you start to do circular breathing with it, and then you start to pulse your breath into it."
With minimal prompts and a lot of freedom, Schachner worked with Mirabal remotely in a studio — this being mid-pandemic, he was in New Mexico, she was in Los Angeles — to improvise a library of free-ranging tones and notes.
"He has his own twist," Schachner says. "He has his own way of playing things. I think we both kind of share that love of music that can be both beautiful and unsettling at the same time. And everything he played... I was just in awe."
Schachner took those tracks and incorporated them throughout her score for Prey, sometimes plainly but often with the manipulation and distortion she applies to all the other elements in her music.
At the end of their one-day, remote recording session, she asked Mirabal if he also sang.
"And he was like, 'Yeah, I sing' — and he just sang something so honest and pure," she says. "It touched me when he sung it, and it was so unplanned. And it really just helped in certain moments of the film, give that kind of extra layer of depth."
"It's almost as if you're whispering the story," Mirabal says of creating music for film. "There's a visual aspect to it, but then there's a whole other mystical side of the story that is whispered to you through music."
So in this movie about a high-tech humanoid that dismembers its victims, listen for that whisper. In between all the screaming.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/how-a-grammy-winning-pueblo-musician-influenced-the-soundtrack-for-prey | 2022-08-12T22:45:38Z |
The Trump Organization and longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg will be tried on tax fraud charges. A judge refused to dismiss the charges and scheduled jury selection for October.
Copyright 2022 NPR
The Trump Organization and longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg will be tried on tax fraud charges. A judge refused to dismiss the charges and scheduled jury selection for October.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/judge-refuses-to-dismiss-tax-fraud-charges-for-trump-organization-former-cfo | 2022-08-12T22:45:44Z |
Megan Thee Stallion gets vulnerable on hot sophomore album 'Traumazine' NPR | By Ailsa Chang, Brianna Scott, Sarah Handel Published August 12, 2022 at 3:39 PM MDT Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Flipboard Listen • 4:20 NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Sidney Madden from NPR Music about Megan Thee Stallion's sophomore album Traumazine. Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/megan-thee-stallion-gets-vulnerable-on-hot-sophomore-album-traumazine | 2022-08-12T22:45:51Z |
Two thousand Kaiser mental health workers plan to go on strike Monday. They say Kaiser has failed to follow California law and make sure patients with mental health needs are given prompt care.
Copyright 2022 NPR
Two thousand Kaiser mental health workers plan to go on strike Monday. They say Kaiser has failed to follow California law and make sure patients with mental health needs are given prompt care.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/mental-health-workers-say-they-plan-to-strike | 2022-08-12T22:45:57Z |
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — In this eastern Ukrainian city, a Soviet-era mural stands boldly in front of Zaporizhstal iron and steel works.
The mural shows muscular ironworkers handing a freshly forged sword to equally muscular soldiers who are rushing off to war. Today, however, Ukraine's iron industry is in rough shape because of war itself.
During much of the 20th century, a thriving industrial heartland churned in central and eastern Ukraine, fed by abundant coal mines and big, hulking steel mills. In several parts of the country, these plants still dominate the landscape, the local economy and even civic identity. Iron and steel production remains Ukraine's second-leading industry after agriculture. And prior to the Russian invasion this year, it was a major supplier of iron ore to Turkey, China and parts of the European Union.
While the war with Russia has raised serious international concern about getting Ukraine's vast production of wheat, corn and sunflower oil — normally its top exports — to global markets, the invasion has been even more devastating to the country's metalworks. Exports of bulk iron ore, for instance, that are shipped by the ton in massive cargo vessels have stopped entirely from Ukrainian ports.
Just half of the plant's blast furnaces are on
Inside the sprawling Zaporizhstal industrial compound, the plant's giant blast furnaces normally convert tons of raw iron ore into a stream of molten orange pig iron.
But Serhiy Safonov, the manager of the blast furnace shop, says that only two of the factory's four blast furnaces are currently operational.
The furnaces are designed to run constantly, he says, and normally would never be shut down over their 30-year life span. But earlier this year all four furnaces had to be dialed back to what Safonov calls a "low idle" as Russian troops threatened to advance on Zaporizhzhia. Moscow's forces never reached the area, but tens of thousands of people fled. Much of the city shut down, and the factory that used to employ 11,000 workers is now operating at less than 50% of capacity.
Yuriy Ryzhenkov, the CEO of Metinvest Group, which owns the Zaporizhstal plant, says they have enough raw materials inside Ukraine to keep pumping out rolls of sheet metal and bars of cast iron. The problem is they can't get those products to market. Metinvest and other Ukrainian steel producers now have huge backlogs of processed metal sitting in Ukrainian warehouses.
"The main difficulty is the logistics," Ryzhenkov says. Traditionally, all Ukrainian steel companies, of which Metinvest is the largest, export their products via the Black Sea ports or Azov Sea ports. "At the moment," Ryzhenkov says. "The ports have been blocked by the Russians."
There's no deal for shipping steel
While a few ships carrying grain have been allowed to leave Ukraine recently, there's still no agreement to allow vessels ferrying other goods to transit the Black Sea.
Some steel and iron ore is getting sent by rail to ports in Poland and Romania, but it's a slow and expensive process. Adding to the logistical challenges, Ukraine's railways operate on a different gauge track than the Western Europeans, meaning cargo has to get transferred at the border.
"This was never envisaged as the main export route for the steel industry in Ukraine," Ryzhenkov says.
As difficult as it is to get steel to customers in Turkey, Italy and North Africa, the Zaporizhzhia factory at least is still in Metinvest's hands.
Russian and Moscow-backed separatist forces seized the company's two steel mills in Mariupol. This includes the Azovstal plant, where Ukrainian soldiers made a final stand against the Russian occupation of the city. Russian forces blew apart the mill to capture it and finally take full control of the southern port city.
While Azovstal is now better known, it was actually the smaller of Metinvest's two steel plants in Mariupol. The other, Ilyich Iron and Steel Works, spread over more ground and, with 14,000 employees, had more workers than Azovstal. Ilyich was seized by Russian troops in April. Ukrainian fighters held out at Azovstal until mid-May.
"At some point in time we'll come back to Mariupol and see what is the state of Azovstal and Ilyich mill and see if they can be restored," he says.
The plants were insured, "but insurance doesn't typically cover the wartime risks," he says. "And that's the big problem."
The company's lawyers are looking at ways to file a claim against the Russian Federation for billions of dollars in damages, Ryzhenkov says — but making a shrug, as if it's a longshot.
There isn't a definitive tally of monetary damages in Mariupol, but the human suffering after months of bombardments has been extensive. Ukrainian officials say more than 20,000 civilians were killed in the Russian siege of the city. U.N. officials have documented a lower number of civilian casualties but still estimate the number killed in the city is in the thousands.
With the city under Russian control, Metinvest has urged customers globally not to buy steel from Mariupol. The company says there's a "high probability" that the occupying Russian forces are selling off some of the more than 200,000 tons of steel products Metinvest had stored at its two plants there.
Earlier this year, Metinvest was paying its idled employees two-thirds of their salaries, including at the Mariupol plants now controlled by the Russians. But in June the company had to lay off thousands of workers.
With limited revenue, two of its largest factories gone, and few options to export their industrial products to customers overseas, Ryzhenkov says the company right now is just focused on survival.
"We are making sure that whatever we still have control over we keep intact," he says.
"And we are waiting for Ukraine to kind of win the war and take back what belongs to it." But he's under no illusions that that is going to happen quickly.
Plants and raw materials are behind enemy lines
The challenges facing Metinvest are similar for other Ukrainian steelmakers and industrial firms, particularly in the east of the country.
"There are a number of really problematic trends that will compound over time," says Andrew Lohsen, who up until last year was based in Ukraine as a monitor and an analyst for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
"One of them is the fact that these industries are highly dependent on coal that is mined behind enemy lines now or close to the fighting."
He says the industrial capacity of Ukraine right now is severely strained because so much of its manufacturing sector is in or near the intense fighting in eastern Ukraine.
This has been part of the problem for Metinvest. Prior to 2014, Metinvest was based in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk. When Russian-backed separatists seized Donetsk in 2014, Metinvest relocated its headquarters to Mariupol, a city on the Sea of Azov. This year, when Russia grabbed Mariupol, the headquarters were displaced again, this time moving to the capital, Kyiv.
Ryzhenkov at times sounds weary talking about the impacts of the war, the export bottlenecks, the assets stolen by the Russians, the layoffs. But when asked if the company might be able to somehow restart operations in Mariupol or elsewhere near the fluctuating front lines, he answers quickly.
"The position of our shareholders is very clear on this," he says. "We will not operate in any occupied territory, under any occupational regime." He insists they'll operate only in areas under Ukrainian control.
Hanna Palamarenko contributed to this report.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/russias-war-in-ukraine-pushes-ukrainian-steel-production-to-the-brink | 2022-08-12T22:46:04Z |
Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, the duo of Sylvan Esso, talk about their new album No Rules Sandy and how they came up with it.
Copyright 2022 NPR
Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, the duo of Sylvan Esso, talk about their new album No Rules Sandy and how they came up with it.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/sylvan-esso-ditches-its-guiding-principles-of-pop-for-its-new-album-no-rules-sandy | 2022-08-12T22:46:10Z |
The House votes Friday to give final congressional approval to a package of climate, health care and tax measures that Democrats have been negotiating for over a year.
Copyright 2022 NPR
The House votes Friday to give final congressional approval to a package of climate, health care and tax measures that Democrats have been negotiating for over a year.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/the-house-votes-on-the-inflation-reduction-act | 2022-08-12T22:46:17Z |
A growing shortage for neon is driving up its prices by 5000%. Neon production became highly concentrated in post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine and Russia. The world is paying for that concentration.
Copyright 2022 NPR
A growing shortage for neon is driving up its prices by 5000%. Neon production became highly concentrated in post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine and Russia. The world is paying for that concentration.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/the-war-in-ukraine-is-disrupting-the-worlds-supply-of-neon | 2022-08-12T22:46:23Z |
This week, Milwaukee County Zoo visitors witnessed the birth of a baby boy giraffe, Bear Grylls taught us how to embrace fear, and NPR's readers and listeners shared their wonderful hobbies.
Here's what the NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to — and what you should check out this weekend.
Pearl
I'm looking forward to the release of Pearl, which is a prequel to X, shot along with it. But Pearl was already done and in the can, so now we get to see the prequel origin story of the elderly woman character from X and how she becomes the woman you see in that movie.
And I am being made happy by the featuring of Mia Goth, the pushing forward of Mia Goth, and the understanding of Mia Goth as a great leading woman screen talent in this little one-two punch we're getting this year of X and Pearl. More Mia Goth all the time, in more places, doing more things, is a mantra I would like to live by. — Jordan Crucchiola
The Voyeurs and Even the Rich
The Voyeurs on Prime Video is possibly the best thing that I've seen this year. In this movie, a young couple move into a beautiful new apartment and discover that they can see the very voracious sex lives of their neighbors across the street through their wonderful windows. They become a tiny bit obsessed with watching them, and consequences ensue, is what I will say.
What's also making me happy is a show I produced for Wondery called Even the Rich. We started airing our new season called "Will Smith, Fresh Prince to Fallen King," in which we really take a look at Will's life growing up.
We'll also be doing an episode from Jada's perspective, to kind of round out the life that they lived and the psychology of Will Smith, as one would say. If you like Pop Culture Happy Hour, you're probably going to like our show, too. — Cate Young
FBoy Island Season Two and Romance Road Test
There is a very high-brow, intricate TV show on HBO Max called FBoy Island. In season two, just like season one, the women have to decide which of these men are nice guys and which ones are "f-boys." Who do I want to go with? And if I choose the right one, will I win the $100,000? Or will the guy I choose keep $90,000 because he's an alpha boy?
It is so funny. It's exactly all the terrible things that other reality dating shows are, but even better because it has a sense of humor. And you do not have to see season one to follow or understand the intricacies of season two.
I am also hosting a new show with my friend Jolanta called Romance Road Test, a kind of reality show podcast only on Audible. On the show, she and I choose a different relationship hack each episode to try to apply it to our marriages.
For example, in one episode we try to reenact our first dates with our husbands. In another episode, we assemble flat-pack furniture to see if it brings us closer or makes us want to kill each other. — Kristen Meinzer
Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls
When this show dropped on Amazon Prime back in March, I discounted it. I thought it was one of those quasi-documentary promo reels that have been floating around so much. So I just thought, "Oh, I love Lizzo, but I don't need to watch that."
Then it was nominated for six Emmys in the category of reality competition. And I went, "Did I miss that?" Lizzo is hosting a RuPaul's Drag Race-style reality competition to find backup dancers. I had somehow missed that.
This thing upends so many reality competition tropes. You realize that this is not a traditional elimination-based reality show where you get attached to people but then your heart is broken, or everybody's terrible and you just want them to eliminate everybody. The typical reality show-style misbehavior is discouraged.
This show, which I have already watched twice in its entirety in the last two weeks, is fabulous, life-affirming, wonderful, and baudy as hell. It is bodies, bodies, bodies positive, and not for nothing. — Stephen Thompson
More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter
by Linda Holmes
I greatly enjoyed this Chika Ekemezie piece at Vox about why wigs on camera often look bad. It gets into a lot of really interesting questions including who is represented in wig talk, who has the benefit of budgets being spent on their looks, what expertise is utilized, and whether making a wig look like someone's real hair is even the point.
I know you are out there, you Bluey partisans; here's a piece for you, straight from NPR's Elizabeth Blair.
It's hard to watch because of the subject matter, but there is much to recommend the Apple TV+ series Five Days At Memorial, which is about the days following Hurricane Katrina at a New Orleans hospital where a doctor and two nurses were later accused of intentionally injecting patients with lethal doses of medications. Prosecutors charged Dr. Anna Pou (played by Vera Farmiga) based on their belief that after facing days of desperate conditions and up against an order to evacuate the hospital, she concluded there was no way of safely evacuating these patients and that the only alternative to euthanasia was to leave them behind in the hospital to die alone. Without taking a clear position on whether this happened or not (Pou denied injecting anyone with the intent of causing their death and a grand jury declined to indict her), the series tries to give a fair airing to the impossible situation the hospital faced, and to the systemic and long-developing causes of the disaster there. But it also explores and respects the arguments of those, including some staff and patients' families, who believed and still believe that these injections, if they happened, were a grievous wrong that cannot be justified.
Our friend Priya Krishna over at The New York Times did a fascinating piece with Umi Syam in which they track down, in detail, the reasons why restaurant tabs are going up.
The new Hulu comedy This Fool, which grows out of comedian Chris Estrada's standup, is a broad and very silly comedy that also manages some warmth. All 10 episodes are streaming now, and it's worth a watch if you're looking for something that goes down easy and feels fresh. More details in the review from Angie Han over at The Hollywood Reporter.
NPR's Maison Tran adapted the Pop Culture Happy Hour segment "What's Making Us Happy" into a digital page. If you like these suggestions, consider signing up for our newsletter to get recommendations every week. And listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Amazon is among NPR's financial supporters and also distributes certain NPR content.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/whats-making-us-happy-a-guide-to-your-weekend-listening-and-viewing | 2022-08-12T22:46:30Z |
KYIV, Ukraine — Days after explosions at a Russian air base on the Crimean coast, no side has officially taken responsibility for what many Ukrainian and international commentators believe to be an attack. On Friday, the U.S. Defense Department corroborated the claims that Ukraine was responsible for the attack.
A Defense Department statement, citing an anonymous senior official, read, "The bombardment significantly impacted Russian airpower and personnel."
In the hours following Tuesday's blasts, Russian officials claimed workers at the Saki air base weren't following safety protocols, which led to a serious accident and fire. But as social media images appeared of large columns of smoke rising above a nearby beach and ambulances rushing to the scene, local Russian authorities acknowledged that one person was dead and several injured. And a bigger picture of the damage came Wednesday when the officials vowed to repair more than 80 buildings damaged during the blasts.
Analysis of satellite images published by the company Planet suggests that multiple explosions took place hundreds of feet apart, damaging nine airplanes and scattering debris on the taxiway. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said nine Russian planes were destroyed.
Ukrainian officials claim that planes based at the Saki air base were providing tactical assistance to Russia's occupation of Ukraine's southern mainland, where authorities loyal to Moscow announced their intent to be annexed into the Russian Federation.
Many people in Ukraine celebrated the blasts, believing that Ukraine's efforts to take back Russian-occupied territory finally reached Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Ukrainian officials, including Zelenskyy and his top adviser, publicly denied that Ukraine was behind attacks at the base, but the contested peninsula has dominated speeches and media coverage of the war this week.
"The war with Russia began and will end in Crimea," Zelenskyy said, vowing "we will return to the Ukrainian Crimea."
Unnamed Ukrainian military sources cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico said Ukrainian special forces and local partisans were responsible for the attack. NPR reached out to two high-ranking Ukrainian military sources, who refused to corroborate the claims.
President Zelenskyy has launched a probe into the leak. Calling it "irresponsible" to divulge specifics to the media, he said, "The fewer concrete details you give, the better it will be for the implementation of our defense plans."
American officials say they have restricted the use of U.S.-supplied weapons against Russian territory, but military experts have argued that Crimea is fair game for Ukraine since most countries consider it illegally occupied by Russia. On Friday, the Pentagon confirmed that American weapons weren't used in the attack.
Even so, Ukrainian forces aren't thought to be capable of firing projectiles over the 120 miles needed to reach from Ukrainian-held territory to the Saki air base, analysts say. But the explosions have fueled speculation Ukraine has accelerated a homegrown, long-range weapons program. An analysis from The War Zone, a military news and analysis site, suggests that Ukraine may have adapted older Soviet-era weapons to reach farther into Russian-held territory. Ukraine used domestic Neptune rockets to sink one of Russia's biggest warships, the Moskva, in April, a move that was also thought to be beyond Ukraine's ability.
Even though Russians are chalking the blasts up to an accident, they have ramped up security levels on the peninsula. Sergei Aksyonov, a local official loyal to Russia, said that Crimea will be under a high "yellow" terrorist threat level through Ukraine's independence day on Aug. 24. A Ukrainian civil rights group has said that Crimea's Indigenous Muslim minority, the Tatars, are being searched and arrested in the wake of the blasts. Tatars are largely seen with suspicion in Crimea over their overwhelming pro-Ukrainian stance since the 2014 annexation, leading many to be exiled.
It's unlikely these blasts will change much about Russia's presence in Crimea. Russia still maintains five other air bases on the peninsula.
The blasts come at the height of Crimea's tourist season, with Russians flocking to the area for its subtropical weather and beaches. Videos on social media showed traffic jams of people attempting to leave the peninsula after the explosions.
Speculation of Ukrainian responsibility has also fueled suspicion that Ukraine might target the Kerch bridge next, a nearly 12-mile stretch of road opened in 2018 to connect Crimea with mainland Russia. Russia's Tourism Ministry says there has not been a decline of visits to Crimea since the incident, though.
Also drawing much attention this week is another crisis, involving apparent attacks at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine. Ukraine's power utility, Energoatom, claims that Russia is working to disconnect the plant from the rest of Ukraine and integrate it with Russia's power grid via Crimea, thus formalizing the annexation of both Crimea and the Zaporizhzhia region. In July, Russian officials said they were busy reconnecting the Ukrainian power lines to Crimea that had been destroyed in 2015.
An analysis from the Institute for the Study of War suggests the Zaporizhzhia crisis may be Russia's way of forcing negotiations with Ukraine, even though 84% of Ukrainians polled by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology are against conceding territory like Crimea to end the war sooner.
Ukraine's envoy for Crimean Tatars, Tamila Tasheva, argued on Wednesday that the two issues are related. She said Ukrainian attempts to "retake Crimea are underway," without providing details.
Tasheva also accused Russia of coercing Tatars from Crimea to visit Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and lobbying residents to extol the virtues of Russian occupation ahead of a potential annexation vote.
"The Russian occupations of Crimea and southern Ukraine are inherently tied together, both in terms of military strategy and civilian propaganda," said Tasheva during a press briefing in Kyiv.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/who-was-behind-the-explosions-in-crimea-ukraine-and-russia-arent-saying | 2022-08-12T22:46:36Z |
BUREWALA, Pakistan — In a YouTube video watched hundreds of thousands of times, an elderly man with a long gray beard and black turban hugs his sister for the first time since she was separated from her family, 75 years ago.
They met in May at a border crossing between India and Pakistan. Mumtaz Bibi, wearing a pink headscarf, is a Pakistani Muslim. Her brothers Gurmukh Singh and Baldev Singh, who were both there at the border to meet her, are Indian Sikhs.
The event that separated her from the family in 1947 was one of cataclysmic proportions: the Partition of British-ruled India into two new states — independent India and Pakistan, the latter created as a homeland for Muslims.
The Partition sparked one of the biggest migrations of the 20th century, with an estimated 10 million people fleeing across the newly drawn borders: Hindus and Sikhs to India, and Muslims to Pakistan. Perhaps a million were killed.
Families like the Singhs' were torn apart. As Mumtaz Bibi's father fled to India, his wife — Mumtaz's Bibi's mother — was killed, and Mumtaz Bibi, then just a baby, was assumed by her father to have died with her mother. But a Muslim couple found her lying next to her dead mother and raised her as their own.
The Pakistani men who reunited Mumtaz Bibi with her brothers are Papinder Singh and Nasir Dhillon. They're friends who've gained a reputation for finding loved ones lost during Partition.
"We are trying to connect loved ones before it's too late," says Singh. "We want to bring peace to people who've held this pain in their hearts for 75 years."
An unlikely friendship helps heal the wounds of Partition
To do that, Singh and Dhillon, both in their mid-30s, have been creating videos that go viral. For the past six years, they've produced the videos in a makeshift studio in Dhillon's garage in a half-built gated community in the industrial city of Faisalabad, where he runs a real estate company. They upload the videos to their YouTube channel, Punjabi Lehar, which has some 600,000 subscribers and more than 97 million views.
The videos feature people talking about how they lost family members during the chaos of Partition. In some lucky cases, viewers help track down missing loved ones. Singh and Dhillon also call on their own network of contacts in India, built through years of investigations.
Singh says the videos go viral because many Pakistanis and Indians want to heal the wounds of Partition. The comments left on the YouTube channel from Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs reflect that desire.
"My message to all the Punjabis on the other side of the border that we are one and that our ancestors were one," wrote one person with the username Muhammad Bin Ali, commenting on a video showing two brothers reuniting. "There is certainly more that joins us than ... differentiates us. This is high time for us to join hands."
Singh's favorite video shows two childhood friends, one Sikh and the other Muslim, meeting for the first time since Partition. In a scene watched some 2 million times, the two men embrace in a bear hug.
The video is a message, Singh says: "The Partition happened, but we can move on and show each other love."
And that message is reflected in Singh and Dhillon's own unlikely friendship.
Singh is from Pakistan's Sikh minority; Dhillon is from the Muslim majority. They met when Dhillon was a police officer who helped Singh, a fabric trader at the time, recover stolen stock. They discovered that they both shared an interest in Partition history in Punjab, a region that was split between Pakistan and India and saw some of the worst Partition-related violence.
A Pakistani woman searches for her brother, who went missing in 1947
With every video that goes viral, more hopeful families get in touch. Right now, they're working on the case of Sharifa Bibi. She guesses she's more than 80 years old, and Dhillon and Singh have produced a video to help her find her brother, who was named Mohammed Tufail.
He got lost when Sharifa Bibi's family was fleeing to Pakistan from their Punjabi village of Badhni Kalan, on the Indian side of the border. Their mother was holding Mohammed Tufail's hand but let go when rioters demanded the gold ring off her finger.
"He must have got scared and run away," said Sharifa Bibi, who could not recall her brother's age but guessed he was around 5 or 6 at the time. "My relatives looked for him, even in the canal where the rioters tossed the bodies of dead Muslims."
She says her mother never recovered.
"My mother was always crying for her lost son," she says.
And he was crying for her.
A man who they believe was Mohammed Tufail tried — as the family eventually learned — to find them in and around the town of Burewala, in Pakistan's Punjab province, where they had resettled and built a new life.
The mystery of Mohammed Tufail
To help shed light on this man, Sharifa Bibi and her family members take NPR reporters through cornfields to a village near Burewala to meet a former horse-and-cart driver named Mohammed Asghar. He guesses he's around 65 years old. He has been part of Sharifa Bibi's life for more than three decades.
After greetings are exchanged, the first thing Asghar says is, "Sharifa Bibi looks just like her brother."
Then he explains how he knows this: About 35 years ago, he says, as he waited for customers outside the British-built Burewala train station, he met a man from India who was asking whether anybody knew his family.
"He cried to me that he lost his family in Partition and that he was adopted by a rich Hindu couple," Asghar says, sitting outside his small homestead, where his friends have gathered around and pulled up plastic chairs and a charpoy — a woven daybed — near a cow pen.
Asghar says the man told him his name was Ranjeet but that he was born a Muslim and believed his family had settled in this area.
Asghar took pity on the man and invited him home. For about two weeks, he took the man around in his horse cart, and they clip-clopped from village to village.
"We went to all the village mosques and told people: There is a man here from India and he is looking for his family. He lost them in Partition. Did anybody here lose a son? About a dozen families came forward — but they said no, this isn't our boy."
Asghar recalls that Ranjeet had a distinctive birthmark on his forehead and a partly damaged foot, which helped families rule him out as their relative. Eventually, the man lost hope and packed his bags.
But before leaving, he shared information on how he could be located, should anyone from his long-lost family want to do so.
"Ranjeet told me: I work as a vet at the Delhi Race Club," Asghar says. "If you come to India, just wait till 2 p.m. when I finish work and meet me at the gate."
Sharifa Bibi heard about this Indian visitor around that same time, from a woman attending a religious celebration at her home.
"The woman told me: He's staying with a horse-and-cart driver," she recalls.
Sharifa Bibi tracked down Asghar and rushed over to meet him with her parents. But by then, the man named Ranjeet had already left.
Sharifa Bibi's mother collapsed. She saw some socks on the floor. Ranjeet had left them behind.
"She snatched them and said, 'Did these belong to my son?' Then she buried her face in them," she says. "My father did too, and they wept."
But for the first time in decades, they also had hope.
"My mother swelled with hope. It was as if her breasts filled with milk again," Sharifa Bibi says.
Efforts continue to find Sharifa Bibi's brother
It's not easy for Pakistanis and Indians to obtain visas to travel across the border, but Sharifa Bibi's sister and the sister's husband went to India around 1990 and made their way to the Delhi Race Club to try to find Ranjeet. As Pakistanis in India, Sharifa Bibi says, they were treated with suspicion. Sharifa Bibi says the people her sister and brother-in-law encountered at the race club told them that Ranjeet had gone to Mumbai for a work visit. No, they didn't know when he'd be back.
"When my sister returned empty-handed, my parents were broken," she says. "They died a few years later, crying over their son."
When NPR visited the Delhi Race Club twice in the spring, its employees — everyone from office clerks to tea servers and other staff, all the way up to the club's president — were eager to try to help solve the mystery of Sharifa Bibi's brother.
It touched something in them, they all said.
"So many families relate to this! I myself was born in Delhi after my parents moved from Pakistan," says Sudheer Uppal, 73, the club's president. Uppal's family had been part of a Hindu minority in a mostly Muslim area of what is now Pakistan. At Partition, they crossed into India.
"Only later did I understand what they'd been through," he says.
Clerks opened up personnel files dating back to the club's founding in 1940, but they yielded nothing matching the information that NPR had for Sharifa Bibi's brother.
On both sides of the border, NPR reporters continued to search for clues that could lead to Mohammed Tufail. Indian police offered to show NPR decades-old records of Indian citizens who crossed the border into Pakistan — but as it turned out, his entry and exit would never have been officially recorded. Asghar says that Ranjeet crossed into Pakistan illegally, with the help of a smuggler in the nearby Pakistani town of Kasur — something that was common at that time.
NPR reporters also crisscrossed Delhi's Chandni Chowk area in two separate visits this spring, asking for anyone who might have known Mohammed Tufail there. Sharifa Bibi's family believes — based on what Asghar and another Burewala-area resident told them — that her brother lived there and had a favorite dhaba, or cafe, called Pehlewan. At least 15 similarly named dhabas are in the area. But no one seemed to know him.
And an NPR reporter tweeted a callout for information from the public, with video of Sharifa Bibi pleading for help finding her brother. It resulted in no promising leads.
A plea to a long-lost brother
Since Ranjeet's appearance 35 years ago in Burewala, Asghar has stepped into the role of Sharifa Bibi's older brother. He attended her children's weddings as an honorary uncle. When he and Sharifa Bibi meet now, they tightly embrace, something rare between an unrelated man and woman of their generation in Pakistan.
On the day of NPR's visit, Asghar shares something that Sharifa Bibi has never heard before: The trip Ranjeet made to Pakistan 35 years ago was not the first time that he had tried to find his family in Burewala.
Ranjeet told Asghar that after he'd let go of his mother's hand all those years ago, during the chaos of Partition, "he followed other Muslims fleeing to Pakistan," Asghar says. "They came to this train station. He slept here for a few nights."
Asghar says Ranjeet told him he'd remembered the name of the station. He remembered a water pump where he washed and drank. But he couldn't remember how he ended up back in India as a child — and didn't even know how he ended up as the son of a wealthy Hindu couple.
On hearing this, Sharifa Bibi is overcome and faints. Her son races toward her with a glass of water to help revive her.
"My brother cried for us, and we cried for him," she weeps. "Are you listening, brother? If you are listening, please come and see me."
Diaa Hadid and Abdul Sattar reported from Pakistan. Lauren Frayer and Raksha Kumar reported from India.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2022-08-12/youtube-videos-are-helping-reunite-loved-ones-separated-by-the-india-pakistan-border | 2022-08-12T22:46:43Z |
53-year-old man indicted for cyberstalking after terrorizing women online, authorities say
ST. LOUIS (KMOV/Gray News) - A man who already served time in prison for harassing women online with violent fantasies again faces similar charges.
KMOV reports a grand jury has indicted 53-year-old Robert Merkle on charges accusing him of threatening and cyberstalking five people since October 2021.
Officials said Merkle had previously pleaded guilty in 2017 to multiple counts of misdemeanor and felony harassment in St. Louis and Jefferson County.
A woman, who wanted to go by the name Angela, shared that she met Merkle at a pub in 2017. They sat at the same table and talked about current events. Angela said a man named Rob then messaged the group organizer asking about her, saying the two found the message strange.
According to authorities, Angela said she received a disturbing message from a man named James through the Meetup app days later.
“It read, ‘I have the need to tell you I have been having sexually violent fantasies.’ It went on from there to describe rape,” Angela said.
According to Angela, the message also mentioned the meeting at the pub, and she then informed police of the situation.
Angela said another message came through the online group that described a violent sexual assault a few days later.
“I’m interested in female sexual response and sexual performance by young Caucasian women under 40 during specific nonconsensual sex acts,” Angela said the message read.
Angela said she connected the profiles of the men and gave the information to police. After working with St. Louis police, charges were filed against Merkle.
Authorities said a judge, Rex Burlison, ordered Merkle’s sentences to be run concurrently, meaning he would serve three years behind bars. Merkle was released from prison in October 2020 and completed his parole in October 2021.
According to police, Merkle faces the latest felony charge of harassment from January 2022. He allegedly texted a woman that he had made a copy of her key to her residence and that he was going to break in and rape her.
Copyright 2022 KMOV via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/08/12/53-year-old-man-indicted-cyberstalking-after-terrorizing-women-online-authorities-say/ | 2022-08-12T23:18:25Z |
Beards & Broads set to open second location in Broadway
BROADWAY, Va. (WHSV) - The Town of Broadway will welcome a new business on Saturday. Beards & Broads axe throwing is set to open a second location in the town.
“I grew up here, I graduated from Broadway in 1999 and we just wanted to bring something to the community that’s fun. We wanted to give people a place to hang out and be entertained, get some great food, and have things to do,” said Jay Roderick, co-owner of Beards & Broads.
Roderick and his brother-in-law Kyle McQuillan are co-owners of Beards & Broads. They considered opening the original Beards & Broads location in Broadway three years ago but it didn’t work out and they went with a location in Harrisonburg.
“Now we have a few years of experience under our belt, we’re pretty well connected in the community and now we’re finally coming back to that hometown,” said McQuillian.
Three years later, Broadway is excited to welcome them.
“When you have a business like this, a restaurant like this that is diverse and offers so much I think that really adds to the town and really adds to the community so we’re really excited about it,” said Broadway Town Manager Kyle O’Brien.
Broadway has had a number of new businesses come to the town over the last year and O’Brien said that Beards & Broads will help to drive even more people to the town and its other businesses.
“We feel like we’re at the cusp of a lot of really exciting things happening with the trail coming to Broadway and a lot of other economic development initiatives. So we’re very excited to have this new business and restaurant coming to town,” he said.
Beards & Broads’ new Broadway location is significantly larger than the original in Harrisonburg and will offer even more to customers. It is complete with a bar and a large pizza oven.
“Axe throwing is our main event but we do have other table games. We’ve got tons of beer and wine, we’ve got great food, we’re gonna have live music and eventually, we’re gonna expand this space and make it more. We want to hire local people, entertain local people, and give back to the community,” said Roderick.
Roderick said that for those interested in organized axe throwing competitions, the Harrisonburg location will remain the spot for World Axe Throwing League competitions.
Both McQuillian and Roderick are veterans and Beards & Broads is closely connected to the Living Waters Freedom Initiative. The owners are also committed to supporting local first responders.
“We stand behind all of our local heroes. We’re hosting a private event tonight just to bring the local heroes of Broadway in. The Broadway Fire, Broadway Police, and Broadway Rescue squad will be here and we’re gonna feed them for free,” said Roderick.
For Kyle McQuillan, the best part about running Beards & Broads is that axe throwing is all about technique so it’s something that anyone can enjoy.
“We’ve had as young as six, seven years old throwing with their parents in the shop. We’ve had as old as 90, and we’ve had people who have disabilities such as being in a wheelchair. Believe it or not, we’ve actually had a few people from a local blind school come in and throw which was unique and amazing at the same time,” he said.
The grand opening of the Broadway location is set for Saturday at 11 a.m.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/08/12/beards-broads-set-open-second-location-broadway/ | 2022-08-12T23:18:32Z |
Police: 3 men arrested for scamming 90-year-old woman out of nearly $120,000
ATLANTA (WGCL/Gray News) - Police in Atlanta are investigating a situation where a woman allegedly lost $118,000 to three men who took advantage of her.
WGCL reports that the 90-year-old woman hired 39-year-old Robert John Criswell, 28-year-old Kyle Dewayne Dover and 23-year-old Hunter Chase Hammitt to complete some tree work and other things.
According to authorities, the woman said she met the men while they were working for a local tree company. However, they were working on their own during the commission of the crimes.
The Floyd County Police Department said the trio was arrested on Wednesday at a campsite, about 10 miles away from the victim’s home.
Police said the woman wrote 33 checks to the three men between December 2021 and April 2022 for various amounts. The men would reportedly follow her to the bank to collect cash.
Floyd County police said some tree work was completed, but the trees were still on the woman’s property, along with small brush piles. Shutters that were intended to be hung were barely attached and hanging by one screw in some cases.
According to police, Criswell and Dover are being charged with exploitation of the elderly and theft by deception, while being held on a $15,000 bond. Hammitt is being held on no bond on charges of exploitation of the elderly, theft by deception and probation violation.
According to Floyd County police, scams of this nature are not uncommon. Fraudsters often exaggerate the damage that needs to be repaired and embellish their skill level to give hope to victims who might only need small repairs. The scammers often drive away with small fortunes in return for little or no work.
The Floyd County Police Department encourages families and neighbors to check in with older relatives to ensure they are not being swindled.
Copyright 2022 WGCL via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/08/12/police-3-men-arrested-scamming-90-year-old-woman-out-nearly-120000/ | 2022-08-12T23:18:38Z |
Southern Baptists say denomination faces DOJ investigation
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention said Friday that several of the denomination’s major entities are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The SBC’s statement gave few details about the investigation, but indicated it dealt with sexual abuse. The SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., has been plagued by problems related to clergy sex abuse in recent years.
“Individually and collectively each SBC entity is resolved to fully and completely cooperate with the investigation,” the statement said. “While we continue to grieve and lament past mistakes related to sexual abuse, current leaders across the SBC have demonstrated a firm conviction to address those issues of the past and are implementing measures to ensure they are never repeated in the future.”
Earlier this year, an SBC task force released a blistering 288-page report from outside consultant, Guidepost Solutions. The firm’s seven-month independent investigation found disturbing details about how denominational leaders mishandled sex abuse claims and mistreated victims.
There was no immediate comment from the Justice Department about the investigation.
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/08/12/southern-baptists-say-denomination-faces-doj-investigation/ | 2022-08-12T23:18:44Z |
Valley Community Services Board provides resources with Begin with Hope campaign
AUGUSTA COUNTY, Va. (WHSV) - “If you don’t know where to begin... begin with hope.” That’s the slogan for a campaign started by Valley Community Services Board to prevent substance misuse and addiction.
The Begin with Hope campaign, funded by a state opioid response grant, was created last year to bring awareness to stimulant misuse in the community.
The website has resources for people struggling, or their loved ones who want to reach out for help.
”With our campaign, we hope that that brings awareness but we also provide medication lock boxes and drug disposal kits at no cost to the community as a way for folks to safely either store or dispose of their medications,” Erin Botkin, prevention services coordinator for Valley Community Services Board, said.
According to the Valley Community Services Board, the last reported data shows that between 2017 and 2019 the Staunton, Augusta, and Waynesboro area saw an average of just above seven deaths, nearly six deaths per 100,000 people.
These numbers went up from the previous reporting year.
On top of that, according to VCSB, in 2019 nearly 50% of the overdose deaths reported related to methamphetamine involved fentanyl.
“We know that there is both cross use of both substances or co-occurring use of both substances and also potential adulteration of the methamphetamines with fentanyl which is, you know, incredibly problematic,” Jeff Robbins, nurse practitioner, said.
Begin with Hope was created to try to help curve those numbers.
”Part of our Begin with Hope campaign is you know if you don’t know where to begin, begin with hope and there’s always hope for that recovery as well for folks who are struggling with substance use issues,” Botkin said.
The campaign has resources for prevention, and misuse assistance, and has a focus on recovery as well.
They participate in the drug take-back initiative each year and have drop boxes and lock boxes for you to get rid of or lock up your prescriptions.
“If you’ve had enough come in, get treatment it doesn’t matter what substance it’s for we do have a program that can help with that,” Robbins said.
If you or someone you know needs help with substance misuse, addiction, or prevention go to their website or call 540-887-3200.
Copyright 2022 WHSV. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/08/12/valley-community-services-board-provides-resources-with-begin-with-hope-campaign/ | 2022-08-12T23:18:51Z |
Bill Allows Medicare to Negotiate Lower Drug Prices and Caps Out-of-Pocket Spending on Medications for Seniors
NEW YORK, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Earlier today the House voted to pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a bill that includes several key provisions to lower the prices of prescription drugs. AARP New York thanks Representatives Tom Suozzi (NY3), Kathleen Rice (NY4), Gregory Meeks (NY5), Grace Meng (NY6), Nydia Velazquez (NY7), Hakeem Jeffries (NY8), Yvette Clarke (NY9), Jerry Nadler (NY10), Carolyn Maloney (NY12), Adriano Espaillat (NY13), Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (NY14), Ritchie Torres (NY15), Jamaal Bowman (NY16), Mondaire Jones (NY17), Sean Patrick Maloney (NY18), Paul Tonko (NY20), Joe Morelle (NY25) and Brian Higgins (NY26) for supporting this critical legislation that will bring real relief for seniors. The bill now goes to President Biden for his signature.
The Inflation Reduction Act includes key AARP priorities that will go a long way to lower drug prices and out-of-pocket costs. AARP fought for provisions in the bill that will:
- Finally allow Medicare to negotiate the price of drugs
- Cap annual out-of-pocket prescription drug costs in Medicare Part D ($2,000 in 2025)
- Hold drug companies accountable when they increase drug prices faster than the rate of inflation, and
- Cap co-pays for insulin to no more than $35 per month in Medicare Part D.
Jo Ann Jenkins, AARP Chief Executive Officer, issued a statement reacting to the House vote:
"Today is a momentous day for older Americans. By passing the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress has made good on decades of promises to lower the price of prescription drugs. Seniors should never have to choose between paying for needed medicine or other necessities like food or rent, and tens of millions of adults in Medicare drug plans will soon have peace of mind knowing their out-of-pocket expenses are limited every year.
"Many people said this couldn't be done, but AARP isn't afraid of a hard fight. We kept up the pressure, and now, for the first time, Medicare will be able to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices, saving seniors money on their medications.
"I thank the House members whose votes today will bring real relief to millions of Americans, and I look forward to President Biden signing this bill into law."
Follow us on Twitter: @AARPNY and Facebook: AARP New York
AARP is the nation's largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering people 50 and older to choose how they live as they age. With a nationwide presence and nearly 38 million members, AARP strengthens communities and advocates for what matters most to families: health security, financial stability and personal fulfillment. AARP also produces the nation's largest circulation publications: AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. To learn more, visit www.aarp.org, www.aarp.org/espanol or follow @AARP, @AARPenEspanol and @AARPadvocates, @AliadosAdelante on social media.
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SOURCE AARP New York | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/aarp-ny-thanks-members-new-york-house-delegation-historic-vote-toward-real-relief-prescription-drug-pricing/ | 2022-08-12T23:18:57Z |
Akumin Provides Business Update and Announces CFO Transition
Published: Aug. 12, 2022 at 5:56 PM EDT|Updated: 1 hour ago
PLANTATION, Fla., Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Akumin Inc. (NASDAQ: AKU) (TSX: AKU) ("Akumin" or the "Company") provided a business update and announced the termination of employment of its Chief Financial Officer, William Larkin and the appointment of David Kretschmer as Interim Chief Financial Officer, effective today.
The Company has implemented a transformation program with initiatives focused on its operations, growth, and capital. These initiatives are intended to support the Company's objectives with respect to patient access and experience, customer and partner engagement, financial sustainability, and employee well-being. The Company is receiving support from a globally recognized transformation specialist to help implement the program. As a part of this transformation, the Company announced: (a) the termination of employment of its Chief Financial Officer, William Larkin, and the appointment of David Kretschmer, an experienced transformation finance executive who successfully completed other business transformations in the healthcare industry, as Interim Chief Financial Officer, effective today; and (b) the sale of certain accounts receivables by subsidiaries of the Company to a third-party buyer for a purchase price of approximately $30 million.
Riadh Zine, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Akumin, commented: "Our transformation efforts to date have already resulted in significant efficiencies to our operations and show a positive momentum for further efficiencies, as discussed in our second quarter results. I am very excited to welcome David as our new Interim Chief Financial Officer. We are thrilled to have his expertise complement our team as we successfully execute our transformation program. On behalf of the board of directors of Akumin, I would also like to thank Bill for his contributions to the Company and wish him the very best in his next endeavors."
Mr. Zine continued: "The sale of certain accounts receivables has significantly improved the liquidity of our Company by an immediate cash infusion of approximately $30 million and a reduction in our days sales outstanding of our accounts receivables. Our cash position at the end of the second quarter of 2022 pro forma this sale would have been approximately $69 million. In addition, any future sale of similar accounts receivables in the normal course of business would not be expected to have any material impact on our revenues."
Before joining the Company, Mr. Kretschmer previously worked for Surgery Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ: SGRY), a multi-specialty ambulatory surgical center company with $2.5 billion of revenues, as interim CFO and executive vice president of strategy and transformation, and, prior to that, as senior vice president, treasurer and CIO for Anthem, Inc. renamed Elevance Health, Inc. (Nasdaq: ELV), a health insurance provider with more than $130 billion of revenues, and he was a key team member in the execution of the successful business transformation of each of these companies.
Akumin is a national leader in comprehensive outpatient radiology and oncology solutions and a partner of choice for U.S. hospitals, health systems and physician groups. Akumin provides fixed-site outpatient radiology and oncology services through a network of 234 owned and/or operated centers; as well as outpatient radiology and oncology solutions to approximately 1,000 hospitals and health systems across 48 states. Akumin combines clinical and operational expertise with the latest advances in technology and information systems to deliver patient-centered innovation, service standardization and exceptional healthcare value to its patients and partners. For more information, visit www.akumin.com.
Forward-Looking Information
Certain information in this press release constitutes forward-looking information or forward-looking statements. In some cases, but not necessarily in all cases, such statements or information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "targets", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "an opportunity exists", "is positioned", "estimates", "intends", "assumes", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate" or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "will" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances contain forward-looking information. Statements containing forward-looking information are not historical facts but instead represent management's expectations, estimates and projections regarding future events.
Forward-looking information is necessarily based on a number of opinions, assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by Akumin as of the date of this press release, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including, but not limited to, the factors described in greater detail in the "Risk Factors" section of our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2022, filed with the SEC on August 9, 2022, which is available at www.sec.gov. These factors are not intended to represent a complete list of the factors that could affect Akumin; however, these factors should be considered carefully. There can be no assurance that such estimates and assumptions will prove to be correct. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and Akumin expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter statements containing any forward-looking information, or the factors or assumptions underlying them, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
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SOURCE Akumin Inc.
The above press release was provided courtesy of PRNewswire. The views, opinions and statements in the press release are not endorsed by Gray Media Group nor do they necessarily state or reflect those of Gray Media Group, Inc. | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/akumin-provides-business-update-announces-cfo-transition/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:03Z |
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IRVING, Texas and FINO MORNASCO, Italy, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Breeze Holdings Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: BREZ) ("Breeze Holdings"), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, and D-Orbit S.p.A. ("D-Orbit" or the "Company"), a market leading space logistics and transportation company, today announced that the companies have mutually agreed to terminate their previously announced merger agreement ("Agreement"), effective immediately.
"Since the outset of our discussions with D-Orbit over a year ago, we have continued to believe in the Company's unique value proposition and the innovation inherent in their solutions," said J. Douglas Ramsey, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO of Breeze Holdings. "However, the financial markets have changed substantially, and we believe that terminating our merger is in the best interest of both D-Orbit and Breeze shareholders. On behalf of Breeze, we wish Luca and the D-Orbit team the best of luck and look forward to cheering on their continued successes. As we look ahead, we remain focused on identifying another value creating opportunity for Breeze shareholders."
"Despite market conditions that were beyond our control and the subsequent need to terminate our agreement with Breeze, we remain incredibly confident about D-Orbit's business and continued growth," said Luca Rossettini, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of D-Orbit. "With our unrivaled ION Satellite Carrier as a foundation and the diversified revenue streams our main line of business already generates, we are setting D-Orbit apart as the global leader in the orbital transportation market. Just this year alone, we have completed more missions than any of our peers, expanded and diversified our customer base across four continents with even more blue-chip companies looking to use our services, secured 11 additional slots with SpaceX and other global launch providers for 2023 and continued to build out the next phase of our In-Orbit Servicing technology, which is also generating revenues from early adopters within institutional and commercial space operators. In addition, we have successfully proven our space cloud infrastructure with almost a dozen third-party applications run on our D-Orbit Cloud Nodes currently in orbit. As we chart our next phase of growth, D-Orbit is moving full speed ahead to achieve our mission of enabling expansion in space and fueling the new space economy."
Since announcing the intention to merge with Breeze in January, D-Orbit has steadily moved along its roadmap and launched an additional three ION Satellite Carrier (ION) missions – six currently in orbit and three scheduled for the remainder of 2022; delivered more than 80 customer payloads into orbit in total; announced several new signed customer contracts among D-Orbit's outstanding customer base, including 30% of existing satellite operators; made progress expanding payload integration and incoming ION assembly in the U.S.; secured eleven ports for launch on SpaceX and on other launchers in 2023; and continued innovating on its suite of in-orbit solutions, including the deployment of D-Orbit Space Cloud and buildout of its In-Orbit Servicing capabilities, positioning the Company to capture long-term growth opportunities.
Details of the termination of the Agreement will be provided in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed by Breeze Holdings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov.
D-Orbit is a market leader in the space logistics and transportation services industry with a track record of space-proven services, technologies and successful missions.
Founded in 2011, before the dawn of the New Space market, D-Orbit is the first company addressing the logistics needs of the space market. The first line of business ION Satellite Carrier, for example, is a space vehicle that can transport satellites in orbit and release them individually into distinct orbital slots, reducing the time from launch to operations by up to 85% and the launch costs of an entire satellite constellation by up to 40%. ION can also accommodate multiple third-party payloads like innovative technologies developed by startups, experiments from research entities, and instruments from traditional space companies requiring a test in orbit and offer the fully redundant ION for rent, or edge computing and space cloud services, to those satellite operators in need of additional capacity and capabilities in orbit. In addition, D-Orbit is investing in becoming a leader in the new in-orbit servicing market, which is considered to be one of the largest, growing markets within the space sector and is already demonstrating significant traction.
D-Orbit is a space infrastructure pioneer with offices in Italy, Portugal, the UK, and the US; its commitment to pursuing business models that are profitable, friendly for the environment, and socially beneficial, led to D-Orbit S.p.A. becoming the first certified B-Corp space company in the world.
Breeze Holdings is a blank check company organized for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, recapitalization, reorganization, or other similar business combination with one or more businesses or entities.
This press release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology, including the words "believes," "estimates," "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "may," "will," "potential," "projects," "predicts," "continue," or "should," or, in each case, their negative or other variations or comparable terminology. There can be no assurance that actual results will not materially differ from expectations. Such statements include, but are not limited to, any statements relating to our ability to consummate any acquisition or other business combination and any other statements that are not statements of current or historical facts. These statements are based on management's current expectations, but actual results may differ materially due to various factors, including, but not limited to: (i) our ability to complete any initial business combination; (ii) our success in retaining or recruiting, or changes required in, our officers, key employees or directors following our initial business combination; (iii) our officers and directors allocating their time to other businesses and potentially having conflicts of interest with our business or in approving our initial business combination; (iv) our potential ability to obtain additional financing to complete our initial business combination; (v) our pool of prospective target businesses; (vi) the ability of our officers and directors to generate a number of potential investment opportunities; (vii) our public securities' potential liquidity and trading; (viii) the lack of a market for our securities; (ix) the use of proceeds not held in the trust account or available to us from interest income on the trust account balance; (x) the trust account not being subject to claims of third parties; (xi) or our financial performance following our initial public offering. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are also subject to additional risks, uncertainties, and factors, including those described in Breeze Holdings' most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other documents filed or to be filed with the SEC by Breeze Holdings or Holdco from time to time. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are made only as of the date hereof.
Contacts
Patrizia Tammaro Silva - Investor Relations
patrizia.tammaro@dorbit.space
+39 335 7959 913
Caterina Cazzola – Head of Communications
caterina.cazzola@dorbit.space
+39 340 2840 792
Aaron Palash / Jack Kelleher
Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher
212-355-4449
Follow D-Orbit on:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/d-orbit
Facebook: facebook.com/deorbitaldevices/
Twitter: twitter.com/D_Orbit
Instagram: instagram.com/wearedorbit/
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SOURCE Breeze Holdings Acquisition Corp. | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/breeze-holdings-acquisition-corp-d-orbit-spa-mutually-agree-terminate-merger-agreement/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:10Z |
Salman Rushdie -- a celebrated author and winner of the world's top literary prizes whose writings generated death threats -- was attacked and stabbed at least twice on stage Friday before giving a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, State Police said.
The suspect was identified as Hadi Matar, 24, from Fairview, New Jersey, State Police Troop Commander Major Eugene J. Staniszewski said in a Friday evening news conference. Police said they are working with the FBI and local authorities to determine what could have motivated the attack.
Authorities are also working to obtain search warrants for several items found at the scene, including a backpack and electronic devices, Staniszewski said. Authorities believe the suspect was alone but are investigating "to make sure that was the case," Staniszewski added.
The suspect jumped onto the stage and stabbed Rushdie at least once in the neck and at least once in the abdomen, state police said. Staff and audience members rushed the suspect and put him on the ground before a state trooper took the attacked into custody, police said.
Rushdie was airlifted from a field adjacent to the venue -- in a rural lake resort about 70 miles south of Buffalo -- to a hospital. Rushdie was undergoing surgery Friday evening, state police said.
Henry Reese, co-founder of the Pittsburgh nonprofit City of Asylum, who was scheduled to join Rushdie in discussion, was taken to a hospital and treated for a facial injury and released, state police said. The organization was founded to "provide sanctuary in Pittsburgh to writers exiled under threat of persecution," according to the Chautauqua Institution's website.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told reporters Friday a state trooper "stood up and saved (Rushdie's) life and protected him as well as the moderator who was attacked as well.
"Here is an individual who has spent decades speaking truth to power," the governor said of Rushdie. "Someone who has been out there unafraid, despite the threats that have followed him his entire adult life it seems."
The suspect had a "pass to access the grounds," Dr. Michael E. Hill, president of the Chautauqua Institution, said in the news conference. Guests can purchase passes to attend programs, Hill added.
"We take our security measures very, very seriously," Hill said. "We'll continue to look at providing the maximum security that we can ... this has never happened in our entire history. Chautauqua has always been an extremely safe place and we will continue to be working to keep that tradition going," Hill said.
Authorities are working with the district attorney's office to determine what the charges for the suspect will be "once we get a little further in the investigation and determine the condition of Mr. Rushdie," Staniszewski said.
What witnesses say happened
Rushdie was being introduced at about 10:45 a.m. when the assault happened, according to a witness, who said he heard shouting from the audience. He said a man in a black shirt appeared to be "punching" the author. The witness, who was 75 feet from the stage, did not hear the attacker say anything or see a weapon.
Some people in the audience ran to render aid while others went after the attacker, the witness said. State police said a doctor who was in the audience during the event rendered aid to Rushdie until emergency responders arrived.
Joyce Lussier, 83, who was in the second row of the amphitheater during the attack, said Rushdie and Reese had taken a seat on the right-hand side of the stage when suddenly, a man who appeared to be in all black "lurched across the stage and got right to Mr. Rushdie."
"He came in the left side and leapt across the stage and just lunged at him. In, I don't know, two seconds he was across that stage," Lussier said. She added she could hear people screaming and crying and saw people from the audience rushing up to the stage.
"They caught him right away, he did not get off the stage at all," Lussier said of the suspect. Shortly after, the crowd was asked to evacuate, she added.
Another witness told CNN there were no security searches or metal detectors at the event. The witness is not being identified because they expressed concerns for their personal safety.
The witness said the attacker "walked quickly" down an aisle and jumped on stage, approaching the author and "making a stabbing motion with his hand repeatedly."
A third witness, a longtime Chautauqua resident who asked not to be identified, recalled a commotion on stage and a man making about seven to 10 stabbing motions in the direction of the author, who was in a half-standing position. She said she fled the open-air amphitheater "shaking like a leaf" in fear.
'His essential voice cannot and will not be silenced'
On its website, the Chautauqua Institution described Friday's event as "a discussion of the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression."
In a statement the nonprofit education center and summer resort said it is "coordinating with law enforcement and emergency officials on a public response following today's attack of Salman Rushdie on the Chautauqua Amphitheater stage."
Writers such as Stephen King and J.K. Rowling expressed well-wishes for Rushdie via Twitter.
Rushdie is a former president of PEN America, a prominent US free speech group for authors, which said it is "reeling from shock and horror at word of a brutal, premeditated attack."
"We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil," PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement.
"We hope and believe fervently that his essential voice cannot and will not be silenced."
Penguin Random House, Rushdie's publisher, tweeted a statement from CEO Markus Dohle: "We are deeply shocked and appalled to hear of the attack on Salman Rushdie while he was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. We condemn this violent public assault, and our thoughts are with Salman and his family at this distressing time."
Furor over 'The Satanic Verses' hounded Rushdie
The 75-year-old novelist -- the son of a successful Muslim businessman in India -- was educated in England, first at Rugby School and later at the University of Cambridge where he received an MA degree in history.
After college, he began working as an advertising copywriter in London, before publishing his first novel, "Grimus" in 1975.
Rushdie's treatment of delicate political and religious subjects turned him into a controversial figure. But it was the publication of his fourth novel "The Satanic Verses" in 1988 which has hounded him for more than three decades.
Some Muslims found the book to be sacrilegious and it sparked public demonstrations. In 1989, the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called Rushdie a blasphemer and said "The Satanic Verses" was an insult to Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, and issued a religious decree, or fatwa, calling for his death.
As a result, the Mumbai-born writer spent a decade under British protection.
In 1999, Rushdie told CNN the experience taught him "to value even more ... intensely the things that I valued before, such as the art of literature and the freedom of expression and the right to say things that other people don't like.
"It may have been an unpleasant decade, but it was the right fight, you know. It was fighting for the things that I most believe in against things I most dislike, which are bigotry and fanaticism and censorship."
The bounty against Rushdie has never been lifted, though in 1998 the Iranian government sought to distance itself from the fatwa by pledging not to seek to carry it out.
But despite what appeared to be a softening of the fatwa, more recently, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirmed the religious edict.
In February 2017, on Khamenei's official website, the supreme leader was asked if the "fatwa against Rushdie was still in effect," to which Khamenei confirmed it was, saying, "The decree is as Imam Khomeini issued."
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved. | https://www.kitv.com/news/crime/authorities-identify-suspect-who-attacked-author-salman-rushdie-at-western-new-york-event/article_dd2860e7-2127-5d3f-92aa-2943c85b3cc1.html | 2022-08-12T23:19:15Z |
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Inflation Reduction Act (2022), that includes a $369 billion investment in clean energy and climate to put more clean vehicles on the road and secure over a million new good-paying American jobs. The bill previously passed in the Senate and is expected to be signed into law by President Biden.
The Inflation Reduction Act includes incentives that will significantly accelerate the adoption of zero-emission transportation technologies and help to fight climate change.
John Boesel, CALSTART President and CEO, issued the following statement:
"The Inflation Reduction Act includes several key provisions that are critical to growing the clean transportation industry. CALSTART applauds Congress' leadership in passing this historic level of investment in American jobs in industries that are key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We celebrate the inclusion of the Clean Vehicle Credit, the Credit for Previously Owned Vehicles, the new Credit for Qualified Commercial Vehicles, and the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit, which includes a significant production tax credit for battery manufacturing. We thank the House of Representatives for passing the Inflation Reduction Act and look forward to working with our CALSTART members who are on the leading edge of the transition to clean transportation to implement this important legislation once it is signed into law by President Biden."
A nonprofit consortium with offices in New York, Michigan, Colorado, California and central Europe and partners world-wide, CALSTART works with 300+ member company and agency innovators to build a prosperous, efficient, and clean high-tech transportation industry. We overcome barriers to modernization and the adoption of clean vehicles. CALSTART is changing transportation for good.
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SOURCE CALSTART Inc | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/calstart-applauds-passage-inflation-reduction-act-by-us-house-representatives/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:17Z |
Anne Heche, pictured here on January 7, 2018, in Beverly Hills, California, is 'not expected to survive,' her family says. Heche was involved in a car crash last week.
Anne Heche, here in March, was injured in a car accident on August 5.
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Anne Heche, pictured here on January 7, 2018, in Beverly Hills, California, is 'not expected to survive,' her family says. Heche was involved in a car crash last week.
One week after a fiery car crash, Anne Heche is "brain dead" but remains on life support, according to a statement from her family and friends shared with CNN by their representative.
"We have lost a bright light, a kind and most joyful soul, a loving mother, and a loyal friend. Anne will be deeply missed but she lives on through her beautiful sons, her iconic body of work, and her passionate advocacy. Her bravery for always standing in her truth, spreading her message of love and acceptance, will continue to have a lasting impact," the family's statement read.
Heche's son, Homer Laffoon, 20, shared an additional statement.
"My brother Atlas and I lost our Mom. After six days of almost unbelievable emotional swings, I am left with a deep, wordless sadness. Hopefully my mom is free from pain and beginning to explore what I like to imagine as her eternal freedom. Over those six days, thousands of friends, family, and fans made their hearts known to me. I am grateful for their love, as I am for the support of my Dad, Coley, and my stepmom Alexi who continue to be my rock during this time. Rest In Peace Mom, I love you, Homer," he said.
Heche has not been taken off life support, according to the representative, so they have time to determine if she is a match for organ donation.
"It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable," the family said in a previous statement on Thursday night.
Heche suffered a severe anoxic brain injury, which deprives the brain of oxygen, as a result the crash, according to the family's representative.
Last Friday, Heche was in a car that was traveling at a high speed when it ran off the road and collided with a residence that became engulfed in flames, Los Angeles Police Public Information Officer Jeff Lee told CNN.
A woman inside the home at the time of the crash suffered minor injuries and sought medical attention, according to Lee.
In their message on Thursday, Heche's family and friends thanked her care team at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills hospital and paid tribute to Heche's "huge heart" and "generous spirit."
"More than her extraordinary talent, she saw spreading kindness and joy as her life's work -- especially moving the needle for acceptance of who you love," the statement read.
Heche rose to fame on the soap opera "Another World," where she played the dual role of twins Vicky Hudson and Marley Love from 1987 to 1991. She earned a Daytime Emmy Award for her performance on the show.
Heche followed that success with numerous films, including "Donnie Brasco," "Wag the Dog" and "Six Days Seven Nights" opposite Harrison Ford.
In more recent years, Heche has appeared in television shows like "The Brave," "Quantico," and "Chicago P.D."
Following the crash, there was an outpouring of support for the actress from the Hollywood community. Her ex and former "Men in Trees" co-star James Tupper, with whom she shares one of her two sons, wrote on Instagram: "Thoughts and prayers for this lovely woman, actress and mother tonight Anne Heche. We love you." | https://www.kitv.com/news/national/anne-heche-is-brain-dead-but-remains-on-life-support-for-organ-donation-according-to/article_3d13294a-51ec-528b-9dd4-40fa467ff9cd.html | 2022-08-12T23:19:21Z |
SAN DIEGO, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cymbiotika, a leading nutritional supplement brand known for creating pure, clinically backed supplements, today announced a new partnership with Dr. Pejman Taghavi, who joins the Board of Advisors as a medical consultant.
"In order for Cymbiotika to continue evolving and guide our customers towards optimal health, we require a wide range of advisors with expertise in healthcare and medicine. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Pejman Taghavi, who brings a wealth of knowledge in the field of Diagnostic and Interventional Abdominal and Musculoskeletal radiology. As Medical Director of Hollywood Healthcare and Diagnostic Imaging and a former clinical instructor at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Dr. Taghavi is an experienced physician who has worked with professional athletes including the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Dodgers," said Shahab Elmi, CEO and founder of Cymbiotika.
"I'm very excited for this opportunity to partner with Cymbiotika," said Dr. Taghavi. "As a specialist in treating musculoskeletal injuries, I find that there is a lot of common ground between my approach to healing and Cymbiotika's approach to nutrition. Cymbiotika supplements are scientifically formulated with natural ingredients that are stringently tested for safety and purity. "
Cymbiotika is an innovative wellness brand based in San Diego. With the motto, "Your mind and body deserve the best", Cymbiotika is driven by the higher purpose of inspiring everyday people to achieve their optimal health. Founded in 2017, Cymbiotika uses the most advanced bioavailable absorption technology and sources only the highest quality plant-based nutrients to resolve specific nutritional deficiencies and support healthy aging, detoxification and longevity. Cymbiotika never uses synthetics, GMOs, fillers, chemicals, preservatives, additives or sugars in its products. For more information, visit https://cymbiotika.com.
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SOURCE Cymbiotika | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/cymbiotika-announces-partnership-with-medical-advisor-dr-pejman-taghavi/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:24Z |
The House of Representatives voted Friday to pass Democrats' $750 billion health care, energy and climate bill, in a significant victory for President Joe Biden and his party.
The final vote was 220-207, along party lines. Four Republicans did not vote.
Now that the Democratic-controlled House has approved the bill, it will next go to Biden to be signed into law.
Final passage of the bill marks a milestone for Democrats and gives the party a chance to achieve long-sought policy objectives ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. It comes at a critical time as Democrats are fighting to retain control of narrow majorities in Congress.
The sweeping bill -- named the Inflation Reduction Act -- would represent the largest climate investment in US history and make major changes to health policy by giving Medicare the power for the first time to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs and extending expiring health care subsidies for three years. The legislation would reduce the deficit, be paid for through new taxes -- including a 15% minimum tax on large corporations and a 1% tax on stock buybacks -- and boost the Internal Revenue Service's ability to collect.
It would raise over $700 billion in government revenue over 10 years and spend over $430 billion to reduce carbon emissions and extend subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and use the rest of the new revenue to reduce the deficit.
House acts after Senate Democrats passed the bill
The House took up the legislation after it passed in the Senate following a marathon overnight session of contentious amendment votes.
In the Senate, the bill passed on a final, party-line vote of 51-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.
Senate Democrats, who control only a narrow 50-seat majority, ultimately stayed unified to pass the legislation. And they used a special, filibuster-proof process known as reconciliation to approve the measure without Republican votes.
Approval of the bill in the chamber marked a major milestone for Senate Democrats, who had long hoped to pass a signature legislative package, but had struggled for months to reach a deal that had the full support of their caucus.
Sen. Joe Manchin played a key role in shaping the legislation -- which only moved forward after the West Virginia Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a deal at the end of July, a key breakthrough for Democrats after earlier negotiations had stalled out.
Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was also at the center of the effort to pass the bill -- and Sinema, Manchin and other senators worked through the weekend making alterations on the bill.
Passage in the Senate came after a lengthy stretch of amendment votes known as a "vote-a-rama" that lasted nearly 16 hours from late Saturday night until Sunday afternoon.
Republicans used the weekend "vote-a-rama" to put Democrats on the spot and force politically tough votes. They were also successful in removing a key provision to cap the price of insulin to $35 per month on the private insurance market, which the Senate parliamentarian ruled was not compliant with the Senate's reconciliation rules. The $35 insulin cap for Medicare beneficiaries remains in place.
In the end, Republicans lined up to oppose the bill. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement that the bill included "giant job-killing tax hikes" and amounted to "a war on American fossil fuel." The Kentucky Republican said Democrats "do not care about middle-class families' priorities."
How the bill addresses the climate crisis
While economists disagree over whether the package would, in fact, live up to its name and reduce inflation, particularly in the short term, the bill would have a crucial impact on reducing carbon emissions.
The nearly $370 billion clean energy and climate package is the largest climate investment in US history, and the biggest victory for the environmental movement since the landmark Clean Air Act.
Analysis from Schumer's office -- as well as multiple independent analyses -- suggests the measure would reduce US carbon emissions by up to 40% by 2030. Strong climate regulations from the Biden administration and action from states would be needed to get to Biden's goal of cutting emissions 50% by 2030.
The bill also contains many tax incentives meant to bring down the cost of electricity with more renewables, and spur more American consumers to switch to electricity to power their homes and vehicles.
Key health care and tax policy in the bill
The bill would empower Medicare to negotiate prices of certain costly medications administered in doctors' offices or purchased at the pharmacy. The Health and Human Services secretary would negotiate the prices of 10 drugs in 2026, and another 15 drugs in 2027 and again in 2028. The number would rise to 20 drugs a year for 2029 and beyond.
The controversial provision is far more limited than the one House Democratic leaders have backed in the past. But it would open the door to fulfilling a longstanding party goal of allowing Medicare to use its heft to lower drug costs.
Democrats are also planning to extend the enhanced federal premium subsidies for Obamacare coverage through 2025, a year later than lawmakers recently discussed. That way, they wouldn't expire just after the 2024 presidential election.
To boost revenue, the bill would impose a 15% minimum tax on the income large corporations report to shareholders, known as book income, as opposed to the Internal Revenue Service. The measure, which would raise $258 billion over a decade, would apply to companies with profits over $1 billion.
Concerned about how this provision would affect certain businesses, particularly manufacturers, Sinema has suggested that she won changes to the Democrats' plan to pare back how companies can deduct depreciated assets from their taxes. The details remain unclear.
However, Sinema nixed her party's effort to tighten the carried interest loophole, which allows investment managers to treat much of their compensation as capital gains and pay a 20% long-term capital gains tax rate instead of income tax rates of up to 37%.
The provision would have lengthened the amount of time investment managers' profit interest must be held from three years to five years to take advantage of the lower tax rate. Addressing this loophole, which would have raised $14 billion over a decade, had been a longtime goal of congressional Democrats.
In its place, a 1% excise tax on companies' stock buybacks was added, raising another $74 billion, according to a Democratic aide.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved. | https://www.kitv.com/news/national/house-passes-democrats-health-care-and-climate-bill-clearing-measure-for-bidens-signature/article_8d55574e-4967-56e3-9df4-becb65f2ab78.html | 2022-08-12T23:19:27Z |
Teachers and Staff at Jefferson Union High School District Benefit from Measure J
OAKLAND, Calif., Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The design-build team of SVA Architects and J.H. Fitzmaurice recently joined Jefferson Union High School District (JUHSD) in Daly City, CA for the district's Centennial Celebration and Grand Opening of 705 Serramonte, an affordable housing community specifically for district faculty & staff. Helping to bring housing equity to the region, JUHSD is the first K-12 school district to pass a bond exclusively to build an affordable housing community for teachers and staff. The $75 million project received $33 million in bond funds provided by the passage of Measure J in June 2018. The pioneering development unites SVA's dual strengths of partnering with educational institutions and designing affordable housing communities.
Coinciding with the JUHSD's centennial, the development team and district celebrated the completion of the housing community on May 13, 2022 with a ribbon cutting event. Throughout the summer, staff have been moving into the community in preparation for the fall semester, which began this week on Tuesday, August 9, 2022.
The 705 Serramonte community consists of 122 apartment homes, with 59 one-bedroom, 56 two-bedroom, and 7 three-bedroom units. Homes range from 560 – 1,174 sq. ft., with rental rates set at 50% of market rate at the time of occupancy. Homes feature vinyl plank flooring, stainless steel appliances, and generous windows with abundant light. Community spaces include a community lounge, a fitness center, and a central, landscaped courtyard with children's play structures, BBQ area, and ample seating.
Nathan Herrero, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, Principal at SVA Architects, states, "SVA's vision was to design homes and community spaces that feel like a market-rate, luxury development. Along with the District, we wanted to honor the critical work of educators by offering comfortable spaces that feel like a haven at the end of the day."
Mohammad Hakimi, AIA, President & CEO at J.H. Fitzmaurice, Inc., states, "It's been our privilege to be a part of this trailblazing project with Jefferson Union High School District and SVA Architects. Many districts around the country are already looking to JUHSD as a model for this type of educator housing in their own communities."
Based on the distinct expertise of its founders, SVA Architects has a robust portfolio of both educational and affordable housing projects. Overseeing the firm's educational projects is Robert Simons, AIA, President of SVA Architects. Under his guidance, SVA designed the award-winning, Grid Neutral, CHPS Verified Leader School La Escuelita Educational Center in Oakland. Leading the design of affordable communities is Ernesto M. Vasquez, FAIA, CEO of SVA Architects. One of the firm's signature affordable projects is Celadon at 9th & Broadway in San Diego, which achieved LEED Gold and was recognized with the 2016 ULI Global Award for Excellence. A natural fit based on SVA's resume, 705 Serramonte uniquely unites the expertise of both of SVA's founders.
About J.H. Fitzmaurice, Inc.
Founded in 1922, J.H. Fitzmaurice, Inc. (JHF) has completed numerous projects in the Bay Area, with its headquarters being in the same location in the City of Oakland for the past 100 years. JHF's primary focus in the past 40 years has been partnering with non-profit housing developers in building affordable housing projects including: teacher & faculty housing; multi-family housing; senior housing; veteran's housing; and special needs & homeless housing. JHF's mission and philosophy is to continue to partner with non-profits to help solve the current need and demand for affordable housing. For more information, visit www.jhfitzmaurice.com.
About SVA Architects, Inc.
Founded in 2003, SVA Architects has become one of the Country's most innovative and respected design and planning organizations. The award-winning firm specializes in urban planning, architecture, and interior design of public, private, and mixed-use projects. Among the firm's portfolio are civic, educational, residential, commercial and mixed-use developments. SVA Architects values institutional and public environments as the foundation of a community and the backdrop against which we live, learn, work, worship, and play. The company is headquartered in Santa Ana with offices in Oakland, San Diego, Davis, and Honolulu. For more information, visit www.sva-architects.com.
Media Contact:
Beth Binger
BCI
Mobile: (619) 987-6658
beth.binger@BCIpr.com
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SOURCE SVA Architects, Inc. | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/design-build-team-sva-architects-jh-fitzmaurice-complete-nationally-recognized-housing-daly-city-ca/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:30Z |
Bill Goes to the President's Desk with Important Insulin and Health Care Provisions
ARLINGTON, Va., Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the House passed the Senate-approved Inflation Reduction Act – historic legislation that limits the cost of insulin for seniors enrolled in Medicare and extends the COVID-19 expansion of Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance premium tax credits, crucial financial assistance that spared millions of Americans from pandemic disruptions in their health care.
"The American Diabetes Association has been the leading organization advocating for copay caps for insulin, resulting in the enactment of these cost-sharing limits in 22 states and the District of Columbia," said Lisa Murdock, chief advocacy officer for the American Diabetes Association® (ADA). "While we have more work to do to expand this benefit to all people with diabetes who rely on insulin to survive, this first national copay cap is a significant step in the right direction and a potentially life-saving policy change for seniors."
"Having health insurance is the single strongest predictor of whether adults with diabetes have access to high-quality health care and are able to manage their diabetes," said Dr. Robert Gabbay, the ADA's chief scientific and medical officer. "Uninsured Americans who are at risk for diabetes and its complications are much less likely to receive a diagnosis, and if they do get a diagnosis, they still average 60 percent fewer office visits with a physician and experience 168 percent more hospital visits than their insured counterparts. The expansion of these ACA health insurance subsidies will literally save lives of people with diabetes."
The Inflation Reduction Act also caps the cost of all prescription drugs at $2,000 per year for seniors who have Medicare Part D and allows Medicare to negotiate the price of some of the most expensive prescription drugs directly with drug manufacturers, reducing the cost of these often out-of-reach medications to seniors. $1 in every $3 spent on prescription drugs in the U.S. is spent on someone with diabetes, and this out-of-pocket cost limit will benefit people with diabetes who rely on more than just insulin to survive.
For more information about how the Inflation Reduction Act helps people with diabetes, check out the ADA's Inflation Reduction Act explainer.
About the American Diabetes Association
The American Diabetes Association (ADA) is the nation's leading voluntary health organization fighting to bend the curve on the diabetes epidemic and help people living with diabetes thrive. For 81 years, the ADA has driven discovery and research to treat, manage, and prevent diabetes while working relentlessly for a cure. Through advocacy, program development, and education we aim to improve the quality of life for the over 133 million Americans living with diabetes or prediabetes. Diabetes has brought us together. What we do next will make us Connected for Life. To learn more or to get involved, visit us at diabetes.org or call 1-800-DIABETES (1-800-342-2383). Join the fight with us on Facebook (American Diabetes Association), Spanish Facebook (Asociación Americana de la Diabetes), LinkedIn (American Diabetes Association), Twitter (@AmDiabetesAssn), and Instagram (@AmDiabetesAssn).
Contact:
Daisy Diaz, 703-253-4807
press@diabetes.org
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SOURCE American Diabetes Association | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/house-passes-inflation-reduction-act/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:37Z |
ARLINGTON, Va., Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Navy Mutual Aid Association ("Navy Mutual") is proud to announce its sixth year of participation with Military Makeover with Montel® airing on Lifetime TV. This season follows the renovations of the Stupar family home. Staff Sergeant Michael Stupar retired after 20 years of service in the U.S. Army; he deployed four times and the process to award him a Purple Heart for an injury received while deployed in Iraq is underway. SSG Stupar lives with his wife, Crystal, and their two daughters.
Navy Mutual staff members Bill Wooten and Michelle Ramos Domingue, Esq. travelled to Michigan City, Indiana, where the Stupar family home is located, to meet with the Stupar's and offer their support and gratitude for each family member's service.
"As an organization that was created by military members for military members, we appreciate the ability to give back to the military community in a personal way," said Ramos Domingue. "We are honored to provide the lighting fixtures for the Stupar family's home. Coming home and having the lights on provides a sense of comfort and safety, and that's what we're all about at Navy Mutual."
Season 31 of Military Makeover airing on Lifetime TV premieres on August 12 at 7:30 a.m. ET/PT. Navy Mutual features in episode 4, which airs on September 2. All episodes can be watched on YouTube after airing on Lifetime TV.
Navy Mutual is a nonprofit, member-owned mutual association established in 1879 to provide affordable life insurance and peace of mind to members of the military and their families. As the nation's oldest federally recognized Veterans Service Organization, its mission and commitment to protect those who defend us remains unwavering. Financially strong, Navy Mutual is proud to be a first-choice provider of life insurance to servicemembers and their loved ones. Through quality life insurance products, no-cost educational and veterans services programs, and unparalleled service, Navy Mutual has earned the loyalty and support of its membership. For more information, visit navymutual.org.
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SOURCE Navy Mutual | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/navy-mutual-partners-with-military-makeover-sixth-year/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:43Z |
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman, head of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and the voice for America's 33 million small businesses in President Biden's Cabinet, issued the following statement on today's passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
"The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 makes urgent investments that will bring down costs, level the playing field, and open up historic opportunities for America's 33 million small businesses and innovative startups.
"This law not only tackles inflation and powers America's transition to safer, cleaner energy, it also shrinks the budget deficit and—most importantly—drives down health care and energy costs for small businesses and their employees. Lower costs mean small business owners and entrepreneurs can focus on doing what they do best, creating jobs, developing talent, innovating, and opening doors of growth and opportunity across all of our communities—including selling more American-made goods and services to the world's largest buyer: the U.S. Government.
"From Day One, President Biden committed to delivering a strong, sustainable, and equitable recovery. Today, thanks to his leadership, we are seeing historic economic growth and job creation, the unprecedented launching of new small businesses, and a return of America's manufacturing base, all adding up to the world's strongest economic recovery from COVID. I look forward to working with President Biden, Vice President Harris, and my colleagues throughout the Biden-Harris Administration to add to our progress and leverage the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act to deliver even greater stability and opportunity for all small businesses and continue to build America's next great economy."
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The U.S. Small Business Administration helps power the American dream of business ownership. As the only go-to resource and voice for small businesses backed by the strength of the federal government, the SBA empowers entrepreneurs and small business owners with the resources and support they need to start, grow, expand their businesses, or recover from a declared disaster. It delivers services through an extensive network of SBA field offices and partnerships with public and private organizations. To learn more, visit www.sba.gov.
Contact: press_office@sba.gov, www.sba.gov/news
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs & Instagram
Release Number: 22-64
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SOURCE U.S. Small Business Administration | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/statement-by-sba-administrator-passage-inflation-reduction-act/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:50Z |
Landmark legislation is a critical step toward resilience as the West faces historic drought, also includes essential support for farmers & climate-smart agriculture, support for tribal nations working for climate resilience, and coastal restoration efforts
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Walton Family Foundation today lauded House passage of the largest climate change investment in U.S. history through the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden is expected to quickly sign into law.
Moira Mcdonald, Director of the Walton Family Foundation's Environment Program, issued the following statement:
"The challenges of climate change have and will continue to impact every aspect of our lives. Government, business, tribal nations, philanthropy, advocates, and others will all need to build on this historic investment together to continue to build momentum for a more resilient future."
"Americans experience climate change each day through water - in the form of droughts, floods, mega-storms, and wildfires. This legislation includes critical funding to help find solutions to the Western water crisis, and support for tribal nations as they adapt to climate change. It also includes support for farmers as they work to feed a growing population, while also protecting soil and water. These are important examples of what it looks like when we work for progress and find solutions so that people and nature can thrive together."
Recent polling, conducted by Morning Consult, shows a majority of Americans agree climate change will alter important aspects of life in the U.S. like agriculture (76% total, 89% Democrats, and 61% Republicans), water resources (76% total, 90% Democrats, and 59% Republicans) and the economy (71% total, 87% Democrats, and 55% Republicans). The same poll also shows 73% of Americans are worried about climate change and water scarcity, with at least three-in-five voters saying that drought, increased temperatures, wildfires, extreme weather, and flooding are a product of climate change's effect on water resources.
The Walton Family Foundation is, at its core, a family-led foundation. Three generations of the descendants of our founders, Sam and Helen Walton, and their spouses, work together to lead the foundation and create access to opportunity for people and communities. We work in three areas: improving K-12 education, protecting rivers and oceans and the communities they support, and investing in our home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta. To learn more, visit waltonfamilyfoundation.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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SOURCE Walton Family Foundation | https://www.whsv.com/prnewswire/2022/08/12/walton-family-foundation-lauds-passage-largest-climate-change-investment-american-history/ | 2022-08-12T23:19:57Z |
Former Louisville officer charged in Breonna Taylor case intends to plea guilty
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) - Kelly Hanna Goodlett, one of the former Louisville Metro Police Department officers now charged in Breonna Taylor’s case, intends to plead guilty to a federal charge. Her attorney agreed Goodlett will change her plea from not guilty to guilty on a conspiracy charge.
They set the date for that hearing for August 22, the judge said during court Friday. It will be up to a judge to decide whether to accept that plea agreement from Goodlett. The possible sentence for a conspiracy charge is up to five years in prison.
No details of the plea agreement were revealed, reported WAVE.
Goodlett’s bond was set at $10,000 and she was ordered to surrender her passport and guns. Goodlett was also told not have contact with other members associated in the case.
On August 4, Goodlett and three former LMPD officers - Joshua Jaynes, Brett Hankison, and Kyle Meany - were arrested by the FBI for alleged Civil Rights violations, which is a federal crime. They were all arraigned except for Goodlett.
The set of charges include conspiracy for some of the officers for actions the FBI believes happened after Taylor’s death.
Goodlett was part of the Place Based Investigations, or PBI Unit which led the drug investigation into Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover. The FBI has accused her of meeting with Jaynes in a garage to discuss what they were going to tell investigators.
Goodlett, who was the partner of Jaynes, was tasked with conducting much of the field work leading them to surveil Taylor. The target of the investigation was Glover and his so-called trap house on Elliott Avenue in Louisville’s Russell neighborhood. Goodlett had taken pictures of Glover picking up a U.S. Postal Service package at Taylor’s home. She had also gathered surveillance video outside of the home on Elliott Avenue showing Taylor getting into Glover’s car.
The investigation led officers to Taylor’s home with a search warrant shortly after midnight on Friday, March 13, 2020. Moments after officers breached the door to Taylor’s apartment, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired at the entry team. The officers fired back, fatally striking Taylor.
In a separate incident, Goodlett was also being investigated by the FBI in the case that later became known throughout LMPD as “Slushigate.” WAVE News Troubleshooters broke the story after learning a number of LMPD officers were being investigated for throwing Slushies at unsuspecting pedestrians while recording videos.
Two other officers were later indicted in that case for Civil Rights violations. Goodlett has not been charged in that case.
Copyright 2022 WAVE via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.whsv.com/2022/08/12/former-louisville-officer-charged-breonna-taylor-case-intends-plea-guilty/ | 2022-08-12T23:33:29Z |
One glance around the Northrup dining room will clue you in to the family business. A bouquet of dried wheat stems sits at the center of the table. Even the china dinnerware set on display in the built-in hutch is embellished with a gold-plated wheat pattern. It’s a family heirloom that goes back generations.
Nate Northrup grew up in this dining room. He is now the 4th generation of his family growing winter wheat on about 3,000 dry acres in New Raymer, Colorado, a small town in far-eastern Weld County. It’s just him and his father working the land with a rotation of wheat and other crops like millet and milo, in between fallow years.
Dryland farming has never been easy. But in recent years, Northrup has been battling a new challenge that would have baffled earlier generations: the wheat stem sawfly. It’s a pest that infests wheat stems at the base, flattening fields — usually just before the harvest.
Northrup described a slow progression of sawflies infiltrating his wheat fields, starting in 2010.
“It used to be just a few swaths around the edges,“ he said. “And then, the next year following, it would just be entire fields, just laying on the ground.”
Last fall, Colorado farmers planted more than 2 million acres of winter wheat for the 2022 harvest. But persistent drought is hurting Colorado’s crop, and the sawfly infestation only worsens things.
The mature bugs emerge in the spring and lay their eggs in young wheat stems. As the wheat grows, so do the sawfly larvae, eating their way down to the bottom of the plant. Just as the wheat ripens and becomes ready for harvest, the larvae ripen and get ready to hibernate. It makes itself an overwintering chamber just above the root and, in the process, takes a final big bite at the base of the wheat stem, weakening it beyond repair. The first wind or sprinkling of rain topples the weakened stalks flat on the ground.
Dr. Erika Peirce is a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University who specializes in integrated pest management of the wheat stem sawfly, which, she is quick to point out, is not actually a fly.
“Contrary to the name. It's actually a wasp,” she explained. She says sawfly may be a new pest, but the bug is not new to Colorado. “It was initially discovered in non-cultivated grasses - the grasses on the side of the road — in 1874 in Colorado. It only became a pest of winter wheat in Colorado in 2010.”
Peirce says the sawfly’s transformation from benign native insect to threatening pest happened because of a change in its lifecycle. Initially, adult sawfly timed their emergence to align with the growth of the non-cultivated grasses that were its native host. She explained that winter wheat develops earlier in the season than those native grasses.
“The sawfly, in order to use winter wheat, has to mature and emerge about 3 to 4 weeks earlier than they normally would for their native hosts,” she said.
And eventually, they started doing just that.
“The sawfly over the years slowly started emerging earlier and earlier,” Peirce explained. Eventually, the bugs synced up with winter wheat. Peirce is still studying why this shift took place. “We're looking into climate and landscape variables that might impact sawfly,” she said.
Whatever the science behind this shift in sawfly behavior, Nate Northrup says it’s devastating to his fields and not just for the crop that gets flattened — a field leveled by sawfly also devastates the next year’s harvest.
Many dryland growers like Northrup don’t till their fields, a practice that keeps moisture in the ground and helps maintain soil health. For those no-till farmers, an outcome almost as important as the wheat crop itself is the crop residue — the plant stubble left over after harvest.
Residue prevents soil erosion — a major concern on these wind-swept plains. It also keeps the snow settled in place during the winter —locking in precious moisture.
Sawfly damage obliterates that crop residue, which threatens future growing seasons. “Out here with limited rainfall, the wheat residue is really vital to the crop rotation,” Northrup explained.
According to Colorado Wheat, a local industry group, sawflies infested nearly one million acres on Colorado’s Eastern Plains last year, causing more than $31 million in damage. Numbers from the 2022 harvest are still trickling in, but with wheat prices surging — the group expects that number to rise to $41 million — all thanks to wheat stem sawfly.
Many common pest control methods do not work against sawfly, making it a tricky adversary. “Since it lives inside the stem, contact pesticides don't work on it because they're kind of hidden and protected inside the stem,” Dr. Peirce explained. Systemic pesticides – those taken up inside the wheat plant – have also proven ineffective.
Esten Mason is the lead wheat breeder at Colorado State University. He says the best defense is better wheat breeding. “The only way that we can solve this problem right now is through genetic resistance — new varieties that are resistant,” Mason explained.
Specifically, Mason and his team are trying to breed a better wheat stem. Traditional wheat stems are hollow, like a drinking straw. Mason and his team have been developing new strains with solid and semi-solid stems that are stronger and denser. The solid stems don’t prevent the infestation, but they do provide a natural defense against the sawfly larva’s damage.
“The sawfly can still lay an egg in there, but that developing larva suffocates and just dies basically,” Mason explained.
The downside to the new varieties is that more material in the stem means less material for the grain. The solid stem varieties produce a lower yield than traditional wheat. But a lower yield is a lot better than no yield.
“At the end of the season, [the solid] wheat would be standing in the field, whereas [the hollow] one would be falling over,” Mason said.
And that wheat standing in the field makes all the difference to no-till dryland farmers like Nate Northrup. After years of increasing sawfly damage, he started experimenting with solid stem varieties on his farm a few years ago.
This year he tested out a new approach on one of his fields: a 50/50 mix of solid stem wheat and a traditional hollow variety. There’s an elegant logic to this strategy — the traditional variety will provide Northrup with a higher yield.
The solid stems provide structure for the field — they can prop up adjacent hollow stems that have started to lean. And they’ll remain standing in the form of residue after the harvesting combine passes through.
Before the harvest, Northrup was encouraged by the results of this particular experiment. But he still expected a lackluster yield overall compared to recent averages.
“We've had phenomenal years, and we've had pretty bleak, pretty tough years,” he said. “So I guess you take the good with the bad, and the bad years make you appreciate the good.”
He knows it won’t be a phenomenal year. But with the solid stem wheat, things are looking good for a strong crop residue when the harvest wraps up. And that means he’ll have a shot at a better season next year.
Copyright 2022 KUNC. To see more, visit KUNC. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2022-08-12/a-native-bug-is-flattening-colorados-wheat-fields-farmers-are-trying-to-keep-ahead-of-it | 2022-08-12T23:57:52Z |
I headed down the interstate across southeast Wyoming where as far as the eye can see was yellow prairie. Until I arrived at Alan Kirkbride's ranch. Here it was a lush oasis, thanks to the creek flowing through.
As soon as I arrived, Alan took me out on his ATV to see where this creek originates as groundwater seeping out of the ground. We followed the spring to where it flowed into Horse Creek.
"You see, these are coyote willows here, aren't they?" Alan asked, pointing out at the creek. "And the taller trees then you've got river willows, same as down by my house on Spraguer Creek, and then get some box elders that are taller. And all pretty much natives, all those guys."
Here the stream goes wide and flat thanks to beaver dams that slow down the water flow, creating even more wetlands. Alan said Horse Creek is the last remaining free flowing stream in Laramie County. Groundwater drilling has dried up all the rest. But now he's afraid even Horse Creek's days are numbered.
"We talk about people fighting over water, that they've been doing it for 100 years? Well, we see the future, it's very possible continual difficulties between different users. It's in our future, I guess," Alan said.
It's already happening right now. A big fight has pitted neighbor against neighbor.
At the heart of this dispute is access to the water in the Ogallala aquifer, an immense underground sea that stretches from Oklahoma and Texas, north across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains. Alan and his neighbors want to stop more drilling into the aquifer because they say it threatens their springs and wells.
Reba Epler is a water attorney and her family's ranch is also potentially affected. She remembers when her dad found out what one of their neighbors was planning to do.
"My dad noticed those ads in the paper because they have to give notice of those. And he was like, 'This is crazy. Eight wells?'"
Their neighbors, the Lerwick family, had applied to drill eight high capacity water wells into the Ogallala aquifer under southeast Wyoming. They said they needed it to irrigate their crops. But the amount of water they were asking for was enough to cover 4,700 acres with a foot of water - one and a half billion gallons.
"That's enough to water 13,000 people a year and their lawns," Reba said.
Reba's dad and the other neighbors knew what this could mean for the creeks and springs and wells they rely on. They'd heard about places in other states where the Ogallala aquifer had been drained down.
"Look what's happened in western Kansas and eastern New Mexico," Reba said. "Those towns are on the brink of having to just move because they've taken all their groundwater. That could happen here very easily."
So Reba, her dad and 16 other ranchers banded together to fight the application to drill the eight wells. Reba represented them in court:
"I assert to you that this creek, this stretch of the creek, is the last running creek in Laramie County," she told the advisory board overseeing water issues for the region in court. "The rest of the creeks have been harmed so detrimentally that they have passed their ecological threshold."
There were also questions about this massive need for water. Jim Pike is the retired district conservationist for Laramie County where Reba and all of her clients ranch. He helped ranchers come up with a way to seriously reduce their water usage.
"So I was surprised when the state engineer then issued an order to allow for some high capacity wells for people to apply for them," Jim said. "But I think it was probably in response to some of the larger oil companies that moved into Laramie County and needed water."
They needed water for their fracking process in drilling for natural gas.
This all raises an uncomfortably, squishy question. Was the Lerwick family applying for these permits so they could irrigate crops as they said, or so they could sell the water to energy companies? Because if so, there's a word for that: speculation, saying you need water for one thing and then hoarding it to use for something else.
But the Lerwicks insisted the water was for crops. "The proposed use in this situation is irrigation," their lawyer William Hiser said in court. "That's what we're asking for in this situation. To say that irrigation is not a beneficial use flies in the face of the statute."
But when a member of the Lerwick family was pressed in court on whether he would transfer the use of the water from irrigation to oil and gas development, he said, "possibly, but not likely." That word - possibly - set his neighbor's teeth on edge. But speculation - saying you need the water for one use and then using it for something else - isn't technically illegal in Wyoming and attorney William Hiser argued that the courtroom wasn't the place to debate that policy.
"This forum is not the place to challenge those rules," attorney Hiser said. "That's down the hall and up the stairs if you want to change the rules. If you want to change the law, that's where you need to go. Not here."
Down the hall and up the stairs is the Wyoming legislature.
Anne McKinnon is the author of the book "Public Waters: Lessons from Wyoming For the American West." She said the state of Wyoming has become more reluctant to change its water laws over the years. Maybe because it's here that western water law was originally developed, including the very idea of public waters - that water belongs to us all and how it's used must benefit us all.
"Wyoming people, very justifiably, are very proud of their water law system," Anne said. "It was an important system and a sort of a key system that others followed in the 1890s. But people also often tend to think that it is practically tablets written in stone."
Anne said with the onset of climate change, those stone tablets may need some revising. Scientists say in the next 50 years, the Ogallala aquifer is expected to be depleted by 70 percent.
"One of the great strengths of Wyoming water law is that it's changed over time to accommodate the needs of our society in this particular place, as that society has changed over 130 years, and that it will need to keep on changing."
Reba, the water attorney, said lots of people - including policymakers - have the wrong idea about groundwater that collects in aquifers. They think it's separate from surface water, like rain, or water in streams, when really, it's all part of the same system.
"They're basically the same thing, you know," said Olivia Miller, a hydrologist with the US Geological Survey in Utah. "Water, whether it's snow or rain, falls on the land surface, some of it runs off into streams, and some of it seeps through soils and then enters aquifers."
Olivia said people also seem to think that groundwater is safe from the evaporation caused by climate change. But that's incorrect.
"Groundwater is vulnerable to climate change because the whole water cycle is so closely linked to the climate system. The water cycle, it's that precipitation and temperature that is our climate system."
Olivia said in the West, people tend to think of groundwater as an unlimited resource.
"People turn to groundwater more, so they use it more," Olivia said. "But it's sort of like your savings account where you put a little bit in at a time, and then you kind of can draw on it when you need to. But if you just start to rely on that, it'll eventually run out."
Then ranchers have to start drilling deeper wells and that gets expensive.
But right now, water law in the West doesn't reflect this science. Reba, the attorney representing the ranchers, wants to change that.
"First of all, the water law needs to recognize that the groundwater and surface water are one," said Reba. "We have to stop looking at this as if it's somehow two different things. Somehow that became the thought in Wyoming and it's just not true. There's no science to support that thought."
She also wants lawmakers to make speculation illegal so people can't hoard water for future uses they aren't honest about and to set a minimum baseflow to protect streams.
And Reba's not just dreaming, she's taking action. In this year's legislative session, she and Alan and their neighbors went down the hall and up the stairs and proposed a bill to lawmakers that would make the guy applying for a water well responsible for proving it wouldn't hurt his neighbors. Right now, it's the people who are trying to stop the drilling who are paying for lawyers and experts to prove these wells will drain their creeks.
Alan Kirkbride, the rancher I visited, had been especially proactive. He sat before lawmakers and made his case.
"The request is, we felt, is so excessive we just had to respond and contest it," Alan testified.
Thanks to Alan and the other ranchers, Wyoming lawmakers did pass that law putting the burden of proof on applicants to show their wells wouldn't injure other water users.
But Alan didn't live to see it signed into law. At 73, he died in his sleep reading a book on geology just days before the final vote. Reba said the stress from this case might have been too much. She said Alan will be sorely missed.
"He did the work of ten men, so we're really going to need a lot of people to step up in his place."
But the passage of the bill did not slow down the Lerwicks' applications for those high-capacity wells. The state engineer has continued moving forward to grant them. Reba said this case in southeast Wyoming should serve as a warning across the West as droughts and aquifer depletion worsen.
"They want to go in that direction of unbridled rape and extraction of our resources," said Reba. "That's where we're going with all this. We can't allow that, I mean, as a society."
And Reba plans to keep fighting to protect her beloved creeks - and the aquifer supplying them with water - all the way to the Supreme Court, if that's what it takes. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2022-08-12/as-drought-increases-ranchers-speak-up-about-the-value-and-science-of-groundwater | 2022-08-12T23:57:58Z |
The state legislature allocated $25,000 of the budget to address high rates of suicides among first responders in the state. This money was taken by the Wyoming Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) and utilized to create the first ever First Responders Health and Wellness Conference that will take place August 22-24 in Casper. Wyoming Public Radio's Kamila Kudelska spoke with POST executive director Chris Walsh on why the conference is needed.
Chris Walsh: It's been needed for a long time, maybe not fully recognized, but the prompting event was some recent first responder suicides that have happened in the state. And I think that kind of kicked in. And so the state legislators, unsolicited and to their credit, said, 'Hey, let's do something about it,' and allocated the money for it.
Kamila Kudelska: POST provides training to make sure that first responders are getting training as they're continuing to work. Does that, at all, include any mental health care or wellness?
CW: This is the first time that we're providing training through a conference. What I typically do, and the staff here, is validate training that the agencies either send their officers to or put on themselves. And so we make sure that it follows guidelines, and it's proper training, but I can tell you that first responder agencies have started incorporating a lot of mental health and mental trauma type training into their yearly training programs. But this is the first statewide first responder conference that has been set up.
KK: And so what is the conference hoping to provide to the first responders?
CW: Things always work better when you get the expertise from all the different fields. So I got together with the State Fire Marshal, Director of DCI, the person in charge of EMS with the state, and then people within departments and we looked at what we thought was needed. And so it's not just treatment of symptoms, or post traumatic incidents, let's say, but everything from proper selection of individuals at the hiring stage to creating an atmosphere within organizations that maintains a good working environment, good mental health background, recognizing signs, where a person might be starting to struggle, and intervention techniques. And then, of course, dealing with major incidents. So instead of just taking it from the back where we see the problems manifest really well beyond any kind of recovery, which would be like a suicide, let's see if we can get in front of it and start building that culture where we take care of problems before they turn into something big.
KK: How much do you think the pandemic has maybe impacted this need for this?
CW: You know, that's a hard one to say. You can't qualify with anything, and I always like to back something up with facts. But from my perspective, the world became isolated. And so a lot of the ways you solve problems and work things out, you know, as my background as a peace officer, you talk to other cops, and when you're isolated, when you can't have that interaction, I don't think humans do well. So certainly couldn't help. And well, I can't scientifically back that up. We're all people. And we all know that those are facts.
KK: What about the rural nature of Wyoming? I mean, obviously Wyoming has always been more rural. But I wonder if that has at all impacted first responders having to take more calls because there's not as many officers supporting them or anything like that?
CW: Certainly. You don't have the backup, you don't have large departments in many places, somebody's gone. If people are ill, if people quit, now you're carrying a double load. So add isolation onto working harder and it creates a lot of internal stress for the individuals that are doing it. And I can tell you that there's a lot of struggles with hiring right now. So that means department numbers are down. That means that those officers and those firefighters and those EMTs are all working harder than they normally would be or harder than they should be, really with no end in sight. So add a difficult situation on top of kind of no light at the end of the tunnel, that becomes pretty depressing.
KK: Any idea why it's so hard to hire people in the sector now?
CW: Oh, yeah. I mean, look at the national response towards peace officers in particular. Who would want to be a peace officer? Now we're blessed in Wyoming that we don't have that kind of just blatant nasty attacks that you see all over the rest of the United States on people that are trying to do the right thing and do good things, but it's prevalent. And so if you're looking for a career and you're just starting out in life, you might say to yourself, 'Well, when does it come here and I don't want to be a part of that.'
KK: So I know that this year was funded by the legislature. Any thoughts about the future? Or are you not even thinking about that yet? I know that the conference still hasn't happened. But any thoughts on how potentially to continue this type of education and training?
CW: Well, first of all, I don't know that the state needs to continue to fund it in future years. I think the formal recognition by the state that, 'Hey, let's address this issue,' is kind of an eye opener for everybody. But I'm telling you that I see a lot of departments offering training and sending their officers to training independent of this conference. So these mental health and wellness educational instruction is going on independent of this. So this might be a good catalyst and I think we'll continue to see organizations put on training to address their individual needs. So I don't know what the future holds for a mental health conference. But I think that training will only continue to increase. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2022-08-12/first-ever-first-responder-mental-health-and-wellness-conference-hopes-to-increase-awareness-of-need | 2022-08-12T23:58:04Z |
At the Ethete powwow this summer, the University of Wyoming Stealing Culture team was honored for their work getting Alyson White Eagle Sounding Sides to London to see Chief Yellowcalf's headdress. White Eagle Sounding Sides is one of Yellowcalf's descendants and the first Arapaho to see his headdress at the British Museum in London in one hundred years.
"It was emotional because I thought about at that time, you know, early reservation era, people, especially our chiefs, were just doing the best that they could to make sure that our people were going to continue on, that we were going to survive," she said.
White Eagle Sounding Side explained that the headdress is more than an item, and the word "headdress" does not do justice to what Chief Yellowcalf's headdress means to her and the Arapaho people.
She said the headdress was removed from Chief Yellowcalf's possession during the filming of Covered Wagons, a film shot in the 1930s. Some say it was a gift to someone in film production but White Eagle Sounding Sides said that's not what she's hearing from her community.
"I just don't believe…I find it hard to believe that this headdress was something that he was willing to give away, considering how much this headdress means to our people," she said.
It's hard to know exactly what happened, but moving forward, there are a lot of unknowns regarding the nuts and bolts of getting the headdress back. Stealing Culture is trying to help. They are a team of two University of Wyoming professors who are endeavoring to pick apart the complicated relationship between how museums work and laws that govern repatriation.
Repatriation is the reclamation of old stolen items from museums, much like what is happening with Chief Yellowcalf's headdress.
The Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone, the two tribes of the Wind River Reservation, have been looking for cultural artifacts for years now. The locally produced 2017 film "What Was Ours'' explores how many sacred and cultural items were taken off the reservation years ago, only to sit undisplayed in the basements of non-Indigenous institutions, much like Chief Yellowcalf's headdress.
Nicole Crawford is part of the team and is the curator at the University of Wyoming's American Heritage Center. She said museums are only now coming to grips with their history of exploitation.
"Museums are collecting institutions, and they were really formed on a colonial basis, right? Somebody would go around and collect things. Think of Napoleon in the Louvre, or the British Museum," she said. "There's a joke that says, 'We named something that seems British but really isn't and it's the British Museum.'"
She said many curators are now looking at their collections and asking important questions about where items came from and the ethicacy of their acquisition.
"But that takes time and money to look at these things. And a lot of museums don't have those resources," said Crawford.
One issue curators have is that it's hard to know who to reach out to about an item, especially if the history of the item is unknown or contested.
"So you can't just call up Kenya and say, 'Hey, I've got an object. Do you want it back?' Who do you call? Who can claim these things? And that's what part of Stealing Culture is, is helping think about these issues," she said. "Can an individual claim something? Does it have to be a community such as a tribe?"
University of Wyoming Law Professor Darrel Jackson is also with Stealing Culture. He said in the world of museums, the history of a particular item is called provenance. It states whether an item was acquired, stolen or gifted. But historically, museums have left these types of details out.
"That's something the law would never do. Law has the equivalent that is massively ahead of provenance, it's called title. You have title to your car, you might have title to your house. But I can literally go to a courthouse and track your title, all the way back to origin. And if I can't, we call that stolen, and we will prosecute you for that," he said.
Jackson said this is where Stealing Culture comes in. They want to help navigate between different nation's, country's, and institution's protocols. All of which can be really difficult to move between.
"Our goal has been to try and be a bridge between analyses between individuals and organizations, even between countries, because we have this kind of neutral third party access point where we can insert into the dialogue in a way that sometimes two opposing parties can't," he said.
Stealing Culture has consulted on projects in Europe, Japan, Australia, and Rapa Nui talking with museums on policy that governs repatriation. Jackson said he's noticed at this point, museums have one of two options moving forward.
"The international dialogue surrounding repatriation is pulling museums in a direction that they can either accelerate and say, 'Okay, we're going to fix this.' Or they can pull back and say, 'We want to fight this,'" he said.
Stealing Culture went with Alison White Eagle Sounding Sides to the British Museum to see Chief Yellowcalf's headdress. That's the first repatriation they've worked on so intimately.
Since White Eagle Sounding Sides has come back from London, she's researching how the headdress got there in hopes to prove the provenance, or title, of the headdress, and dreaming of its eventual return.
"I went into law because I love my people. I am so proud to be Arapaho. I'm very fortunate to be Arapaho. And so, this idea of bringing this headdress home is for the well being of my people, the healing of my people," she said.
She said during her research, she will talk with ceremonial leaders and tribal council to decide how to move forward, an integral part of the repatriation process. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2022-08-12/law-and-museum-politics-come-together-in-repatriation-efforts-of-an-arapaho-headdress | 2022-08-12T23:58:10Z |
At the National Elk Refuge near downtown Jackson in early August, Drew Gath helped unload a semi-truck jam packed with hundreds of bear-resistant trash cans. They’re made of a thick black plastic and feature an automatically locking lid and notches even the most nimble paws couldn’t break into.
Gath is the program director for Jackson Hole Bear Solutions, a new nonprofit delivering these cans to Teton County residents.
“They're [trash cans] tested up at a wilderness refuge in Montana where they have grizzlies and wolves,” Gath said. “And they fill these with fish meal, rotten meat, anything bears really want to get into, and let them hammer on these for an hour or two.”
A common saying around Jackson is, ‘a fed bear is a dead bear.’ They’re opportunistic, omnivorous, and not picky. Gath said if a grizzly or black bear finds an open dumpster, or livestock feed, or even a bird feeder, they’ll become habituated to those foods.
“They have a really good memory. Really good sense of direction,” Gath said. “If they get into your trash one time they get a food reward.”
That puts people in a dangerous situation. Last fall, arguably the most famous bear in the world, Grizzly 399, went viral when she waltzed right through downtown Jackson with her four cubs. Wildlife managers were concerned that she was looking to stock up before hibernation.
Dan Thompson heads the large carnivore section of the Wyoming Game & Fish Department. He said food-conditioned bears become increasingly bold over time if they aren’t dealt with.
“They start doing things. Pushing people out of hammocks. Taking food, literally from people in their backpack holding it. We don't have a lot of options if it gets to that point,” Thompson said.
One of Grizzly 399’s young cubs was killed earlier this summer because it was hanging around homes. Conflicts that bears have with people and livestock have risen by more than 30 percent in the past decade, according to Game & Fish. After consulting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the department killed 30 bears last year.
Thompson said the main reason is that more people are living near public lands or recreating there. Plus, grizzlies and black bears are actually expanding their territory and their numbers have recovered.
“People use the term coexist all the time. Well, the reality of that is there's going to be conflicts,” Thompson said. “There's going to be negative things that happen to people and negative things that happen to bears if you're going to have a high density of both in the landscape.”
That’s why Teton County lawmakers passed a law this year trying to reduce future conflicts. They’re now requiring people in some parts of Jackson Hole to secure their trash and other attractants, something studies show is the number one cause of human-bear friction.
Kristen Combs, the executive director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, pushed for these changes.
“Our ecosystems desperately need these, you know, large apex predators, and large carnivores in order to function properly,” Combs said. “A lot of times this place looks like a wildlife paradise, but then you scratch a little deeper beneath the surface, and you find out that, like, things could be healthier. Things could be better.”
There’s still a long way to go. These new laws need to be enforced, and Combs wants them to eventually extend further.
An estimated 3,500 cans also need to be distributed. Gath at Jackson Hole Bear Solutions is taking donations for people who can’t afford $300 for a can. And he’s hoping to get the latest delivery out to people as soon as possible.
“As we start to move deeper into the fall, closer to the fall, bears, they're really trying to stock up for hibernation,” Gath said. “They increase their appetites, and they'll travel farther to get food at that time. That's called hyperphagia for bears, and that's definitely the time when conflicts are more likely.”
Jackson Hole is not the only location taking action. Lake Tahoe is upping education efforts following a high-profile incident there. Southwestern Colorado communities are being issued grants to manage wildlife. And some Montana towns are looking to create new conflict mitigation plans.
In all cases, wildlife managers say the key to limiting high-profile is greater awareness from tourists and residents. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2022-08-12/teton-county-starts-to-require-some-to-have-bear-resistant-trash-cans-to-reduce-human-bear-conflicts | 2022-08-12T23:58:16Z |
This week a new University of Wyoming poll conducted by the Wyoming Survey and Analysis center between July 25th and August 6th shows that Harriet Hageman holds a nearly 30 point lead over U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney in their battle for the Republican House primary election. University of Wyoming Political Scientist Jim King has analyzed the poll and tells Wyoming Public Radio’s Bob Beck what the numbers say and how some additional questions shed light on what voters think. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2022-08-12/uw-political-scientist-says-the-u-s-house-primary-is-a-referendum-on-cheney | 2022-08-12T23:58:22Z |
It's been awhile since people have doubted the Wyoming Cowboys football team. But after losing its top two quarterbacks, its top running back, receiver, along with several key defensive players, Wyoming has been picked fifth in the Mountain Division of the Mountain West Conference. But the majority of media members who voted believe that position is warranted after Wyoming struggled in conference play last year.
One of the offensive stars that remains this year is running back Titus Swen. He was second team All Mountain West Conference after averaging almost six yards a carry, which included a school record 98 yard touchdown run. After trading carries with former running back Xazavian Valladay last year, he is excited to be the main guy this year in Wyoming's run-first offense.
"It is a good feeling," said Swen. "I've been running the ball ever since I first started putting on pads, so coming to an offense in college where I can utilize my ability as best that I can means a lot to me and the offensive lineman, they embrace running the ball so that fuels my fire even more."
But Swen said he also knows that he needs to have a good season if Wyoming is to have the success it wants to have.
"I mean, I try not to think about it, but I do feel a little pressure on my shoulders," he said.
But Swen pointed out there are younger teammates who didn't get a chance to play last year due to some veteran players staying an extra season after the shortened COVID-19 year of 2020. He said many of those players thought they should have played more and are ready to prove themselves.
On the defensive side of the ball, linebacker Easton Gibbs for feels some pressure. Gibbs is playing middle linebacker, a position that has led to a lot of success for the Cowboys, as the two recent starting middle linebackers are now in the NFL.
"I'm definitely excited to step into that role. So definitely an honor just being even mentioned in the same two sentences. The guys who came before me, they're such good players here, but I definitely took a lot out of their games to try and incorporate it into mine," said Gibbs. "When they were both super successful at this level, it was definitely beneficial to me watching how they handled everything and how they approached everything that they did."
Gibbs hopes to pass along such things as how to watch game film, and how to properly prepare for games, to the younger players who will be getting significant minutes this year. He said they've spent a lot of time working on communication on defense and he likes where they are.
"The defense came a long way even since spring ball. I think we're looking really good in fall camp, we got a bunch of young guys stepping up that are hungry to play. A lot of competition going on right now, which I think is a really good thing," said Gibbs. "I think by the end of fall camp, we're gonna be ready to roll right into week one. And we'll be that same cowboy tough defense that everybody's used to seeing."
Wyoming Head Coach Craig Bohl agreed with Gibbs. His defenses have been consistently good and while this is a younger team, he said there is a lot of talent out there.
"We've got some defensive tackles who've played, the defensive ends have not played very much. And so we're excited that we've seen good things there. You know, obviously, we lost a dynamic middle linebacker, and so an opportunity for Easton Gibbs to have an impact there. And then the back end, we've got two new cornerbacks, safeties, a lot of youth, but I think some really, really good focused young players who have good athleticism," said Bohl.
One thing that really dogged Wyoming last season was inconsistency on offense. Bohl singled that out as something they had to improve upon. Things got a little tougher when Wyoming's top two quarterbacks entered the transfer portal and left the program after the season.
Offensive Coordinator Tim Polasek has been tasked with bringing along a new quarterback as well as improving the entire offense. He said his focus has been identifying things they can realistically do well. They are also setting some standard levels of play and enforcing those.
"Then getting on that marker beyond that mark, as many days as many reps as physically possible," he said. "So I'm just trying to work tirelessly right now with the offensive staff, and identifying those dips in saying, 'Okay, is it an issue because we're not capable? Or is it an issue of coaching? Or is it a player issue?' And really, any one of those three things can lead to us moving beyond it."
Polasek said near misses on big plays and untimely penalties hurt Wyoming last year too. But he's optimistic things will go smoother this year.
Bohl stressed on Wyoming Football Media Day that the team has a lot of young talent and he's very optimistic. They get to prove that on August 27 at Illinois. | https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2022-08-12/young-cowboys-hope-to-prove-doubters-wrong | 2022-08-12T23:58:29Z |
On a glorious fall day in 2016, I stood before an audience of cancer survivors and wondered, “What can I possibly tell them that they don’t already know?”
The event was a “Celebration of Life,” hosted by United Hospital Center in Bridgeport, W.Va., to honor oncology patients and to remind them that they were not alone.
I had no degrees, no expertise at all to offer. But I’ve raised three children and buried my share of loved ones. I lost my mother, my stepfather, my brother’s wife, and my first husband, all to cancer. I’ve been a daughter, sister, wife, widow, mother, grandmother and a student of life. And I’ve learned a few things along the way.
So I told them my story, hoping it might be their story, too. Here is some of what I said.
My first husband wore a lot of hats. He was “Dad” to our three children, a high school teacher, basketball coach, marathon runner, Young Life leader and a handyman around the house.
He loved doing those things and kept doing them, even after he was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. By the strength of his will and the grace of God, he stretched those six months into four years. And along the way, we learned several lessons.
The first lesson was kindness. We were swamped with offers for help. So many casseroles showed up at our door I thought I might never need to cook again. Friends and even strangers said they were praying for us and that their children were praying for our children.
Kindness heals. I watched it heal the Coach, even as he was dying. I watched his spirit bloom with the realization of how much he was loved.
The second lesson was how to embrace change. As the cancer took its toll, he adapted. When he could no longer run, he went for walks. When he could no longer hike, he took photos of mountains and put them in scrapbooks. When he could no longer coach, he sat on the sidelines and cheered for his former players. When he could no longer teach or walk or change channels on the TV, he lay on the couch and welcomed a stream of visitors.
One by one, he let go of things that once defined him. Instead, he focused on what he could do, rather than what he could not.
We were fortunate to have friends who made us laugh and reminded us to be thankful. That was the third lesson: Gratitude. Near the end, I gave the Coach a journal.
“I want you to use that,” I said, “to make a list every day of five things you are thankful for.”
“What if I don’t do it?”
“I’ll hide the TV remote.”
So he did it. My name often showed up on the list, but never at the top. He always listed God first. He said God never threatened to hide the remote.
After he died, I learned yet another lesson from the words of a friend who wrote: “The challenge for you now, having lost your loved one, is to live a life that is honoring to his memory, while at the same time that life moves forward, so only one person has died, not two.”
I don’t know why some people get to live longer than others. But I believe that those who do, owe it to those don’t, to live well; to keep moving forward; and to be more, not less, alive.
From my grandmothers, I learned I was loved. From my blind brother I learned not to fear the dark. From my children, I learned there are things I can do, and things I have to leave to God. From my late husband, I learned to let go. From my new husband, I learned to believe in second chances. And from my grandchildren, I’ve learned I will live forever in their hearts.
If there is any art to living, it might be this: Be kind. Embrace change. Be thankful. Live well.
And always celebrate life.
Sharon Randall is the author of “The World and Then Some.” She can be reached at P.O. Box 922, Carmel Valley CA 93924 or www.sharonrandall.com. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/column-remember-to-always-celebrate-life/article_23a7ea20-528b-5e97-a2c1-ef774b8041c3.html | 2022-08-13T00:04:44Z |
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The Big Ten had an invitation for the University of Oregon, after all.
Only it’s Oregon’s president, Michael Schill, who is departing the Pac-12.
The Ducks are still here. For now.
Schill, who has led UO since 2015, is off to do the same job at Northwestern, one of the finest academic institutions in the country. It’s a terrific career move and reflects positively on Schill’s seven years in Eugene, which included increasing the four-year graduation rate by more than 10% and completing a $3.2 billion fundraising campaign for the school.
But it’s hard to imagine a worse time for the Ducks to hang a “Help Wanted” sign on the door of the president’s office in Johnson Hall.
Only rarely do the movements of career academics spill over to the sports page, but this is a rare moment for Oregon and the Pac-12.
The conference is fighting for its survival. USC and UCLA jumped ship, leaving UO, which Phil Knight has helped build into a sports behemoth, without a clear path forward.
Do the Ducks become the flagship of a reimagined Pac-12? Or do they search for a new home, too?
These are questions that Schill was being looked to for answers.
Now, it’s up to his replacement. But finding the right candidate takes time, as Oregon State can attest.
OSU has been without a full-time president since F. King Alexander resigned in March of 2021. Jayathi Murthy, the former UCLA engineering dean, will step into the role in Corvallis next month.
But now neither Oregon school will have a seasoned figure helping shape the future of the Pac-12.
That’s most acutely felt in Eugene, where in addition to his on-campus duties, Schill chaired the Pac-12′s CEO Board.
That means that the biggest decisions facing the conference were being filtered through a local perspective.
At the Pac-12′s football media day in Los Angeles last month, Commissioner George Kliavkoff said the board’s members had met twice weekly since USC and UCLA bolted.
“They’re committed to the conference,” Kliavkoff said.
Now one of those apparent allies has jumped the fence. Not only is Schill leaving the Pac-12 and his role with the CEO board, in a delicious twist of irony, he will assume a spot on the Big Ten equivalent.
That means a man whose obligation yesterday was to help preserve the dwindling Pac-12 now joins a body that has the power to destroy it.
So … will Schill bring the Ducks along with him to the Big Ten?
A football program that perennially contends for a conference title and the seemingly limitless backing of Nike founder Knight make Oregon one of the most attractive targets for future conference expansion — even if Washington and the Bay Area schools offer larger TV footprints and, in the case of Stanford, unmatched academic rigor.
The conference has done an excellent job of presenting a unified front since its membership was reduced to 10. Questions about the conference picking off other Pac-12 members has cooled.
When I saw Oregon State AD Scott Barnes on the sidelines of Oregon State’s practice this week I asked him how he viewed his school’s positioning amid expansion. I wondered if OSU saw itself as a lone operator, as part of a tandem with UO, or as one of a banded group of 10.
“The body,” he responded immediately, “is 10.”
At the football media day, Kliavkoff said he was “bullish about the Pac-12′s future and our opportunities for long-term growth, stability and success.”
That may remain true even as UO begins its search for a new leader. But with Schill, Oregon had a respected voice at the table to shape the future of the Pac-12 and set the course for sports at Oregon.
Now, there is just an empty chair. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/column-oregon-s-president-exits-leaving-ducks-with-big-hole-in-realignment-talks/article_b60b4f33-fbcf-56ac-a739-7dc73c0e7a59.html | 2022-08-13T00:04:56Z |
Oregon’s mental health professionals for young people are frustrated.
At a roundtable discussion Thursday, medical providers and representatives from a tribal health agency and Portland Public Schools expressed frustration that public and private health insurance plans have left many youth untreated.
They called for an expansion of the mental health care workforce in schools, and an overhaul of outdated regulations that restrict care settings and providers. They also said the federal government needs to hold insurers accountable for denying behavioral health care coverage to kids.
The roundtable was convened at a southwest Portland campus of Oregon Health & Science University by Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden. He was joined by Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, head of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as parents and students, to discuss youth mental health care going into the new school year.
Wyden said kids in Oregon have been “sounding the alarm clear and loud,” that more mental health support is needed.
The other participants agreed.
A survey of about one-third of Oregon students conducted in 2020 by the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Department of Education found nearly half felt sad or hopeless for more than a two-week period. And a report released this week by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, found that the number of Oregon children struggling with mental health issues grew from 11% in 2016 to 16% in 2020, a 40% increase.
Wyden said the pandemic exacerbated the mental health crisis in Oregon’s kids. “This has been an issue before the pandemic, and it’s mushroomed,” he said.
Wyden, Brooks-LaSure and health care providers agreed that schools need more counselors and therapists. They said Medicaid needed to provide greater access to mental health care.
In Oregon, about two in five children are insured through Medicaid, the federal program that covers low-income families. Nationwide, nearly half of kids receive free coverage from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP.
Expanding the workforce
In 2019, the state allocated more than $1 billion to the Student Success Act in 2019, which helped pay for mental health care in schools. Additionally, Oregon received millions from the American Rescue Plan during the pandemic, with directives to use some of it for mental health staff and programs.
But the money has not solved the problems, according to Colt Gill, the director of the Oregon Department of Education.
“The Student Success Act gave us money for more counselors,” Gill said in a November meeting of the Oregon Senate’s Education Committee. “We cannot find them.”
One mother said during the discussion that her son has been on a waiting list to see a school counselor for six months.
Brooks-LaSure said her agency is accepting public comment on a policy that would increase the number of mental health care providers in schools by giving counselors more flexibility in who they treat and their focus. As an example, they could treat school children and veterans, or they could work in schools but also offer family counseling. This would bring in professionals who do not work in schools now. The public can submit comments until the end of August.
Rep. Lisa Reynolds, D-Portland and a pediatrician, said about 30% of her patients are on Medicaid. Some wait weeks or months to see a therapist because of the shortage of mental health professionals.
Reynolds said more doctors need to be trained in mental health care, and that payments to social workers, counselors and therapists should increase. Although Oregon regulations require equal payments for physical and mental health care, therapists are typically paid less than those providing physical care. Increasing payments would increase the numbers of professionals, she said. “We need to compensate mental health care providers the same as we do physical health care providers,” she said.
Randy Kamphaus, director of the University of Oregon’s new Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health in Portland, which offers curricula to students interested in the field, added that interns should be paid while they are training. The institute’s first class of 200 undergraduates will intern in Portland Public Schools in the fall of 2023, Kamphaus said. They’ll start by screening students to identify those at risk or susceptible for mental health problems.
Outdated regulations
Many of the medical providers on the panel expressed frustration with policies under Medicaid that restricts care.
Laura Platero, executive director of the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, said a restriction that only allows providers to claim a reimbursement when care is provided in a facility has been especially restrictive. She told Brooks-LaSure that Medicaid should be extended to tribal practices, such as the Healing of the Canoe program for Native American youth. The curriculum includes tribal traditions and practices to strengthen children’s connections to their culture and to combat suicide and substance abuse.
She said her agency has struggled to help kids with their mental health.
“We’ve had a hard time finding in-patient treatment for youth, and when we do we have to wait or it’s too expensive,” she said.
Robin Henderson, chief executive for behavioral health at Providence, said she oversees the only child psychiatric unit in the state and that it often has a waiting list. She said administrators face the biggest problem with reimbursements from private insurers. All insurers in Oregon are supposed to include the clinic in their network but she said many aren’t.
“We need regulators to hold insurers accountable,” she said.
She criticized the requirement by some insurers for prior authorizations before allowing treatment. Many often deny coverage, she said.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard back ‘well that’s a behavioral health problem,’” Henderson said. She called on Wyden to continue to push for insurance reforms in Congress.
School counselors
Wyden said a “resounding call for help” from students pushed the recent Safer Communities Act over the finish line. The act, which includes $1 billion for school counselors over five years, was embedded in a gun safety bill that Congress passed in June.
An Oregon student, Trace Terrell, a senior at La Pine High School, testified in favor of the measure before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, which Wyden chairs. Terrell said about 80% of his peers who were referred for counseling never heard from a counselor.
Wyden said Thursday that Terrell’s testimony had a profound impact on the committee, which played a major role in writing the gun safety bill.
Wyden said more help is coming. He indicated that the Congress is likely to pass a “major bipartisan package” to help states add youth mental health professionals. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/health-care-professionals-call-for-federal-help-addressing-oregon-s-youth-mental-health-crisis/article_7135f3d2-bf26-52dd-a764-f27167109ff3.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:03Z |
That Kansas voted to protect abortion rights guaranteed in its state constitution didn’t surprise me, although I certainly never expected a landslide. The original Jayhawkers, after all, waged a guerilla war to prevent Missourians from bringing slavery into the Kansas territory – a violent dress rehearsal for the Civil War. A good deal of the state’s well-known conservatism is grounded in stiff-necked independence.
In the popular imagination, Kansas has always signified heartland values and rustic virtue. Superman grew up on a farm there, disguised as mild-mannered Clark Kent. As did Dorothy of “The Wizard of Oz,” a spunky young woman with an adventurous spirit. But cartoonish fictions have little to do with the real world. My favorite Kansas politician was always Sen. Bob Dole: war hero, Senate majority leader, 1996 GOP presidential nominee, and unmistakably his own man.
Pondering a photo of the then three living ex-presidents – Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon – Dole quipped, “There they are: see no evil, speak no evil ... and evil.”
Regardless of party, how can you not appreciate a politician like that? After the 2020 presidential election, Dole accepted Joe Biden’s victory and allowed as how he was “sort of Trumped out.”
So naturally, Trump skipped his 2021 funeral. All class, that guy.
Although nominally anti-abortion during most of his career, Dole was also a realist who was leery of single-issue zealots and political purity tests. Suffice it to say they aren’t making Republicans like him anymore.
All of that is a roundabout way of saying the Kansas result shouldn’t have astonished anybody. After all, the state currently has a Democratic governor, Laura Kelly. Another Democrat, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, was elected there in 2002 and reelected in 2006. Indeed, as Stuart Rothenberg points out in Roll Call, “Democrats have won four of the last eight gubernatorial contests in the state and six of the last 11.”
It follows that this blue state/red state business based strictly on presidential elections tells you relatively little about a place and its retail politics. More broadly, Justice Samuel Alito and a handful of religious zealots on the Supreme Court can argue that there’s no right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution, but they will never persuade a majority of Americans to believe it.
Specifically, how is it even the government’s affair to know who’s pregnant and who’s not? How is it yours? How is it anybody’s except the woman herself? Truly, it’s hard to imagine a more fundamental freedom than the decision of whether or not to give birth.
Women voters in Kansas appear to have felt this more keenly than men. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, some 33,000 new voters registered in Kansas in the weeks immediately following the court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, some 70% of them women. That’s a lot in a state with just under 2 million registered voters, enough to push the state’s abortion referendum into landslide territory: 59% to 41%.
What the Kansas vote mainly signified to me was bedrock Americanism: essentially, “You’re not the boss of me, and it’s none of your damn business.”
“For decades,” writes the New Yorker’s John Cassidy, “the Republican Party has largely owned and exploited the language of individual liberty and freedom, even as many of its policies have favored the rich and powerful – from gunmakers to Big Pharma and Wall Street – over individual middle-class Americans.”
It’s time to call their bluff. Everywhere you look these days, politicians calling themselves “conservative” are banning books, pushing teachers around, threatening school boards and businesses, suppressing voting rights, attacking the freedom to love and marry, elevating gun rights over basic human rights, and doing their best to turn American women and girls into brood mares, knocked-up and locked up.
What they are is authoritarian. In a word, bullies.
Writing on Twitter, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has some advice for Democrats up for election this fall. (He is not on the 2022 ballot.) “Run on personal freedom,” he urges. “Run on keeping the government out of your private life. Run on getting your rights back. This is where the energy is. This is where the 2022 election will be won.”
Polls show that the majority of likely voters are preoccupied with economic issues, inflation in particular. But the Kansas referendum resulted from right-wing activists seeking to impose a total ban on legal abortion: an intrusive effort to extend government control into citizens’ most intimate life decisions.
And voters there rejected it about as decisively as it’s possible to do. It appears that Americans – and for what it’s worth, Kansans are overwhelmingly white and Christian – have no wish to live in a judicially imposed theocracy and will turn out in droves to prevent it. Overall voting totals were extremely high for a primary contest, reflecting high motivation.
Perhaps Murphy’s optimism is mistaken. But it’s definitely the right fight to have.
Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can email Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/kansas-isnt-having-any-part-of-conservative-overreach/article_ed018e29-86f9-530c-b6f0-27741aa15b65.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:09Z |
We need cops, not more drugs
I am a resident of Oregon and have lived in Klamath Falls for 18 years. I was surprised to read that U.S. Sen Ron Wyden is promoting the legalization of marijuana for all states.
I am a resident of Oregon and have lived in Klamath Falls for 18 years. I was surprised to read that U.S. Sen Ron Wyden is promoting the legalization of marijuana for all states.
Currently, our need in Southern Oregon in Klamath County and neighboring counties Jackson and Josephine is for more law enforcement officers. We have such a problem with shortages that currently, officers are unable to respond to higher rates of theft.
Legalized marijuana has led to poor decisions by many, and I would love to see Sen. Widen lobbying with his fellow senators for ways to increase drug treatment instead of drug usage. Many students do not know the long-term effects of marijuana use, and many jobless residents in our county are unable to pass drug tests, which is affecting our local businesses in a negative way.
I know that Sen. Wyden cares about our entire state, and these problems are not limited to Southern Oregon, but sometimes our rural community can feel overlooked. If he can make time to meet with our local sheriff, even via telephone, we would love to hear ideas on how to meet the needs of our beautiful county.
How do we address the increases in domestic violence and fatherless children whose mothers are struggling?
Those are the areas that our federal government’s investment will impact America for generations. We need to break addictive patterns and behaviors, and expanding drug usage seems like two steps in the wrong direction.
Tammy Belau
Klamath Falls
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has proposed a bill to significantly raise the taxes on U.S. oil companies, which the companies will pass on to the drivers of Oregon.
Will we see $10 per gallon if he passes this legislation?
William Sowles
Klamath Falls
The Klamath County Fair is one thing we look forward to every year. This year we attended the Martina McBride concert.
We saw a couple of issues that could be improved upon for next year:
• There are a lot of handicapped and elderly that have difficulty climbing stairs. The very bottom row should be reserved for those individuals only.
• We witnessed several people leave their grandstand seats and crowd around the railing overlooking the party zone. These people blocked the view of everyone behind them. Security needs to do a better job of chasing these people from that area.
Archie Colvin
Klamath Falls
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A receipt was sent to your email. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/letters-to-the-editor-for-aug-13-2022/article_1d96c10c-9e17-5f6a-ad5b-5a283c798ec5.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:15Z |
Having spent nearly my entire adult life in politics, I never cease to be amazed by the nerve of some elected officials. With the advent of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, you would think that folks would be less inclined to act outlandishly. Sadly, this is not the case.
Consider an effort by lawmakers in California, working in conjunction with some firefighters in the state, trying to take over ambulance services — and get the American people to pay them over a billion dollars to do it. Understand, California currently has perfectly good ambulances, and there is no actual need for the firefighters to take on this responsibility.
Today, about 70% of ambulances working in California are operated by private companies that employ paramedics to perform critically and often lifesaving emergency services. Private ambulance businesses must win a competitive bidding process to win the right to serve these cities and towns.
The ambulance companies competing to provide emergency services must inform the cities and counties how much they want to be paid per ambulance trip. The city or county, ostensibly, will choose the company that offers the lowest cost per trip while also likely considering if the company has a credible reputation. This arrangement benefits the local taxpayers by ensuring they get ambulance services that are both affordable and responsive.
To offer the cities and counties the lowest cost per ride, the private ambulance companies rely on reimbursement from the state’s Medicaid department of $339 per ride. (If you’ve ever wondered why a fire truck comes when you call an ambulance, it’s because the fire department also wants to get $339 in government funds for responding to an emergency.) This $339 helps the ambulance companies offset their costs, so they can offer the municipalities they serve a lower fee per ride.
But because the ambulance trade is a multi-billion-dollar industry, some firefighters in California wanted to get a piece of the action. Working with their political allies in the state capitol, these firefighters launched an audacious (some might say outrageous) plan.
Indeed, California lawmakers will soon ask the federal government for an additional $723 per ambulance service that is only available to fire departments.
Yes, under a California law passed a few years ago, private ambulance companies will not be allowed access to these federal funds — only the fire departments. This means that when cities and counties put their ambulance services out to a competitive bidding process, the fire departments will be able to underbid the private ambulance companies. After all, they will be getting nearly $1,000 more per ride, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
This highly orchestrated scheme by California lawmakers could place an additional $1.3 billion burden on the American taxpayer. With this in mind, I have urged the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees Medicaid, to reject this official request by California. Indeed, California is set — any day now — to make this appeal to CMS for those additional taxpayer dollars.
To be clear, I have no issue with fire departments taking over ambulance services for cities and counties. However, I have a problem with forcing the American taxpayer to subsidize firefighters in California to provide ambulance services. After all, there is no evidence that the fire departments would do a better job than the ambulance companies.
Ultimately, I believe the Biden administration and CMS will reject this misguided request by lawmakers in the Golden State. This nation cannot afford to pay firefighters in California over a billion dollars to do the same job that the private sector currently does well, for a lot less.
Ronnie Shows, a Democrat, represented Mississippi’s 4th Congressional District from 1997 to 2001. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/opinion-support-firefighters-but-what-california-is-doing-is-crazy/article_77efca79-acdf-53e7-a168-b858a775c31e.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:21Z |
Policymakers and community leaders visited the Oregon Institute of Technology on Thursday as part of the Oregon Business & Industry (OBI) 2022 Manufacturing Roadshow.
The visit was in partnership with the Oregon Business Council and highlighted Oregon Tech’s impact on workforce development and the manufacturing sector. OBI is Oregon's leading statewide business association, representing more than 1,600 businesses and industries in the state.
On the 11-day tour, OBI travels across the state, visiting with leaders in Oregon’s growing manufacturing sector and learning about the ways each business benefits Oregon and its economy.
“OBI’s Manufacturing Roadshow highlights the economic importance and diversity of Oregon’s manufacturing sector,” said OBI President & CEO Angela Wilhelms. “The Roadshow includes makers of wine and cheese, plastic pipe and rolled steel, sophisticated dental equipment and, of course, semiconductors. These companies differ in obvious ways, but all of them require well-trained employees who can help them innovate and grow. The Roadshow is visiting Oregon Tech to recognize its critical role in preparing Oregon’s students for technical and lucrative jobs in manufacturing and similar industries.”
Oregon Tech’s manufacturing education and industry partnerships were highlighted with a tour of Oregon Tech’s renovated Cornett Hall and new Center for Excellence in Engineering and Technology (CEET), which features classrooms and laboratories for students to learn, collaborate and experiment while immersed in a forward-thinking, entrepreneurial culture.
Oregon Tech President Dr. Nagi Naganathan said, “As Oregon's polytechnic university, we are committed to being industry's university where our graduates are ready for innovative professional careers on day one. Our partnership with OBI is vital in creating immersive professional opportunities for our students and faculty toward this mutually beneficial goal.”
After the Oregon Tech tour, OBI wrapped up its visit to Klamath Falls at Wilsonart, a global manufacturer and distributor of high-pressure laminates and other engineered composite materials.
The OBI Manufacturing Roadshow continues through next Wednesday, when it will end after a final stop in Portland | https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/oregon-tech-visitors-see-schools-impact-on-workforce-development/article_ee681de2-2bf9-58d5-ad53-22203bb7642c.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:28Z |
Lakeview players mob catcher Emily Philibert, the lone senior on the Honkers' roster, following a plate at the plate in the sixth inning of the Class 2A/1A state championship game June 3, 2022 in Eugene. Lakeview defeated top-seeded Grant Union/Prairie City 5-3 in the title game.
Tyler McNeley of Lakeview was named the co-pitcher of the year and teammate Emily Philibert was the co-player of the year in Class 2A/1A as the state's softball coaches announced their awards last month.
Sam Tacchini, who led the Honkers to the state title, was named the coach of the year.
McNeley and Philibert, a catcher, were joined on the all-state first-team by infielders Bridget Shullanberger and Annikah Tacchini. Lakeview outfielder Jaila Jackson was a second-team selection, along with Lost River infielder Grace McCollam. Lost River catcher Avery Turner was named to the third team.
Five Henley players received all-state recognition in Class 4A. Hornets infielder Elizabeth Powell and outfielder Malia Mick were first-team picks, with pitcher Annie Campos, infielder Anna Harper and outfielder Maddie Moore receiving honorable mention.
Fall practices begin Monday
The start of fall practice for high schools in Oregon is Monday, Aug. 15, in preparation for football, volleyball, soccer and cross country seasons.
The seasons for the various sports will, in some cases, begin before school starts.
Football teams can take part in jamborees as early as Aug. 25, with the first date allowable for games Sept. 1.
In volleyball and soccer, the first date for jamborees or matches is Aug. 25. That’s also the first day teams can take part in cross country meets. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/prep-notebook-lakeviews-tyler-mcneley-emily-philibert-coach-sam-tacchini-get-top-honors-on-class/article_692ddce3-4b13-5552-bd6f-3abf6cf47b65.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:34Z |
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says Congress has now made it possible for the federal government, states and others to get serious about reducing the greenhouse-gas pollutants that contribute to a radically changing climate.
Granholm spoke Tuesday at the start of a one-day tour of energy innovations in Oregon. Her audience in Portland included Gov. Kate Brown, U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, and the chief executives of Portland General Electric and Daimler Trucks North America.
“I cannot imagine a better time to be in any of our positions than right now. This is the tipping point,” Granholm said after a quick tour of Electric Island, the supercharging station that PGE built on Portland’s Swan Island across from the headquarters of Daimler Trucks.
“What a time to be serving, because now we have the tools to actually meet our aspirations: 100% clean electricity and net-zero emissions by 2050.”
Granholm referred to three bills Congress approved in the past few months and President Joe Biden has signed or is preparing to sign:
• The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (HR 3684), which Biden signed Nov. 15 to provide $1.2 trillion for fixing highways and bridges. It included $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations across the nation. Oregon will get $52 million earmarked for existing corridors, including the West Coast Electric Highway that connects three Pacific Coast states and the Canadian province of British Columbia. (The Oregon Transportation Commission has committed $100 million.)
• The CHIPS and Science Act (HR 4346), which Biden signed as Granholm spoke. It provides $52 billion for incentives for domestic manufacturing of semiconductors — many of which are made in China and other Asian nations — and $200 billion for research into advanced technologies. Intel, Oregon’s largest private employer, has four plants in Hillsboro and Aloha.
• The Inflation Reduction Act (HR 5376), which the Senate passed Aug. 7 and the House is expected to repass soon and send to Biden. About half the money ($370 billion) is in the form of tax incentives for carbon-reduced energy — such as purchase of electric vehicles and installation of solar panels — and other measures to cushion the effects of climate change, such as prolonged droughts and severe wildfires.
“These three bills — this one-two-three punch — allows us to demonstrate to the world that America is determined to be a warrior in the fight against climate change,” Granholm said. “I’m so happy to be suited up for battle. It is a great day to be a warrior against climate change.”
‘Moving like lightning’
A Democrat who was governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011, Granholm complained about the slow pace of federal decision-making under Republican and Democratic presidential administrations in her 2011 book, “A Governor’s Story.” She cited one example from the Energy Department, which she now leads.
But in the case of the $7.5 billion in federal funds for electric-vehicle charging stations, Granholm said her department provided guidance to states as soon as Biden signed the infrastructure legislation — and all the states have submitted plans.
“We are moving like lightning. The money will flow starting this fall,” she said. “We are moving fast. There are a lot of big problems, big budgets and big legislation. But we understand the urgency of the moment. We are on a mission.”
Granholm praised Portland General Electric — whose chief executive, Maria Pope, sits on the secretary’s advisory board — and Daimler Trucks North America for Electric Island, the supercharging station PGE set up in 2021 for quick recharging of battery-powered buses and heavy-duty trucks made by Daimler Trucks. John O’Leary, its chief executive, was in the audience.
“It is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize, and you are taking this on as a mission. This bill obviously is going to help you,” she said. “We do want to make sure we are electrifying all aspects of transportation.”
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for the largest share of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions at 27%.
Among Granholm’s other Oregon stops were ESS Inc., in Wilsonville, which has an agreement with PGE to manufacture long-term energy storage, and Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Brown, who introduced Granholm, said she had no complaints about the federal response to states under the current administration.
“It has to be an all-hands-on-deck effort. Congress and the Biden-Harris administration are extraordinary,” she told reporters afterward.
“But this country was not electrified overnight,” she added. Just as it took President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to bring electric power to underserved rural communities, “the same is true with electrification of our transportation system. We need a federal partner — and the good news is that we have a strong federal partner in the Biden-Harris administration and with these two amazing senators.”
Long-term tax breaks
As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which writes tax legislation, Wyden got the committee not only to reshape energy tax incentives to focus on carbon reduction — not oil, gas and coal — but to extend many of those incentives for 10 years or longer. The oil depletion allowance, for example, has been in the federal tax code for more than a century, but solar and wind incentives often were renewed only before they were set to expire.
“One of the biggest problems in weaning away from a business-as-usual energy policy is that oil had permanent tax breaks, but renewables had temporary tax breaks,” Wyden said.
“All of these are permanent. They are technology-neutral. That is how we got this bill going.
“In the past, particularly in the Finance Committee, it was all about picking winners and losers.
“Some of those tax breaks had a shelf life just a little longer than a carton of eggs — they had no predictability. This is a beginning that people with permanent incentives can build on for years ahead.”
For example, the tax credit for installation of solar panels will be 30% — subtracted directly from taxes owed — for the next decade, then taper off to 26% in 2032 and 22% in 2033. Without the pending bill, the credit was set at 26% this year and 22% next year before it ended in 2024. (The federal credit was created in 2006.)
For purchase of electric vehicles, the tax credit is $7,500 for a new model — though domestic-content restrictions on batteries will be phased in, so some cars will not qualify — and $4,000 for a used vehicle. (Oregon has a separate rebate program of $2,500 per vehicle, administered by the Department of Environmental Quality. Low- and moderate-income households can qualify for up to $5,000 more under a law that Brown signed in 2021. It is not a tax credit.)
Oregon has met a 2020 goal of 50,000 electric vehicles on the road.
The federal incentives appeared off the negotiating table when Sen. Joe Manchin, whose West Virginia is a major coal producer, walked away. But Wyden said Congress had to salvage something, and Manchin came to an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that enabled all 50 Democrats to vote for the overall legislation, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker. No Republicans voted for the bill.
More work ahead
Wyden and Merkley said they were convinced a different approach was needed after the 2010 failure in the Senate of a House-passed climate-change bill, which would have capped greenhouse-gas emissions.
“We are going to try something other than sticks and hammering on people,” Wyden said.
Merkley said the incentives would lead to more domestic manufacturing: “We are incentivizing ‘made in America’ and good-paying jobs.”
Wyden and Merkley acknowledged that more needs to be done, given the increased severity of heat domes — Oregon has had two such sieges this year, on top of the June 2021 event that resulted in about 100 deaths — plus prolonged drought and catastrophic wildfires. Merkley said virtually no one at town hall meetings these days raises doubts that something is changing for the worse.
Merkley had offered his own version of climate-change legislation. He said the pending bill would boost the projected reduction in greenhouse gases from 27% to 40%, but that’s still short of the 50% Biden has proposed to reduce those pollutants from 2005 levels by 2030.
He said the next step, once Biden signs the Inflation Reduction Act, is for federal agencies to find ways to achieve the rest of that target.
“Congress has done its job. The president is going to be signing the bill,” Merkley said. “Then the president’s team is trying to go beyond it because of the size and urgency (of climate change) and the need for bold action.” | https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/u-s-energy-chief-climate-action-at-the-tipping-point/article_0d6a6647-45ab-530d-81fb-8c4b8d0982a1.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:40Z |
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Margery Vera Goff Margery Vera Goff passed away with loved ones by her side on July 21, 2022, at the age of 91. She was born on September 21, 1930, in Bassano, Alberta, Canada, to Franklin Elias Bramwell and Betsy Vera Madsen. Their family moved to Klamath Falls when she was 14 months old. She grew up on a farm in Bonanza where she met her husband Bert H. Goff. For 71 years, they raised a family, worked and played side by side in all their adventures. She was a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, where she loved playing the piano. She spent many an hour taking care of her flowers and garden. Her home was always filled with laughter and good food for family, friends and neighbors especially after a long day of branding. In her later years she was lovingly called GG. She is survived by her children, Linda Margery and son-in-law Steve Vroman, Beverly Susan and son-in-law Tom Mallams; 6 grandchildren, 15 great-grand children and 3 great great grand children. The viewing will be Friday, August 19, from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m., at Davenport's Chapel, followed by an 11 a.m. graveside service, Klamath Memorial Park, both at 2680 Memorial Drive. Also, on the same day at 2 p.m., a memorial service will be held at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Yonna Valley Branch Chapel at 26627 Highway 140 East.
The Herald and News also publishes its obituaries and death notices with Legacy.com, a leading online obituary database that partners with more than 1,500 newspapers. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/obituaries/goff-margery-vera/article_9dcd007a-157a-503e-8f81-3a0b230e1599.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:52Z |
Cynthia Ann Harris It is with great sadness that the family of Cynthia Ann Harris (Renée Riley) announces her passing on March 18, 2022, at her home in Moscow, Idaho. Cynthia was born in Redding, California on September 17, 1947. As a toddler, she moved with her parents (Thelma Fossum Riley and Oliver Riley) to Klamath Falls, Oregon , her mother's hometown, where the Fossum family had deep roots. John Fossum, Cynthia's grandfather, had been the superintendent at Big Lakes Lumber on Lake Ewauna. She attended Riverside School and graduated from Klamath Union High School in 1965. Cynthia graduated from University of Oregon in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree. She then pursued her strong interest in education, first by earning a Master of Science in Teaching from Eastern Oregon College (now University) in 1972, and not long after that, she began teaching on the Navajo Reservation in the Four Corners area of New Mexico. Her experience there cemented her commitment to teaching and especially to strengthening the introductory experience of young students (kindergarten and first grade). She returned to Eastern Oregon in 1974 to accept a teaching position at Fossil Grade School in Fossil, OR (Wheeler County). While there she met and married Tiffin Harris, and they resettled in Corvallis, OR, with Cynthia continuing her career at Periwinkle Elementary School in nearby Albany. In 1981, she and her husband moved to Texico, New Mexico, where Tiffin worked as a science editor for CIMMYT, an international agricultural research center. At CIMMTY's request, Cynthia established a school for the education of other expatriate employees. She also used her background to provide various consulting services to Scholastic Publishing Corporation of New York. In 1996, she returned to the U.S., settling in Idaho. Cynthia is preceded in death by her parents, Thelma and Oliver Riley. She is survived and missed by her former husband and friend to the end, Tiffin Harris; stepson, Clint Harris; eight cousins and second cousin;s and a multitude of friends from around the world. Cynthia gave everything to her friends and former students. With her passing, a bright light has dimmed, but the light she generated in countless others lives on.
The Herald and News also publishes its obituaries and death notices with Legacy.com, a leading online obituary database that partners with more than 1,500 newspapers. | https://www.heraldandnews.com/obituaries/harris-cynthia-ann/article_37d23dae-7080-5091-96af-bef48e89b0a4.html | 2022-08-13T00:05:58Z |
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...FLOOD WATCH IN EFFECT FROM SATURDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY
EVENING...
* WHAT...Flash flooding caused by excessive rainfall is possible.
* WHERE...A portion of southeast Wyoming, including the following
areas, Central Laramie County, Central Laramie Range and Southwest
Platte County, East Platte County, Laramie Valley, South Laramie
Range and South Laramie Range Foothills.
* WHEN...From Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening.
* IMPACTS...Flooding may occur in poor drainage and urban areas.
Low-water crossings may be flooded.
* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...
- http://www.weather.gov/safety/flood
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
You should monitor later forecasts and be prepared to take action
should Flash Flood Warnings be issued.
&&
1 of 2
Campaign signs for the 2022 primary election. Courtesy of the Wyoming Department of Transportation
CHEYENNE – The Wyoming Department of Transportation issued a reminder Friday that advertising signs cannot be placed in the state right-of-way.
"With the upcoming elections, we’ve seen an increase in the number of signs our maintenance crews are having to remove from the right-of-way fence or from the right-of-way itself,” said WYDOT area maintenance supervisor Clint Huckfeldt of Thermopolis.
“Wyoming law and WYDOT policy prohibit placement of signs in those areas, so when our maintenance crews come through an area, they pick them up and take them to the area maintenance office," the agency official went on to say, in a news release. "Whoever owns the sign has two weeks to claim the sign, and then we dispose of the sign if it is not claimed.”
Wyoming statute 24-10-104 states that outdoor ads must meet certain conditions for placement. Fines and even jail time can be meted out to those who don’t comply with the law.
"This applies to political candidates, real estate representatives and residents advertising garage sales. Posting these signs along roadways is illegal within the right-of-way of rural highways and interstates," Huckfeldt said.
This procedure also applies to people who erect private memorials within the state right of way, or decorate an existing roadside memorial sign. The state of Wyoming has made similar reminders in the past year, for people to not put up campaign or commercial signage in this manner.
Business people and citizens who believe their signs may have been removed by WYDOT crews may contact the nearest maintenance office of the agency to make arrangements to pick up the signs. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/campaign-and-ad-signs-not-allowed-in-state-right-of-way/article_9258a8ef-b5f0-526e-acf4-99066e11ab0f.html | 2022-08-13T00:10:14Z |
CHEYENNE – Laramie County sheriff candidates received the most donations in local primary races this reporting period, show campaign finance documents due this past week.
Republican candidate Don Hollingshead reported close to $27,000 in contributions between Jan. 1 and Aug. 2, with $21,450 directly from individuals. He has raised the most out of any local primary candidate, and spent nearly $23,000 on advertising.
He told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle Friday his fundraising success stemmed from living in the county his entire life and being involved in the community, which has led to a vast number of residents who knew his character and wanted to donate. Hollingshead said he was humbled by the support.
One of those contributors included outgoing Sheriff Danny Glick, who endorsed the candidate in July, and donated $200.
“He knows how important this race is to the lives and the families of Laramie County,” said Hollingshead. “And he understands that I’m the best candidate.”
Given the broad range of people here who gave money, he said he believes it will translate into votes.
Other Republicans
There are two other Republican candidates who trailed Hollingshead in contributions.
Brian Kozak, the former police chief of Cheyenne Police Department, raised nearly $22,000 overall in the reporting period. His individual contributions were $15,430.
Nearly a third of those were raised for a Operation: Victory Warrior, which provides services to veterans in an effort to prevent suicide, and didn’t go directly to his campaign. He raised additional funds that went toward an AR-15 giveaway, posters and flags, cited in the reports for charity.
“Last year, we had three officers commit suicide in Wyoming, and when I checked into those agencies where those officers worked, tehre were no peer support teams there,” he told the WTE. “So, we wanted to raise some money so agencies can find peer support teams and get them going.”
He received the second largest number of donations in the primary race, and he also said he hopes it equates to votes on Tuesday. He said he has used the money largely to educate the public on his goals, and matched Holingshead in expenditures of nearly $24,000.
Boyd Wrede had the lowest fundraising haul. He didn’t host as many fundraisers as his contenders and the money he received was “organic.”
He got $4,365 in individual contributions, including $1,000 from former Republican U.S. House candidate Darin Smith. Smith confirmed the contribution, saying it was a sign of his endorsement and their shared values.
Wrede said he doesn't believe the most important factor in a campaign is the amount of donations, but rather being genuine with voters.
He has spent close to $18,000 this year.
Indie candidate
Despite not being on the ballot until the general election on Nov. 8, the Independent sheriff's candidate reported almost $13,000 in total contributions for the filing period. Tuesday is the primary.
Jeff Barnes scored $9,285 from individual contributions.
He said he has seen a lot of interest in his campaign, and in who he will face following the primary election. Barnes told the WTE he does believe the number of donations can reflect success for a candidate at the ballot box.
“We will have a lot of momentum after the primary,” he said. “We expect to see a lot more contributions, along with endorsements.”
He has spent around $9,500 in 2022.
Democratic candidate Jess Fresquz is another option for voters. He has spent $416.75. He received no contributions since Nov. 1.
County commissioners
The second local primary race in campaign contributions was among the seven Republican county commissioner candidates.
Incumbent Gunnar Malm has raised $11,305 in total contributions, and spent less than $4,000. He has received the largest number of political action committee donations, with $2,500 from Wyoming Hope and $2,000 from the Wyoming Realtors PAC.
“I got my start in public policy with the realtors association, and I’m actually in the hall of fame for that political action committee because of donations and time I’ve given to that cause,” said Malm. “I’m always appreciative of them supporting me back with the Wyoming Realtors PAC, because of my efforts to protect private property rights and promote home ownership.”
His total contributions also include individual donations of $4,425, one of which was from longtime local philanthropist Maury Brown.
Malm believes it shows that the public is confident in the job he has done over the last four years, and is willing to help him get re-elected. He told the WTE it isn’t guaranteed how it will translate in the polls, but it provides a better chance of prevailing in the primary.
Fellow county commissioner and Republican candidate Troy Thompson was ahead of Malm in individual contributions by $125. His total contributions for the filing period were $5,550, and get got $1,000 from the Cheyenne Board of Realtors.
Thompson said he was honored to receive donations from the community, and appreciates the faith they had in the job he’s done. He said it is not the end-all when it comes to predicting local election results.
“When you look at statewide candidates and the amounts, and the discrepancies from one candidate to another, I certainly think that will translate into votes,” he said. “At the county commissioner race, I don’t know if there is that big of a correlation, especially when you look at the fact that the number of people that contributed for the size of the county is pretty small.”
Donation power
First-time office seeker Abbie Mildenberger came in third for individual contributions at $2,475, among all of those tracked by the WTE for this report.
She said having that kind of support meant the world to her.
She decided to run for office after construction on a decades-old subdivision started in her community. It was approved in the 1970s, and the families who live in Happy Valley currently had no idea hundreds of homes could be built. Mildenberger came forward with her neighbors to ask y commissioners to step in after concerns arose.
Mildenberger received the financial support of residents such as Terry Booth, Georgia George and Kyle Wendtland. They also testified in front of the the county commissioners seeking solutions for a separate subdivision approved.
“They were upset just like I was,” she said. “And they put their money where their mouth was.”
Wendtland told the WTE he gave $100 to her campaign because Mildenberger understands the long-term sustainability issues that the county is going to be facing, and showing support through donations is the benefit of a democratic society. He said she shares the same experience with commissioners being unreceptive.
“I don’t think any of my neighbors and myself are really opposed to the development, we all recognize that it’s going to occur,” he said. “But the way it has been approved recently is not sustainable, and especially as it relates to groundwater.”
Mildenberger was followed by candidate Bryce Freeman in contributions from individuals. He disclosed $1,650 in donations.
Incumbent Linda Heath reported $1,500 in individual contributions. Brian Casey reported no contributions or expenditures of any kind, and Sam Eliopoulos didn’t have a report available on the Laramie County clerk site. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/laramie-county-sheriffs-race-leads-in-campaign-contributions/article_f8df1d25-304b-5c7e-82a7-0411ca849d45.html | 2022-08-13T00:10:21Z |
...FLOOD WATCH IN EFFECT FROM SATURDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY
EVENING...
* WHAT...Flash flooding caused by excessive rainfall is possible.
* WHERE...A portion of southeast Wyoming, including the following
areas, Central Laramie County, Central Laramie Range and Southwest
Platte County, East Platte County, Laramie Valley, South Laramie
Range and South Laramie Range Foothills.
* WHEN...From Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening.
* IMPACTS...Flooding may occur in poor drainage and urban areas.
Low-water crossings may be flooded.
* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...
- http://www.weather.gov/safety/flood
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
You should monitor later forecasts and be prepared to take action
should Flash Flood Warnings be issued.
&&
Online information, accessed Thursday, on the Wyoming Veterans Commission.
CHEYENNE – The Wyoming Veterans Commission will hold its quarterly meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 23, at 1 p.m. The meeting is at the National Museum of Military Vehicles, located at 6419 U.S. Highway 26 in Dubois.
Veterans from around the state, especially northwest Wyoming, are invited to attend. This is according to a Wednesday news release.
Items on the agenda include 2022 legislative updates, 2022 possible property tax reductions, handicap parking for disabled veterans, vet verification processing for driver licenses, and veteran food insecurities.
The meeting is expected to adjourn by 3 p.m.
For more information, contact the Veterans Commission at 307-777-8152. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/wyoming-veterans-commission-will-host-quarterly-meeting-on-aug-23/article_9a249db8-c137-5aa7-85c7-f2261e1c34b2.html | 2022-08-13T00:10:27Z |
...FLOOD WATCH IN EFFECT FROM SATURDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY
EVENING...
* WHAT...Flash flooding caused by excessive rainfall is possible.
* WHERE...A portion of southeast Wyoming, including the following
areas, Central Laramie County, Central Laramie Range and Southwest
Platte County, East Platte County, Laramie Valley, South Laramie
Range and South Laramie Range Foothills.
* WHEN...From Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening.
* IMPACTS...Flooding may occur in poor drainage and urban areas.
Low-water crossings may be flooded.
* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...
- http://www.weather.gov/safety/flood
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Where's the evidence Biden is doing better than Trump did?
Let’s see, Orange-Man-Bad Trump is out, Build-Back-Better-Biden is in.
Consider Trump’s administration: Russia/China/North Korea were under control, Arab-Israeli peace treaties signed, war-ending Afghanistan negotiations, energy independence and low gas/food prices, 1.9% inflation, high employment/low unemployment for ALL ethnicities, secure Southern border, supported law enforcement, strong military, defeated ISIS, strong economy.
Meanwhile, Democrat mayors/governors defy Trump and law enforcement by supporting insurrectionists riots, with Portland and Seattle burning, and CHOP/CHAZ zone seceding from the U.S., and Democrats in Congress refusing to recognize “peaceful transition of power” by conducting fake Russia-collusion hoax impeachment hearings.
Now, consider Biden’s administration: Blames everyone else for all problems/takes no responsibility for anything, Russian-Ukraine war, possible nuclear war, China threatens/encircles Taiwan and threatens US, 9.1% inflation, supply/food chain disruptions, high gas/food prices, possible economic collapse, out-of-control Southern border, crime surges, SCOTUS attacked/ threatened, election integrity still questionable, Taliban armed with $85 billion in weapons and Americans left behind (and Biden denies it), America/military are weakened and become a worldwide laughingstock, etc.
Here’s my prognostication:
Later this year or early next year, China tries to take Taiwan by force – it’s beginning right now. About that time, North Korea attacks South Korea. The U.S. gets sucked into what devolves into a world war. This war is a distraction/conduit for the elites as they further their plans for the One World Government.
Somewhere along the line, the U.S. economy crashes, and the human chip gets introduced as the “solution.” All the while, domestic chaos runs rampant here. People will be crying for law and order, food and stability. The One World Government will be “sold” as the solution. Hungry and distressed survivors will buy into it. Those that don’t will be persecuted and exterminated.
A lot could happen to us during this time frame. This war would be a good excuse to suspend national elections, thus the Democrats retain power. During this time, boundaries between nations may disintegrate and world chaos ensues, thus, who knows what will happen? World Peace!?
So, how’s the Biden Build-Back-Better plan working out for you Biden-loving Trump haters? | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wheres-the-evidence-biden-is-doing-better-than-trump-did/article_835067c6-2d88-5537-9a3a-b3d3378bda07.html | 2022-08-13T00:10:33Z |
This large bronze sculpture titled “Breakin’ Through” is on the northwest corner of the entrance to War Memorial Stadium on the University of Wyoming campus. UW trustees are discussing ways to “break through” to attract and retain students and faculty. Greg Johnson/Laramie Boomerang File
LARAMIE – The University of Wyoming board of trustees will consider creating endowments for faculty and students when it meets next month.
The idea is part of a UW initiative to focus on expanding its competitiveness by retaining high-quality faculty and students. The money would go to better supporting faculty and students with a goal of fostering a sense of security and encouragement within the university community.
“We’ve had successive budget cuts over the years,” UW President Ed Seidel said during a board of trustees retreat last month. “We’ve had administration changes. Both of those have combined to lower morale. ... We have to build back.”
Chairman John McKinley presented the idea that the university could create three new endowments: one for student scholarships, one for faculty work and support and another for research at all levels.
He proposed the board and the UW Foundation each contribute $5 million to every one of the endowments, resulting in three $10 million endowments that could then generate additional money from private donors.
The concept was at its beginning stages during McKinley’s presentation in July. Some suggestions of how the money could be used included increasing the number of endowed deanships, chairs and fellowships.
These types of positions can allow faculty members to access more financial resources for conducting research and other work. With money available to invest in starting research projects and programs, the faculty could bring in additional money from donors to the university in the long term, Seidel said.
UW Foundation President John Stark and the budget committee was tasked with working through the ideas to bring a more specific plan to the table in September.
Building prestige
The endowment money fits into a larger university plan to invest in programs that will make UW more competitive.
Programs listed as high priority for the school include the Science Initiative program, the School of Energy Resources, engineering, tourism and outdoor recreation, agriculture, entrepreneurship and computing.
“We still need buildings and facilities, but it’s about the people,” Seidel said.
This list encompasses aspects the university has been focusing on the last few years, Seidel said. Investment into the areas of arts and humanities also could be considered.
Trustee Michelle Sullivan raised concerns that the priorities outlined in the proposal don’t mesh with the university’s plan to better align the disciplines of arts and humanities and the so-called hard sciences with their respective areas of study.
“There are major colleges which aren’t reflected in these priorities at all,” Sullivan said. The College of Arts and Humanities “is a new college and we need to be setting that as an area of focus while we fundraise.”
Seidel said that the university would work to cover as many of its priorities as possible. He said it would “be opportunistic” in how it accepts money from willing donors who may want to offer assistance for programs lower on the priority list.
“Where we really have success is where a donor’s interest in providing private support overlaps with the university’s,” Stark said. “That’s the secret sauce.”
He said that if this alignment could extend to the Legislature as well, the university would be in an even better position.
Money from the endowments also could be used to expand scholarship options for students who may not be eligible for higher-level scholarships and to offer opportunities for more undergraduate and graduate research, Seidel said.
McKinley added that any money the university saves on its current scholarship funding mechanism could be applied to student programs that enhance the university experience and increase student success.
“For every dollar that we’re able to generate in student scholarship funds, it frees up a dollar in wagers and discounts that the university is already doing,” McKinley said. | https://www.wyomingnews.com/wyomingbusinessreport/industry_news/banking_and_finance/uw-board-mulls-30m-in-new-endowments/article_8f50fdd8-1a86-11ed-992d-277bb152d63f.html | 2022-08-13T00:10:39Z |
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