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US | Newark Will Test Children for Lead Poisoning Due to School Contamination | The city of Newark, N.J. will test about 17,000 children for lead poisoning after finding lead in the drinking water at 30 schools in the district. About 2,000 toddlers at early childhood centers in those schools will be the first to be tested, Hanaa Hamdi, director of the Department of Health, told the City Council on Tuesday, nj.com reported. The remaining older students will then be tested at sites set up outside of the schools, which sparked some debate among city officials. "It doesn't mean the other students are not our priority," Hamdi said. "If we can look at those toddlers first, we'll be able to gauge whether they're safe or not.", The lead findings in Newark come after high levels of lead were found in the public water supply in Flint, Mich. Officials in Newark have assured residents that the levels of lead in the school drinking water are not as high as those found in Flint. Newark officials do not know yet how many students were exposed to lead in the school buildings. |
US | Hurricane Irma Causes Devastation Across the Caribbean Heres What to Know | Hurricane Irma has caused widespread destruction to properties and people as it barrels through the Caribbean. At least 5 people have died as the Category 5 storm, recorded to be the most powerful hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean, crossed the U.S. Virgin Islands and moved toward Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic Haiti and Cuba on Wednesday. Officials earlier said that 10 people had been killed but have since reduced the number of people killed on St. Martin from eight to four. Here's what to know about the hurricane's impact in the Caribbean and its path towards Florida, Irma first hit the islands of Antigua Barbuda causing widespread destruction early on Wednesday. The nation's Prime Minister said that the islands were "barely inhabitable", that 95 of buildings had been destroyed and 60 of the population were now homeless. Roads and telecommunications have been wiped out. A two-year-old boy is confirmed to have died in the storm as his family tried to escape a building damaged by the storm. Residents on Barbuda are expected to be evacuated to the larger island of Antigua, where the damage was less severe. The storm next passed over Anguilla, where one person has died and Ronald Jackson, executive director of the Caribbean disaster and emergency management agency, said that "police stations, hospitals, school facilities, three or four emergency shelters, a home for the infirm and the aged, as well as the fire station.", Hurricane Irma did not directly pass over Puerto Rico, travelling north instead. However, about half of the island is thought to be without power as it was hit by winds and floods. Hospitals are working on back-up generators and roads have been destroyed. The Governor of Puerto Rico has said that at least three deaths on the island are being attributed to the storm one woman was electrocuted, another suffered a fall, and a man died after his car crashed. Dutch marines have said they are unable to land at the famous Princess Juliana International Airport, making it harder to delivery aid and supplies. The U.S. Coast Guard has started to conduct assessments of the storm by flying over Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. "Our first priority is ensuring safety of lives and helping anyone in distress," said Capt Eric King, who is leading the response team. On Thursday morning, it was north-east of the Dominican Republic and heading towards Turks and Caicos. Officials have cut the electricity on South Caicos for safety. Hurricane watches have been issued for south Florida. The death toll across the Caribbean has risen to at least 10, according to France's interior minister. That figure is expected to rise as rescue teams search the island at daybreak. Hurricane Irma is predicted to hit Florida and move north toward South Carolina this weekend, potentially bringing heavy rains, strong winds and flash flooding to the states. Both Florida, Georgia and South Carolina are under a state of emergency. Reuters reported that Hurricane Irma is considered likely to drop to a Category 4 storm once it makes landfall in Florida. The Caribbean islands have not seen a hurricane this large since Hurricane San Felipe in 1928, according to the National Weather Service. That storm killed a total of 2,748 people in Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe and Florida. |
US | Ilhan Omar Unity Will Take Generations | American hate is not new and it is not scarce. While Nov. 8, 2016, acted as a wake-up call for many Americans, to most people of color and indigenous people the election of President Trump served as an affirmation of our nation's divisions. We have never truly defeated hate. We merely allow it to take new forms Nazis, the KKK, white supremacists, white nationalists emboldened by reflective leadership are again comfortable gathering en masse, without hoods. Take a good look, America this is real, and it is not going away. It is painless to denounce the events in Charlottesville and to question how or why such events occur. We need to recognize that racism has never been subtle, though it has gone underreported. This is the same fight as the civil rights movement, the Civil War we are fighting over human rights. So the solution is not compromise. The solution is to educate. It is imperative we collectively overcome and make amends with history. We must confront that our nation was founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves, that we maintain global power with the tenor of neocolonialism. Our failure to reconcile these facts and our failure to take overt action to correct mistakes further deepen the divide. Our national avoidance tactic has been to shift the focus to potential international terrorism. With constant misinformation and fearmongering, it is easy to exacerbate external threats while avoiding our internal weaknesses. Our apathy has placed immense strain on society, making it difficult to move forward. And because we have perpetually avoided the truth, pretending that everything has been O.K. we have not focused on laws to protect us from domestic terrorism. We are at a bigger risk of destroying ourselves than falling at the hands of external extremists. The work of restoring this regression in our democracy is daunting, but we are fighting for the lost promises of liberty, justice and pursuit of happiness. The path ahead Step out of your comfort zone, engage with your enemies and make them your friends. When we interact with those we fear and hate, we will find commonality. Hope will be found by understanding that diversity is the essence of the American Dream and why we need each other to fulfill it. To bridge the divide, 1. We must realize that most of our differences are exaggerated nuances fueled by uncompromising ignorance. 2. We must see others' struggles as our own, and their success as our success, so we can speak to our common humanity. 3. We must build a more connected society, using our resources to uplift one another so we collectively benefit. No one has the privilege of inaction. No one has the privilege of saying this is not their battle. If we are not actively fighting against regressive ideologies, we are contributing to their growth. We must be courageous. We must spread a radical vision of love and unity. It is possible, but it will take a long time we are trying to undo centuries of institutional and personal hatred and exclusion. This is a generational project do not underestimate the power of human connection. |
US | Family Checks on Grandma After Hurricane Matthew By Ordering a Pizza to Her House | Family members unable to reach their grandmother in Florida after Hurricane Matthew made sure she was safe by ordering a pizza to her house. Eric Olsen, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, said he grew worried after being unable to reach Claire Olsen, his 87-year-old grandmother who lives alone in Palm Coast, Florida, for two days after the storm ripped through the area, according to ABC News. When he spoke to her on Friday, she told him she had lost power. "I was calling the police department, I was calling the sheriff's department, and no one was answering, so I was really worried," Olsen told ABC News. "So I just said, I'm going to order her a pizza, and if they can deliver it, then I know she's alive.", Olsen ordered the pizza from Papa John's and gave special instructions for the delivery person to call his phone upon getting to his grandmother's house and give the phone to Claire Olsen so he could speak to her. It workedto his relief, Olsen heard his grandmother alive and well on the other line. "Police and fire couldn't do it, but Papa John's got there in 30 minutes and put the cellphone to her ear," he said. "People are asking why I didn't call the police and ask them to do a wellness check, but I did. Trust me, Papa John's was a last resort.", Claire Olsen told ABC News affiliate WFTV the surprise pepperoni pizza was "fantastic.", Lance Tyler, the pizza deliveryman, told WFTV that Claire Olsen's expression "was just priceless" while speaking to her grandson. |
US | US Navy Restricts Use of Dolphin and WhaleHarming Sonar in the Pacific Ocean | Sonar that may kill wildlife and disrupt the feeding patterns of marine animals has been restricted thanks to a deal struck between environmental advocates and the U.S. Navy on Monday. A federal judge in Honolulu signed the agreement after environmentalists reported that the use of sonar disrupts the feeding patterns of dolphins and whales, possibly causing deafness or even death. "Recognizing our environmental responsibilities, the Navy has been, and will continue to be, good environmental stewards as we prepare for and conduct missions in support of our national security," said Lieut. Commander Matt Knight, a U.S. Pacific Fleet spokesman, reports the BBC. The deal brings to an end a legal battle between Earthjustice and other environmental groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service for allowing military training. The Navy will now be prohibited from using midfrequency sonar in the habitat for beaked whales between Santa Catalina and San Nicolas Island. The blue-whale feeding area near San Diego will also be sonar-free. Navy explosives training, which killed several dolphins in San Diego four years ago, will also face major restrictions, including between Maui and the Big Island. On the eastern side of the Big Island explosives will be banned. The fisheries service will investigate the deaths of any marine life in the area going forward. BBC |
US | US Spy Agencies Doubt North Korea Will Give Up Nuclear Weapons | WASHINGTON In an assessment casting doubt on President Donald Trump's goal of a nuclear-disarmed North Korea, U.S. intelligence agencies told Congress on Tuesday that the North is unlikely to entirely dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has expressed support for ridding the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons and has not recently test-fired a nuclear-capable missile or conducted a nuclear test. "Having said that, we currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain its WMD weapons of mass destruction capabilities and is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capability because its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival," Coats said in an opening statement. "Our assessment is bolstered by our observations of some activity that is inconsistent with full denuclearization," he added, without details. This skepticism about North Korea is consistent with the intelligence agencies' views over many years and runs counter to Trump's assertion after his 2018 Singapore summit with Kim that North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat. Plans for a follow-up summit are in the works but no agenda, venue or date have been announced. More broadly, the intelligence report on which Coats based his testimony predicted that security threats to the United States and its allies this year will expand and diversify, driven in part by China and Russia. It says Moscow and Beijing are more aligned than at any other point since the mid-1950s and their global influence is rising. Coats told the committee that Russia and perhaps other countries are likely to attempt to use social media and other means to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election. "Our adversaries and strategic competitors probably already are looking to the 2020 U.S. elections as an opportunity to advance their interests," the intelligence report said. "We expect our adversaries and strategic competitors to refine their capabilities and add new tactics as they learn from each other's experiences, suggesting the threat landscape could look very different in 2020 and future elections.", "Russia's social media efforts will continue to focus on aggravating social and racial tensions, undermining trust in authorities, and criticizing perceived anti-Russia politicians," it said. "Moscow may employ additional influence toolkits such as spreading disinformation, conducting hack-and-leak operations, or manipulating data in a more targeted fashion to influence US policy, actions, and elections." |
US | Vets Want Class Credit For Military Skills | When Benny Lloyd enrolled in nursing school at the University of South Florida, the Navy veteran brought with him the experience of having been a search-and-rescue swimmer, trained to provide life-saving medical care in some of the most challenging situations. "Looking at the kids next to me, I knew I was going to smoke these kids," said Lloyd, who was 35 at the time. "I had a competitive advantage.", But while he may have had a head start over 18-year-old classmates right out of high school, Lloyd got no academic credit for it. He had to slog along with them through introductory courses in anatomy and physiology, the fundamentals of nursing care, and how to conduct physical examinations, among other subjects. The only benefit of his time in the military that the university conferred was to recognize his basic training by tossing him two credits for phys-ed. Lloyd, now 39, completed his degree and is on his way to a earning a master's next year. Those are the kinds of credentials required to get civilian nursing jobs. But it took him longer than it needed to, in part because universities and colleges give veterans so little credit for their military training and experienceeven though the skills they've learned, in fields like nursing and law enforcement, are in high demand, and even as more are being discharged into a persistently soft employment market. Some 684,000 veterans are unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Getting so little class credit for so many skills learned on the battlefield has long frustrated America's military veterans. Now it threatens to delay or derail the education of a growing number of veterans Officials say they're bracing for an influx of servicemembers seeking education benefits as U.S. troops leave Afghanistan. More than a million veterans are receiving education benefits, the Veterans Administration reports, which is already up almost double from about 564,000 in 2009, before the military drawdown. But things are slowly starting to change. Lawmakers in Washington state have unanimously voted to make public universities and colleges give academic credit to veterans for military training, and the governor has signed the measure into law. A similar bill is under consideration in Michigan. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich has proposed requiring that veterans' experience be taken into account not only for academic credit at that state's public institutions, but for professional licenses. "If you can drive a truck from Kabul to Kandahar, Afghanistan, don't you think you should be able to drive a truck from Columbus to Cleveland?" Kasich asked in his state-of-the-state address. In addition to time, the problem is costing veterans money to pay for courses about subjects they already know, often subsidized by taxpayers through GI Bill benefits that have totaled nearly 35 billion since 2009. "It's frustrating," said Will Hubbard, a Marine Corps veteran and vice president of Student Veterans of America, or SVA, which is pushing universities to change this. "Some schools may say they're veteran friendly, and that could be true. Could they be more veteran friendly? Absolutely.", A new study by the SVA finds that veterans who enroll in college using money from the GI Bill take longer to finish than other studentsa median of five years for a four-year bachelor's degree. Bachelor's degree candidates generally take a median time of four years and four months, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Veterans often go to school while simultaneously raising families, holding jobs and serving as reservists, all of which can slow them down. But so can universities' reluctance to give them credit for what they already know, advocates say. "Even things like military courseseducational experiences that clearly translatedo not always transfer," Hubbard said. "I can understand, if not condone, that they don't give credit for experience. But when you have classroom experience, that's bewildering. That really is confusing to me.", In addition to changes at the state level, individual schools are moving on their own to give veterans more class credit for time served and skills learned. At the University of South Florida, the nursing school will start a pilot program in the fall for veterans that will waive as many as 16 credits for them, based on their military experience. That's equivalent to one semester. The university estimates that as many as 20,000 former medics and Navy corpsmen are jobless nationwide, even as there's a shortage of civilian nurses particularly in states like Florida, which has 1.5 million veterans and 61,000 personnel on active duty. By 2025, the nation will need 260,000 more registered nurses than it's scheduled to produce, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, which says the problem is worst in the South and West. "We want to capitalize on the knowledge they already have, rather than teaching them how to take vital signs or make beds," said Alicia Rossiter, who is both the college of nursing's veteran liaison and an active-duty combat nurse. "Our combat medics and corpsmen put in chest tubes, they're doing tracheotomies, they're doing frontline battle care. The wealth of information they bring is just a win-win.", The new USF program has already gotten 500 inquiries for just 24 available seats. That has prompted other colleges of nursing to watch the experiment, and a few are applying for grants to try the same thing. "There are a lot of jobs, and we have these phenomenally talented veterans," said Rita D'Aoust, the nursing school's associate director for academic affairs. "They are a phenomenal applicant pool because of their maturity, their experience, their commitment.", Bryan Robinson, a 26-year-old former Air Force MP enrolled at USF, doesn't understand why he can't use his military experience toward the criminology degree he's seeking. "Everything we're doing now, I did in the military," Robinson saod. "They should at least waive something. I already have hands-on experience. Why do you have to take these electives? It's slowing us down and costing us benefits.", Scheduled to graduate this summer with a bachelor's degree, Robinson won't have enough GI Bill money left to pay for the master's degree he also hopes to get. The benefits expire four years after they begin, meaning many veterans are at risk of dropping out or have to take on debt to pay for the rest of their educations. Universities have generally been reluctant to accept transfer credit from any student. Hubbard, of the SVA, agreed that part of the reason for this "comes back to the business model of these universities," which charge by the credit letting students forgo credit means the institutions must forgo revenue. It's also cultural, he saida problem academics and others may have "translating military experience to the civilian world.", But policy makers begin to pay attention to the issue, Hubbard said, "the universities will be next to feel this pressure. It wouldn't surprise me if more universities started getting heat about this." |
US | Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis Is Released From Jail | Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant a gay couple a marriage license due to her religious beliefs against homosexuality, was released from jail on Tuesday among a throng of cheering supporters. "Thank you all so much," she said, in tears. "I love you all so very much. I just want to give God his glory. His people have rallied and you are a strong people. We serve a living God who knows exactly where each and every one of us is at. Keep pressing. Don't let down.", Earlier on Tuesday, A U.S. District judge ordered that Davis be released from jail and that her contempt order be liftedas long as she did not stop her deputies from issuing licenses to same-sex couples. Davis's speech was preceded by a rally interrupted by frequent cries of "Amen" and chants for "Praise Jesus." She was introduced by Republican presidential candidate and former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee along with comments from her attorney, Mat Staver. Huckabee and Staver spoke to reporters before Davis's remarks, embracing her. , "We don't gather here because we hate anybody," Huckabee said immediately prior to Davis's arrival on stage. "We gather here today because we love God and this country. And we do not want to see this country become the smoldering remains of a great republic." Huckabee followed with an offer to go to jail himself to protect what he views as the right of elected officials to follow their religious convictions. Huckabee and Staver frequently invoked the fact that the Supreme Court was composed of unelected officials speakers that took the stage before Davis's much-anticipated speech repeatedly brought up the civil rights movement, with a pastor reciting lines from sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Rowan County clerk was sent to jail last week for refusing to grant marriage licensesand ordering her deputies to also not issue licensesto same-sex couples on religious grounds since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in June. Her lawyers asked for an injunction from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals directing Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear to remove her name from the marriage licenses the county issues. Tuesday was her sixth day in jail. |
US | Gun Sales Apparently Broke a Record on Black Friday | The FBI processed a record-breaking number of firearms background checks on Black Friday, the agency said Tuesday, indicating that gun sales soared on the busiest retail day of the year. The law enforcement agency conducted 185,345 background checks on Black Friday, the Associated Press reports, which is about 5 more than the same day last year. On the same day, three people were killed and nine others were wounded in a shooting rampage at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. The FBI said it processed roughly two background checks per second on Black Friday. The total surpasses the previous record, which was set Dec. 21, 2012, about a week after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, the AP reports. It's unclear how many of the Black Friday background checks were approved. , AP |
US | Winter Storm to Bring 2000 Miles of Snow to Eastern US | A winter weather system that was on pace to dump snow along a 2,000-mile corridor was set to snarl the morning commute for millions as it moved east on Tuesday morning, forecasters warned. A plethora of winter watches, warnings and advisories were in effect for 22 states from Washington to New Jersey. The storm caused transport chaos in the Midwest on Monday, hitting Chicago with five inches of snow and canceling and delaying hundreds of flights. The snow has been making its way from the Northwest since the weekend and promised a messy Tuesday morning for motorists in Philadelphia, Washington, Read more from our partners at NBC News |
US | Report FBI Created Fake News Article With Spyware to Track Suspect | The FBI created a fake Seattle Times article containing surveillance software in order to track a school bomb-threat suspect in 2007, according to documents obtained by an advocacy group. The controversy was publicized Monday evening on Twitter by Christopher Soghoian, a technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, who linked to the FBI documents pages 61-62 obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization. While the FBI's use of data gathering software in this investigation was reported in 2007 by WIRED, which acquired an FBI affidavit seeking a search warrant for the tool's use, the latest documents reveal for the first time the FBI's use of a false news article. According to the documents, the link to the article was "in the style of the Seattle Times" and used a false Associated Press byline. The article, titled "Bomb threat at high school downplayed by local police department," was mocked up with subscriber and advertising information. The link was then e-mailed to the to the MySpace account of the suspect, who police believe was responsible for a series of bomb threats at Timberline High School in Lacey, Wash. When clicked on, the link would deploy FBI software to track his location and computer IP address. "We are outraged that the FBI, with the apparent assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office, misappropriated the name of The Seattle Times to secretly install spyware on the computer of a crime suspect," said Seattle Times Editor Kathy Best in a statement Monday evening. AP's Director of Media Relations Paul Colford also criticized the FBI's actions, writing in a statement that, "We are extremely concerned and find it unacceptable that the FBI misappropriated the name of The Associated Press and published a false story attributed to AP. This ploy violated AP's name and undermined AP's credibility.", The FBI in Seattle maintains that its technique was justified in locating the suspect, who was arrested on June 14, 2007, two days after the dateline that appeared on the agents' e-mail correspondence discussing the plan. "Every effort we made in this investigation had the goal of preventing a tragic event like what happened at Marysville and Seattle Pacific University," Frank Montoya Jr. an FBI agent overseeing its Seattle operations, told the Seattle Times. "We identified a specific subject of an investigation and used a technique that we deemed would be effective in preventing a possible act of violence in a school setting.", A spokeswoman for FBI's Seattle unit also defended the strategy to the Seattle Times, arguing that the FBI did not use a "real Seattle Times article, but material generated by the FBI in styles common in reporting and online media." |
US | Suspect in 5 Louisiana Shootings Caught in Virginia | WARSAW, Va. A man suspected of killing his parents and three other people including a girl he was dating was arrested Sunday when he showed up at his grandmother's house in Virginia, a sheriff there said. On Saturday, Dakota Theriot, 21, shot and killed three people the woman believed to be his girlfriend, her brother and father in Louisiana's Livingston Parish before taking her father's truck, driving to neighboring Ascension Parish, and shooting his parents, authorities said. Theriot's grandmother, who lives in Warsaw, Virginia, had checked into a hotel Saturday night because she feared he might show up at her house, Richmond County Sheriff Stephan B. Smith said in a phone interview. The woman asked authorities to check her home Sunday morning to make sure it was safe before she returned. While deputies were there, Smith said, Theriot drove up. He had a gun on him but he dropped it and was taken into custody without incident, Smith said. Theriot will be brought back to Ascension Parish to be booked on two counts of first-degree murder, home invasion, and illegal use of weapons, according to a statement by Ascension Parish Sheriff Bobby Webre and Livingston Parish Sheriff Jason Ard. Smith said he believes the truck Theriot was driving when he arrived at his grandmother's house was the one taken in Louisiana. Authorities have identified the victims in Livingston Parish as Billy Ernest, 43 Tanner Ernest, 17 and Summer Ernest, 20. Ard said Summer Ernest and Dakota Theriot were in a relationship and that Theriot had been living with her family for a few weeks. Authorities earlier identified the other two victims as Theriot's parents Keith, 50, and Elizabeth Theriot, 50, of Gonzales. They were shot in their trailer on Saturday morning. "The father was gravely injured at the time we found him and has since passed away," Webre said late Saturday. But before he died, Webre said authorities were able to get a "dying declaration from him, and only enough information to let us know that it was his son that committed this act.", Crystal DeYoung, Billy Ernest's sister, told The Associated Press that she believes Theriot had just started dating her niece, Summer Ernest. "My family met him last weekend at a birthday party and didn't get good vibes from him," DeYoung said. She said she wasn't sure how her niece and Theriot met, but that she believed the relationship was relatively new. |
US | Patrick Stewart Wants to Become an American Citizen to Fight Donald Trump | British actor Patrick Stewart is joining the fray opposing President Donald Trump by applying to become an American citizen. On Thursday's episode of The View, the X-Men star defended a tweet he wrote last month where he joked that Trump might be the reason why he "had the worst sleep of my life.", , Stewart, who is promoting his new film Logan, then told Joy Behar that "the only good thing" to result from the election is that he was going to apply as an American citizen. "I am now applying for citizenship. Because I want to be an American too," Stewart told The View. "All of my friends in Washington said, There is one thing you can do. Fight, fight, oppose, oppose.'", |
US | Anderson Cooper Gives Emotional Tribute to Victims of the Orlando Shooting | Anderson Cooper received considerable praise on Twitter Monday in response to his emotional tribute to the victims of the Orlando shooting. Cooper stood near the scene of the tragedy by Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and 53 injured early Sunday morning. At the time of airing the CNN segment, 48 of the 49 victims had been identified. As their images appeared on the screen, Cooper read aloud the names of those killed along with a short description of who they were or where they worked. He became noticeably upset in places, taking his time to regain his voice to continue honoring the victims of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Cooper ended the tribute by saying, "we think it's important you hear their names.", Viewers tweeted their appreciation for the CNN news anchor and his heartfelt memorial to the victims. , , As of Tuesday morning, all 49 victims had been identified. |
US | Like Pieces of a Puzzle The Story Behind That Dramatic Alaska Earthquake Aerial Photo | I was in my car with my nine-year-old son, headed to drop him off at school before I went to work on Nov. 30. We had made it only a couple hundred feet when the car began bouncing. As I pulled over, thinking I had mechanical trouble, I noticed snow cascading from the trees. The houses in my neighborhood had gone dark. I've felt enough quakesat least a few each yearto know this was big and would be major news. No one from the Anchorage Daily News ADN needed to tell us this was an all-hands-on-deck moment. We communicated primarily via Slack, but I was already headed out to find images of damage before I knew where to go. Because schools were soon closed, my son Quinn came along for the ride for the first hour as I stopped into a Walgreens and a university library, both of which were a mess. All four ADN visual journalists hit the streets right away. Another, who had retired just weeks ago, was called back into action. Our immediate challenge was the gridlocked traffic the result of so many workplaces and schools being closed and power outages. But we were spread out enough that pictures came in quickly from different corners. Activity on social media helped us identify locations where the worst damage had occurred. Some of it was apparently on Glenn Highway, the only major highway that stretches north from Anchorage, but traffic was at a standstill. More damage was reported near Wasilla, which I would need the Glenn Highway to reach by car. I knew if we were going to get images from there in a timely fashion, we'd need to fly over it. My photo editor, Anne Raup, tried to get a charter flight company on the phone, but couldn't reach anyone. We decided I should go to Lake Hood, a small plane airport, to see whom I could find to help. It was mostly empty. Regal Air was able to call a pilot in to work, and a staff member prepared a four-seat, single-engine bush plane for takeoff. North of the city, we made a few laps around some isolated but dramatic damage on a closed stretch of highway. In frozen ponds and open fields I could see fractured ice, which I found fascinating and oddly beautiful. I photographed it all with a Nikon D4 and, mostly, a 70-200mm lens. I'm lucky we were in a plane with a window that slid opennot all of them are so equipped. Then we headed toward Wasilla, about an hour's drive north of Anchorage. A reporter covering the area suggested I go to Vine Road, but neither the pilot nor I was familiar with where that was. I used Google Maps while in the air to find it. Upon arrival, we made several passes and I photographed it from all sides as the pilot monitored other aircraft in the vicinity and got me in position. The roadway looked like pieces of a puzzle. The light snow cover helped the cracks in the earth stand out and tell the story. ADN photographers have a fair amount of experience shooting from planes. It's a staple of our annual Iditarod coverage. The key a pilot who understands the mission and wants to help make it great. Devon Holmberg of Regal understood what I was after, and delivered. We got back to Anchorage after an hour in the air. I texted with Anne, who was sorting through many staff and reader images, and who instructed me to "send there"meaning, file my pictures as soon as possible. I sat on the floor of the airplane hangar to edit. I made around 150 pictures of Vine Road and ultimately picked one that felt the most three-dimensional on first blush, thinking there would be time for further review later. Before I closed my laptop and headed to find more photos from the ground, I tweeted it out. In a few months I will have been at the Anchorage Daily News for 20 years. I'm pleased with this photograph, but more than that, I'm proud of the work our small, dedicated, scrappy newsroom did on a chaotic day. I thought wereporters, editors, the whole darn familymade a difference for our readers who truly needed to know what happened. I'm honored to have played a role. Once home, my wife and two kids and I talked about each of our earthquake experiences over dinner. Even as aftershocks kept rolling through, I went to bed rattled but fortunate. A 7.0 earthquake might well have been catastrophic in some parts of the world. Here, there were no early reports of death and relatively few injuries. We were lucky, I think. |
US | How the Airline Worker Who Stole a Plane in Seattle Exposed a Security Risk | On the evening of Aug. 10, a Horizon Air grounds crewman towed a 76-seat Dash-8 Q400 from a maintenance area at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, jumped into the cockpit and took off. The 29-year-old, later identified as Richard Russell, flew around the Puget Sound area for about an hour, musing about the sunset over the Olympic Mountains, an orca whale recently spotted mourning her dead calf and whether he could coax the twin-engine turboprop into doing a barrel roll. It's not clear if he knew that a pair of F-15 fighters were following him for much of his flight, missiles loaded. "I've got a lot of people that care about me, and it's going to disappoint them to hear that I did this," Russell told air-traffic controllers, according to recordings. "I would like to apologize to each and every one of them. Just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess. Never really knew it until now." Shortly after, his plane crashed into the tiny, mostly uninhabited Ketron Island. Russell did not survive authorities said he was "suicidal.", Tragic as Russell's flight may have been, it could have gone worse. He had no formal flight training and alluded to learning to fly from flight-simulator software. Such an inexperienced pilot could have caused a catastrophic incident on the runway or crashed into a more populated area. Thankfully, air-traffic controllers guided Russell away from dangerous routes, tried to get him to land the aircraft safely and cautioned other pilots out of his path. The incident is raising questions about safety and security just as previous aviation disasters have. Nearly 17 years after 9/11, the idea of turning airplanes into suicide missiles still haunts us. What if Russell were someone else, someone intent on killing others? In any case, he was an authorized employee who passed background checks to get his job. But should he have been able to start, or even access, the airplane? Were there any signs of his condition beforehand? And what can airlines do to address workers' mental-health issues?, "Those of us in this industry have felt like there has been some exposure to what is being called the insider threat.' That's an issue that probably needs to be looked at and some mitigations put in place," says Alan Stolzer, dean of the College of Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Indeed, learning from past mistakes is gospel in the aviation world. Just three years ago, another airline worker, Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz, deliberately crashed an Airbus A320 into the French Alps, killing himself and 149 others on board. Officials responded with mandated mental-health programs for pilots. During a news conference, Brad Tilden, CEO of Horizon parent Alaska Air Group, said the Seattle incident "is going to push us to make sure this doesn't happen again." Better securing of aircraft and access to mental-health resources might be a good start. |
US | How to Watch the Solar Eclipse Without Glasses | A total solar eclipse will cross the United States from coast to coast on Monday as millions of Americans gaze upward to catch a glimpse of the historic, rare phenomenon. And many of those viewers will want to know how to watch the solar eclipse without special glasses. Experts warn that viewers should use caution when viewing the eclipse, since staring directly at the sun can cause severe eye damage. The American Astrological Society recommends viewers wear eclipse glasses to protect their eyes from the sun. Those looking at the eclipse within the path of totality where the moon will completely block the sun along a path spanning from Oregon to South Carolina can view the eclipse without protection during the two minutes or so that the sun is completely out of view. However, glasses or another form of protection must be used while watching the partial eclipse, in which the sun is not fully blocked, which will be visible in all of North America. But if you weren't able to get eclipse glasses, after some retailers across the country sold out and others have recalled them after discovering they were faulty, don't fret. There are still safe ways to view the eclipse without special glasses, NASA Solar Eclipse Educator Charles Fulco visited TIME for Kids earlier this month to explain how to create a solar viewer with a few household materials. To create a solar viewer, you'll need a shipping tube, tinfoil, a hobby knife, an awl, tape and a marker. Using the hobby knife, you need to make a small hole at the end of the tube then tape a piece of foil over the hole you created. Using the awl, punch a smaller hole into that foil. Then, cut a large rectangle at the other end of the tube, which will serve as a viewing window. During the eclipse, put the tube over your shoulder and have the small hole pointed to the sun. If you look inside the tube at the large rectangle, "you should see a bright, white image of the sun suddenly appear at the very end of the tube," Fulco said. Viewing a projection of the eclipse which this contraption will help you do is recommended by NASA. "The safest and most inexpensive method of viewing an eclipse is by projection, in which a pinhole or small opening is used to cast the image of the sun on a screen placed a half-meter or more beyond the opening," NASA says, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. To learn more, watch the video of Fulco creating the contraption here. Beginning on Monday at 12 p.m. ET, TIME will stream the eclipse live online at Time.com as well as on TIME's Facebook and YouTube pages. The broadcast will feature commentary from Amy Shira Teital, a spaceflight historian, and former NASA astronaut Marsha Ivins. TIME's editor-at-large Jeffrey Kluger, author of Apollo 8, will also report from the ground in Casper, Wyo. which falls under the path of totality, where the moon will entirely cover the sun. |
US | Chicago Mayor Pushes Illinois To Decriminalize Pot | Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked the Illinois state legislature Tuesday to decriminalize marijuana possession and to make all arrests for those caught with one gram or less of any drug a misdemeanor instead of a felony. "It's time, in my view, to free up our criminal justice system to address our real public safety challenges and build on the progress that has been made," Emmanuel told lawmakers, the Chicago Tribune reports. Emanuel is looking to expand upon a Chicago law passed in 2012 that made possession of 15 grams or less of marijuana a ticketable offense. Emanuel, who's up for reelection next year, said the plan will save taxpayer money. Emanuel's office estimates that Chicago police officers spent almost 275,000 hours on low-level narcotics arrests, even though less than 10 resulted in guilty verdicts. Emanuel's office says about 7,000 people are arrested every year in Chicago for possession of one gram or less of drugs. Chicago Tribune |
US | This Island Is So Crazy Why Living on the Worlds Most Active Volcano Doesnt Scare These Hawaiians | Almost a year ago, Stacy Welch began building her home in the small community of Leilani Estates in Hawaii, on the most active volcano in the world. Then the lava came. The 48-year-old restaurant worker and her daughter were among more than 1,500 people who had to evacuate their homes Thursday after Hawaii's Kilauea volcano erupted, causing lava to flow onto the streets and high levels of sulfur dioxide gas to fill the air. "I could see the orange glow through the trees," Welch told TIME. "I knew it was erupting really close.", As sirens sounded, warning residents to evacuate the neighborhood, panic spread among neighbors. "I couldn't breathe. I was super stressed. I was shaking really bad," said Welch's 19-year-old daughter, Maddy. "I walked to the end of the driveway and looked at everybody. We live next to some people who own a local restaurant in town. You could tell they were freaking out. They were loading up their safes.", "It was crazy to see everybody scrambling," Maddy added. "Cars speeding, sirens everywhere.", The teen packed her family's emergency gear and their pets, including two dogs and a goose. They left their home and headed to the Phoa Community Center, one of two shelter sites for those who had to evacuate from Leilani Estates and the Lanipuna Gardens Subdivision because of Kilauea's eruption. The Kilauea volcano is the youngest volcano in Hawaii and the most active volcano in the world, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It has been erupting nearly nonstop since 1983. "It's always been considered a danger," said Mike Poland, a geophysicist with the USGS. In the 1990s, a flurry of lava flows destroyed the village of Kalapana. More recently, lava almost inundated the village of Pahoa in 2014, the last time Kilauea had a major eruption prior to Thursday. "It had been known that this was a high-hazard area," Poland said. "And frankly, it was known it was only a matter of time.", There have not been any reported injuries or deaths after Thursday's eruption. But Poland said it's unclear how long the eruption could last and how much lava could come out of the ground. The volcano was still erupting Friday morning local time, with lava spattering around the fissures. Poland said the eruptions could evolve to become more rigorous. "People will be losing their homes. People will be losing their land," he said. "It's already having an unfortunate impact on the people who live there.", Welch said she understood the risks when she built her home in Leilani Estates, but never believed the worst would happen. "We've been preparing for this, knowing that we bought in Lava Zone 1," Welch said, using the technical name for an area where lava flows are most likely to occur. "I didn't think there would be any chance.", Welch began building her solar-powered small home only 10 months ago. Now, like hundreds of other neighbors, she doesn't know if it's still standing. "It's kind of nerve-wracking," she said. "I just built it. It's like my baby. I built it without a mortgage so it's paid off. It's everything I own.", Despite the uncertainty, Welch and others taking temporary shelter at the Phoa Community Center have maintained upbeat spirits. "We'll be fine. We'll just rebuild," Welch said. "We'll just start again.", "This island is so crazy. You have death around every corner," her daughter, Maddy, added. "You have flash floods, tsunamis. Now we have lava. But I love it. I wouldn't change it for the world. Hawaii is a community. People are just happy out here.", That includes Tristan Rice, a 50-year-old carpenter who has been living in Lanipuna Gardens for about three years. Rice said he was swimming in the ocean when the evacuation was ordered. He left the area before he even had time to change out of his swimming shorts. Still, he could not be shaken. "It should be easy to rebuild," he said. "Most people get scared and leave. I'm going to stay." |
US | What The Twitter Tax Break Means For San Francisco | San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other city leaders stood on the third floor of a charity called St. Anthony's on Friday morning, two stories above a bustling dining room where homeless residents were queuing up for hot meals. "This will be a day where we're celebrating something," said St. Anthony's executive director Barry Stenger. "You won't have tech companies and activists fighting each other about housing or something like that. Police won't have to worry about separating somebody in a brawl.", On the surface, they were all gathered to extoll the launch of a website called Link-SF, a portal that can connect those in need with the closest shelter, food or medical care. But that website was produced pro bono by a software company called Zendesk, in return for the same controversial tax break that inspired about 450 union members to protest outside Twitter's headquarters earlier this month. That made the meeting a political opportunity for the mayor, a chance to prove that the tax break he brokered was paying off, and to emphasize that the tech companies bolstering the city's economy aren't so out-of-touch and navel-gazing as some residents believethat they care about San Franciscans, not just profits. "Services can now be accessed with the use of technology," Lee said. "All the technology companies are registering that as they evolve, they want to be part of the success of the city.", It was a far cry from the chants of the union protestors. "Twitter you're no good," they shouted, "pay your taxes like you should.", The story of the so-called Twitter tax break goes back to 2011. The social media company, then located in a San Francisco neighborhood known as SoMathe epicenter of startupshad told the city it was planning to relocate outside of town, where so many other tech giants are. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple and Yahoo might all be associated with the City by the Bay, but their main campuses are located south in Silicon Valley, where they do not have to funnel money into San Francisco coffers. Twitter said the deal-breaker was a payroll tax levied only inside city limits with plans to double their staff, the company felt it couldn't justify the cost, Colin Crowell, Twitter's Vice President of Public Policy, said in a recent interview with TIME. "We were ready to go," he said, "did not want to go.", Twitter indicated it was interested in moving into a sprawling building on Market Street that had once housed a giant furniture mart full of showrooms and was virtually empty at the time. The mid-Market area, historically home to a thriving theater district, had become blighted over the years, with nearly one in every three storefronts sitting vacant. City officials saw Twitter as a potential "proof point" for other companies, that might draw more jobs and investment to the mid-Market artery. Lee, who was elected with the help of the tech industry, and other city leaders pushed for a compromise for any company that agreed to locate in a specified geographic area around that building, the payroll tax would be waived for all new jobs they created for six years. Angry residents continue to see the tax break as an example of politicians coddling the booming tech sector while many low-income residents are hurtingunable to afford skyrocketing rents that are in part pushed upward by well-paid tech workers flocking to town. "Twitter held San Francisco hostage," Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer said at a recent meeting of housing rights advocates. At protests she helped organize this winter, people passed out fliers demanding that officials "End the two-tier system!" that many discontented citizens also see in the so-called Google buses, private shuttles currently using public bus stops for free. "As the city gives tax breaks and the use of public assets to rich tech companies for no measurable return," the flier goes on, "evictions and rents continue to rise.", A payroll tax is particularly problematic for a tech startup, Crowell said. Young tech businesses may have big ideas without any monetization plans and may need to go on a hiring spree before they start raking in money. Even during the time of its IPO this past November, Twitter hadn't outlined any solid paths to profits. "The mayor and several supervisors recognized that this was a problem not just for Twitter but would be a problem for any similarly situated company like Twitter," Crowell said. "It wasn't just that we were saying it was bad." With the break in place, Twitter agreed to move in and has since increased their local staff from 800 to 1,500. Prior to the IPO, the Securities and Exchange Commission estimated that the break could be worth up to 56 million the city initially estimated that it would be worth 22 million. Other businesses did indeed move in after Twitter and take advantage of the same deal, like the luxury-goods discount website One Kings Lane and music streaming service Spotify. Another handful announced that they'd be moving to the mid-Market area but not taking the break, such as sound company Dolby and Jack Dorsey's Square. The area is showing signs of new life, with check cashing shops and shuttered storefronts now followed by upscale cafes that sell 65 beers. New tony apartment buildings are going up and construction workers are hammering away on renovations. Mayor Ed Lee has zero regrets about the tax break. "I am absolutely convinced that Twitter would have moved out of the city. We would have lost not only the jobs that they had," he told TIME for a magazine story in December, "but what they expected to create. You look at the corridor, literally just two years ago, one of every three storefronts was vacant and dark, unattractive and blighted. Now you see the opposite. You see vibrancy, you see people walking along Market Street, wanting to be here, live here, work here, play here.", But recent changes brought on by new investment also threaten to make the area less affordable for people and organizations that were there in pre-Twitter days. In the tax break's wake came stories about nonprofits being priced out of the area, more familiarly know as the Tenderloin. Jeannie Kim, the owner of Sam's Diner on Market Street, which has added servers to cater to new tech-worker crowds, sees the area as "definitely gentrifying." Yes, there are more customers, she said, but prices for everything else are going up too. "It's difficult because all these people are moving in, they have the money and paying 15 for breakfast is not a big deal," she said. "But we also have people who work here and live here and they don't make that kind of money.", Companies that take part in the tax break deal also have to propose and agree to "community benefit agreements," promises to help low-income neighbors in the Tenderloinwhich some have taken to calling the "Twitterloin"who would inevitably be affected by their presence. Creating Link-SF was satisfying part of Zendesk's "CBA" from 2012. In their 2014 proposal, Twitter has vowed to send its employees out to volunteer in the area, provide pro bono legal assistance in eviction proceedings, donate at least 50,000 worth of computers and IT equipment to local schools and provide more than 300,000 worth of grants to groups like digital literacy non-profits. Katy Steinmetz / TIME, For many angry about the tax break, these seem like small efforts that distract from the real point that a company which minted an estimated 1,600 instant millionaires in their IPO was given special treatment and isn't paying "their fair share of taxes," as one eviction protestor said. The union protestors argued that the cash the city isn't getting from those companies should have been used to improve city services. "We want to get rid of the Twitter tax break," City Supervisor David Campos recently told the San Francisco Examiner. "I don't know a single worker who gets a tax break from City Hall.", Twitter's Crowell said that is just one perspective and not the one they take. "There are some who focus on what they believe is the lost tax revenue from all the companies participating in the temporary payroll tax exemption," he said. "But if the limited tax exemption didn't exist, there'd most likely be no revenue at all from these companiesbecause they wouldn't have stayed in the city." Plus, he says, given the philanthropic efforts and job creation spurred by companies like Twitter, "this is a net overall plus for the city.", Companies like Twitter and city officials who supported the tax break felt validated by a 2012 vote, in which citizens opted to switch from a payroll-tax model to a tax on gross receipts. "It was universally recognized that taxing jobs is not a smart way to promote job creation," Crowell said. The shift from the former model to the new one will begin this year and end in 2018. For many years, large businesses have had to pay a 1.5 percent tax on their payroll expenses. On some level, anger about the Twitter tax break is really anger about much bigger issues like inequality and changes that are happening in the city as tech wealth explodes. "They're natural tensions," said Gaby Pea, a Twitter employee who lives in the Mission District. "As a city evolves, there's always some people who will want it to stay the same, some people who will want it to change. So long as each community finds commonalities and solutions as opposed to dwelling on the tension, I think we can go ahead." |
US | Californias Massive Wildfires Are Nearly 10 Times the Size of San Francisco | More than 4,160 wildfires have collectively burned 26,329 acres across California so far this year, according to the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The fires have killed at least 10 people, including six firefighters, and destroyed thousands of homes and other structures. Scientists and other experts say it will only get worse. Explosive and fast-moving, this year's fires have burned five times more land than the five-year average to this point in the calendar. Severe weather conditions, including record-setting temperatures and a a six-year drought that's turned local vegetation bone dry, have helped the flames grow and spread at breakneck speeds. Two of California's 20 largest-ever fires are currently burning in the state's north and still growing. The monstrous Mendocino Complex fire, created by two neighboring fires that span three counties just north of San Francisco, is now the largest fire in state history, at 366,037 acres. Even without the smaller of the two fires that make up the inferno, the larger Ranch Fire would still be the largest in state history, at 317,117 acres. And in Shasta County near Redding, Calif. the Carr fire is now the state's eighth-largest fire, spanning 211,038 acres. To get a better sense of just how enormous these deadly and destructive fires are, we compared them to one another, as well as several major U.S. cities and states. See more in the graphic below |
US | ADL Tackles Online Hate Speech With Silicon Valley Command Center | A leading civil rights group in the U.S. plans to build a command center in Silicon Valley where activists, educators and experts will work to combat online hate speech and harassment. The Anti-Defamation League ADL, which is headquartered in New York City but has regional locations across the country, is planting its new office amid titans of the tech industry in California, the group's leader announced Sunday. The ADL is among more than 100 Jewish institutions across the country that have received bomb threats this year. "Now more than ever as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, and other hatreds have exploded online, it's critical that we are bringing best-in-class technology and resources to this fight," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. ADL employees in the command center will track and analyze hate speech on the Internet to compile reports, offer suggestions to legislators and expose incidents of cyberbullying. The organization said it has received a six-figure donation from Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm, to build the center. |
US | US Armys New Hair Requirements Called Racially Biased | The U.S. Army is under fire for new grooming regulations that scores of American soldiers say are "racially biased" against women with ethnically diverse hair. Around 6,000 soldiers and civilians have signed a White House petition asking the Army to reconsider the appearance guidelines found in AR 670-1, which prohibit hairstyles including "twists, both flat twists as well as two strand twists as well as dreadlocks, which are defined as any matted or locked coils or ropes of hair.'" The petitioners have until April 19 to attract 100,000 signatures, if they want to receive a formal response from the White House. Sgt. Jasmine Jacobs, who started the petition, told the Army Times that whereas she once wore her hair neatly in two unobtrusive twists, she is "kind of at a loss now with what to do with my hair.", "Most black women, their hair doesn't grow straight down, it grows out," she said. "I'm disappointed to see the Army, rather than inform themselves on how black people wear their hair, they've white-washed it all.", The military created a slideshow which offers photo examples of the unauthorized hairstyles, often modeled on racially diverse soldiers. A recent Pew Research Center study found that 31 of women in the military are black, including black Hispanic. A 2011 study found that 36 of African American women wear their hair naturally. An Army spokesman at the Pentagon said, "The requirement for hair grooming standards is necessary to maintain uniformity within a military population. Many hairstyles are acceptable, as long as they are neat and conservative. In addition, headgear is expected fit snugly and comfortably, without bulging or distortion from the intended shape of the headgear and without excessive gaps. Unfortunately, some hairstyles do not meet this standard or others listed in AR 670-1.", This article originally misstated the number of signatures on the petition. At the time of posting it had only been signed by around 6,000 people. |
US | All 5 Former US Presidents Team Up to Raise 31 Million for Hurricane Victims | All five of the former living U.S. presidents made a rare appearance together in the name of hurricane relief Saturday night. They were even joined by current President Donald Trump sort of. Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter attended "Deep From the Heart The One America Appeal," a benefit concert at the Reed Arena at Texas AM University in College Station that has already raised more than 31 million for victims of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. Trump also made an appearance in the form of a pre-taped video message that was delivered to concertgoers. "To Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Melania and I want to express our deep gratitude for your tremendous assistance," Trump said in the message. "This wonderful effort reminds us that we truly are one nation under God, all unified by our values and our devotion to one another.", All of the former presidents in attendance besides George H.W. Bush spoke briefly to the crowd and though they discussed politics, none of them specifically mentioned Trump by name. , "The heart of America, without regard to race or religion or political party, is greater than our problems," Clinton said. The concert, which was hosted by country singer Lee Greenwood, featured a number of rock and country performers including Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen, Sam Moore and Yolanda Adams. Lady Gaga made a surprise appearance during the show and tweeted a photo of her with all the former presidents. , More than 60,000 people donated to the presidents' fund helping generate millions for the victims of the natural disasters that battered America in recent months, according to the concert's organizers. Proceeds will be distributed into various charity and relief organizations throughout Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The concert was not the first time the former presidents teamed up via One America Appeal though it is the first time they were all together since 2013 during a dedication of George W. Bush's library in Texas, according to the Associated Press. The five former presidents launched the campaign in September in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and filmed a video urging Americans to donate to the relief effort. |
US | Coastal States Prepare for Hurricane Matthew to Make Landfall | Southern states on the East Coast braced for Hurricane Matthew on Wednesday with a mix of storm warnings and emergency declarations. Governors in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina declared a state of emergency in coastal areas, as they asked residents to prepare for the deadly storm to make landfall. At least 11 people died as the hurricane swept through the Caribbean this week, the Associated Press reported. As of Wednesday at 8 a.m. Hurricane Matthew had reached maximum sustained winds of 115 miles per hour and began to batter the Bahamas, the National Hurricane Center reported. The hurricanewhich fell from a Category 4 to a Category 3 storm on Wednesdayis expected to near Florida's east coast by Thursday evening, the center said. Florida Gov. Rick Scott characterized it as a "potentially catastrophic storm" during a press conference Wednesday morning. "You need to be prepared. We are preparing for the worst but hoping for the best," Scott said, asking residents not to delay evacuation if they think it will be necessary. There is not yet a mandatory evacuation order in effect. "I hope no one in the state takes any chances," Scott said. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said people in the coastal counties of Charleston and Beaufort will be ordered to evacuate on Wednesday, the AP reported. Haley said it won't be necessary to evacuate 1 million residents, as she had originally expected. "I would love nothing more than to see this just suddenly take a right hand turn and head back out to sea, but as of right now, we're looking at Friday night into Saturday being pretty brutal," Haley said Tuesday, the Greenville News reported. In North Carolina, officials ordered a mandatory evacuation on the University of North Carolina -Wilmington's campus and along the Cape Lookout National Seashore. "We are doing everything we can to prepare for Hurricane Matthew and ensure the safety of our citizens and visitors," Gov. Pat McCrory said, according to local station ABC 11. "I urge everyone on Ocracoke Island to take these evacuation orders seriously.", |
US | ISIS Terrorist Killed Iraqi Police Officer Then Came to US as Refugee Justice Department Says | A suspected member of ISIS was arrested Wednesday in Sacramento on charges that he murdered an Iraqi police officer in 2014. Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, 45, appeared in federal court Wednesday to start the proceedings to extradite him to Iraq, where he will face trial on charges of premeditated murder. Court documents allege that Ameen was a member of Al Qaeda and later ISIS. He is accused of killing a police officer in the Rawah District on June 22, 2014, a day after ISIS took control of the area, the Justice Department alleged. According to court documents, Ameen was part of a four-vehicle convoy that opened fire at the victim's home. In response, the victim returned fire. Ameen then shot the man while he was on the ground. A death certificate from the Rawah hospital confirmed he died by gunshot to the chest, documents say. Ameen then fled Iraq and landed in Sacramento, claiming to be a refugee. Court documents say he concealed his associations with Al Qaeda and ISIS in his refugee application and fabricated parts of his background, including a misrepresentation of his father's death. "He lied about his background and the circumstances of his departure from Iraq in order to evade detection, seeking to blend into the flow of legitimate refugees fleeing the conflict zone," court papers say. |
US | School Bus Driver Shot in the Head in Road Rage Attack on Minneapolis Highway | A school bus driver was shot in the head in an apparent road rage incident that stopped traffic on a snowy Minneapolis highway Tuesday. Police say that the alleged gunman, Kenneth W. Lilly, 31, was driving on the I-35 freeway at around 230 p.m. when his car made contact with the school bus, which was chartered for Minneapolis Public Schools. A child was at the back of the bus during the shooting, but was not injured. After the two vehicles made contact, the drivers pulled over on the highway's shoulder, police say. In a blurry video of the incident released by the Minnesota DOT, a man who is allegedly Lilly gets out of the car and walks back toward the bus, which is halted in traffic on the highway. Lilly appears to point a gun at the bus, and there what appear to be several gunshots. The man advances toward the bus again and fires off several more shots. The bus driver was rushed to a local hospital, but is expected to survive. Lilly was taken into police custody after the shooting and charged with second degree assault, police say. |
US | Military Suicides Down Overall But National Guard Rates Up | The number of suicides across the military fell by more than 15 percent in 2013, though more Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers reportedly took their own lives in 2013 than the year before. That's according to data provided by the major military branches to the Associated Press. 151 active duty soldiers took their own lives in 2013, compared to 185 in 2012, a slight drop. However, another 152 members of the Army National Guard and Reserve took their own lives last year, compared to 140 the previous year. There were 289 active duty suicides across all major military branches in 2013, down from 343 in 2012. The drop in overall suicides may be a promising sign for the Pentagon, which has been ramping up prevention efforts to help those at risk of taking their own lives. However, military leaders are not being quick to call the slight decreases a victory. "I think we've changed the cultural mindset that it's O.K. for a sailor or a soldier or an airman or Marine to come forward and ask for help," said Navy Rear Adm. Sean Buck, who's in charge of suicide prevention for his branch of the armed services, the AP reports. "We're trying to reduce the stigma that used to exist.", The Pentagon is expected to release its own suicide data Friday. While the numbers are expected to differ slightly, one issue will remain unchanged the slight increase in Army National Guard and Reserves soldiers who committed suicide in 2013 compared to 2012. The AP reports many reservists that committed suicide served in Iraq and Afghanistan, though there is no evident link between service and suicide. AP |
US | Occupy Wall Street Activists Suing ExMember Over Twitter Account | A group of Occupy activists filed a lawsuit in a Manhattan court Wednesday alleging that one of their ex-members had gone rogue and hijacked the account for himself, locking everyone else out. The lawsuit says that Adbusters the Canadian magazine that first called for demonstrators to occupy New York City's financial spine opened the @OccupyWallStNYC Twitter account in summer 2011, according to the New York Times. Adbusters later gave the account to Marisa Holmes, an activist and filmmaker, who apparently shared the account's password with 14 group members who all tweeted from it. Or they did until this August, when one activist, Justin Wedes, changed the password. In blog post soon after the takeover, Wedes said that the relationships among the account's users whom he called TweetBoat had degenerated over the past few years, into a "dust storm of festering interpersonal conflict.", That month, he "started to worry about the future of the boat," wrote Wedes, who has not returned media requests for comment. "I don't shy away from currently being the chief steward of this account," he said, "and my plan is to reinvigorate it again by putting it back in the hands of responsible stewards.", In a long statement entitled "The Wolf of Occupy Wall Street," the group excoriated Wedes for using its Twitter account for self-promotion and pulling "a power grab" that "violated our basic principles of organizing within Occupy.", Occupy which just celebrated its third birthday on Sept. 17 said it had asked Wedes in August to cut down on his tweeting from the account, after too many referred to his controversial personal project for water rights in Detroit. "Throughout our brief history there have been opportunists who would use the name to build their personal careers and benefit financially from their association with Occupy Wall Street," said the group, adding that it disavows "any connection between this individual and the movement at large.", The Twitter account has been mostly retweets since Wedes wrested control of it. It has more than 177,000 followers. NYT |
US | Florida Man Guilty of Murdering Teen in Fight Over Loud Music | A Florida man was convicted of first-degree murder Wednesday in the 2012 death of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, who the man shot and killed following an argument over loud music. Michael Dunn, 47, had previously been found guilty on four counts in Davis' murder, including attempted second-degree murder, during his trial this past February. His original jury, however, was unable to come to a decision on the first-degree-murder charge. The Florida jury finally reached a verdict of guilty after several hours of deliberations Wednesday following a retrial. Dunn, who could now face life in prison, showed no emotion when his verdict was read, according to local news reports. During his trials, Dunn argued he shot Davis out of self-defense, claiming he saw the teen flash a weapon before opening fire. CNN reports detectives did not find a weapon matching Dunn's description on Davis' body or in his car. CNN |
US | 10 Confirmed Dead 10 Wounded The Latest on the Santa Fe Texas School Shooting | Ten people were killed and at least 10 others wounded Friday in a shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas an incident Gov. Greg Abbott called "one of the most heinous attacks that we've ever seen in the history of Texas schools.", The suspect, who is now in custody, used a shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver that he took from his father, Abbott said. The investigation into the shooting is ongoing. Here's what we know so far, Authorities said 10 people eight students and two teachers, according to Santa Fe Independent School District Superintendent Leigh Wall were killed in the shooting on Friday morning, and 10 more were wounded. Hospitals reported treating a total of 14 people for injuries related to the shooting, according to AP. Students at Santa Fe High School, which is located about 35 miles southeast of Houston, told local TV stations that the gunman opened fire in an art class during first period. University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston said doctors were treating three patients from the shooting, two adults and one minor. One patient, retired Houston police officer John Barnes, is in critical condition after being shot in the arm while engaging the gunman. Another adult, a woman, was wounded in the leg and was being operated on. The minor had a gunshot wound to the leg, doctors said. Doctors at Clear Lake Regional Medical Center said eight patients, all students, were treated there. Six were released. Two remain in the hospital. One is in critical condition and the other is in fair condition. , Student Rome Shubert tweeted that he was shot in the back of the head, but was "completely okay" and in stable condition. KHOU 11 reporter Levi Ismail tweeted that Shubert was released from the hospital after only around four hours. , , A suspect, believed to be a student, has been taken into custody. Abbott said the suspect turned himself in to authorities. The suspected shooter has been identified as 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who was booked into the Galveston County Jail on Friday, the Galveston County Sheriff's Office said. Galveston County Judge Mark Henry said at a press conference Saturday that probable cause was found on charges of capital murder and aggravated assault against a public servant. The suspect admitted to the shooting, according to a probable cause affidavit. Two more people are currently being interviewed as persons of interest in the shooting. Abbott said the shooter, who had no criminal history, used a shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver that were obtained from his father. Texas Sen. John Cornyn said the shotgun had a shortened barrel, and investigators are still determining if it was legal, according to AP reports. "There simply were not the same type of warning signs that we've seen in so many other shootings," Abbott said, noting that the suspect posted a picture on his Facebook page of a T-shirt that said, "Born to Kill." Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also told Fox News that the shooting suspect "does not appearto have had any issues with the school.", Information obtained from the suspect's journals, computer and cell phone indicate that he planned to carry out the mass shooting and then commit suicide, Abbott said. Officials at a press briefing on Friday afternoon praised law enforcement officers who engaged the shooter. "We know that because they were willing to run into that building and engage him right now that other lives could be saved," said Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. "That's absolutely important.", The Santa Fe school district said police bomb squads were working to dispose of explosive devices found in the high school, whose roughly 1,400 students have been evacuated. "There have been explosive devices found in the high school and surrounding areas adjacent to the high school. Because of the threat of explosive items, community members should be on the look-out for suspicious packages and anything that looks out of place," Santa Fe Independent School District said in an update hours after the shooting. "Do not touch any items out of place and call 911 as we have agencies that can respond.", , , Cornyn said authorities also discovered homemade explosive devices, including pipe bombs and pressure cooker bombs, in the suspect's car, the AP reports. This is the 22nd school shooting of 2018, according to CNN. It follows another shooting on Wednesday at Dixon High School in central Illinois, where a school resource officer shot and wounded a former student who opened fire at the school. It comes three months after 17 people were killed in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. That shooting sparked mass protests and calls for tougher gun control restrictions in the U.S. Less than a month before the shooting at their own school, a group of Santa Fe High School students participated in the national walkout against gun violence on April 20. A clip from Houston's KTRK-TV featuring an interview with one student from Santa Fe High School has gone viral in the aftermath of the shooting. In it, the student responds to a reporter who asks if she couldn't believe a shooting was happening at her school. "It's been happening everywhere. I've always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too," she said. "I don't know. I wasn't surprised. I was just scared.", , President Donald Trump addressed the shooting in remarks on Friday morning. "We grieve for the terrible loss of life and send our support and love to everyone affected by this absolutely horrific attack," he said. "To the students, families, teachers and personnel at Santa Fe High, we are with you in this tragic hour, and we will be with you forever. My administration is determined to do everything in our power to protect our students, secure our schools and to keep weapons out of the hands of those who pose a threat to themselves and others.", Earlier, he tweeted "School shooting in Texas. Early reports not looking good. God bless all!", , White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders also said the White House's gun safety commission, which Trump pulled together after the February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, "has been activated today to start that conversation up again.", Texas leaders have voiced support for the students and teachers at the school. "This community is grieving mightily," Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said at a press briefing on Friday. "The entire country is grieving along with these parents, grieving along with these students. There have been too many of these. Texas has seen too many of these.", "Nothing can prepare a parent for the loss of a child. This will be a long and painful time for these parents as they work their way through what has to be the greatest challenge they've ever dealt with," Abbott said at the briefing. "I ask every parent out there, wherever you may be, to hold your children close tonight and let them know how much you love them.", Gene Wu, a Texas state representative, also called for action beyond "thoughts and prayers.", |
US | 9 Suspects Face Hazing Charges in Death of FSU Fraternity Pledge Andrew Coffey | Police announced hazing charges on Tuesday against nine men in the November death of Florida State University fraternity pledge Andrew Coffey. Coffey, 20, died on Nov. 3 after a Pi Kappa Phi "big brother" ritual where he passed out after drinking a bottle of bourbon, according to a Leon County grand jury report released in December. Coffey was found unresponsive the morning after the party, and he had a blood alcohol level of .447 at the time of an autopsy. The grand jury concluded that there was sufficient evidence to support criminal charges in Coffey's death, describing "alarming" alcohol abuse within the fraternity chapter and accusing fraternity members of fostering an "environment of hazing.", On Tuesday, the Tallahassee Police Department said all nine suspects will face charges of "College Hazing-Cause Injury or Death.", "This collaborative investigation was critical to finding answers for Andrew Coffey's family and our community," said Tallahassee Police Chief Michael J. DeLeo in a statement. "Hopefully, this investigation and its outcome will prevent another tragedy from occurring.", Florida State President John Thrasher suspended Greek life indefinitely in the wake of Coffey's death and called for a "a new normal for Greek Life at the university." Several other universities took similar action last year in response to deadly hazing incidents. In an attachment to last month's grand jury report, Coffey's parents demanded accountability from fraternity members. "Even as we are heartbroken, we are also troubled. Troubled that our son died alone in a room full of people," they wrote. "Troubled that no one stood up and said stop,' no,' enough.' Troubled that a group of young people saw someone in crisis and didn't act. And troubled that this continues to happen, again and again." |
US | 8 Questions With Al Gore | Why release An Inconvenient Sequel now?, Ten years after the first movie seemed like an appropriate time to check in on what's changedand as it turned out, a lot has changed. The climate-related extreme weather events are unfortunately way more frequent and way more destructive, but solutions are available now. In a growing number of regions, the electricity from solar and wind is now cheaper than electricity from burning fossil fuels. You met with President Trump after his election. Have you been disappointed by what you've seen since?, I've certainly been disappointed. I really thought there was a chance he would come to his senses and keep the U.S. in the Paris Agreement. I was wrong. But I've been gratified that the entire rest of the world has redoubled its commitment, and within this country so many governors and mayors and business leaders have stepped up to say, "We're still in." If President Trump refuses to lead, the American people will. Is the Paris Agreement Trump's most significant decision on the climate?, In every area of policy that affects the climate, President Trump has surrounded himself with a rogues' gallery of climate deniers. And they appear to be intent on doing almost everything they can to destroy a sensible climate policy. Trump defeated his opponent while losing the popular vote. You faced a similar circumstance. Do you think the U.S. should get rid of the Electoral College?, Even after the 2000 election and the Supreme Court decision that determined the outcome, I continued to support the founders' design that included an Electoral College. But with changing circumstances, it would now be much better for our country to adopt a popular vote for determining the outcome of presidential elections. Is there a lesser-known innovation to address climate change that you're most excited about?, Converting my farm in Tennessee to a carbon-sequestering farm without any insecticides or pesticides or GMOs. It's a small farm and a small effort, but I see a lot of my neighbors and a lot of farmers around the world beginning to switch to these techniques. What's the best way for one person to make a difference?, The first thing is to learn about the issue. The second thing to do is to win the conversation about climate. The conversations about who we are as a people precede changes in laws and policies. Third, when you go into stores, when you participate in the marketplace, make choices in favor of the environment-friendly and climate-friendly options. And finally, be active in the political process. Don't be shy about your role in our democracy. You're hopeful. How do you stay that way?, Anybody that deals with the climate crisis and the solutions to the climate crisis inevitably has an internal dialogue between hope and despair. I guess after 40 years of working on this, it has become a little bit easier to put some of the events that unfold day to day and year to year in perspective. Do you ever take a step back and say, "I need to take a day, a week, even a month to not think about this one problem"?, I am not sure that I can say in all honesty that there has been a day where it didn't occupy my thoughts to some extent, but I like to get away with family and friends. I just took a whole week in Center Hill Lake near my farm in Tennessee. I have a houseboatI call it my redneck yacht. |
US | Nebraska Restores the Death Penalty One Year After Eliminating It | Nebraska voted Tuesday night to reinstate the death penalty, after state lawmakers voted last year to eliminate it. With more than half of Nebraska's precincts reporting Tuesday night, more than 60 of voters chose to repeal the earlier legislation that had eliminated the death penalty. The effort was led by Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who vowed to get capital punishment on the ballot, saying voters still supported the practice. Read more The Future of the Death Penalty Will Be Decided in These Three States, Last year Nebraska became the first conservative state to do away with the death penalty since North Dakota in 1973. After state lawmakers voted to eliminate it, Gov. Ricketts vetoed the bill. Lawmakers, however, overrode him. The governor then led a drive to get the issue on the ballot and even bankrolled the effort. Prior to the vote, some residents said they were confused by the referendum's language. A vote for "Retain" meant keeping the legislation passed by the state and eliminating the death penalty while a vote for "Repeal" meant getting rid of the bill and keeping capital punishment. |
US | New York City Heightens Security at Holiday Markets Following Berlin Attack | The New York Police Department has stepped up security at holiday markets in New York City in the wake of a deadly attack on a crowded holiday market in Berlin on Monday. Members of the NYPD counterterrorism unit patrolled the Winter Village in Bryant Park on Monday night as well as the area surrounding the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and Macy's in Herald Square, NBC New York reported. "The Department has moved highly trained teams, including the Critical Response Command, to high profile locations around New York City," the NYPD said in a statement, CBS News reported. "In the coming days, we will look to learn more about what occurred to inform the NYPD's operations, deployments, and training of officers.", Law enforcement officials in other cities around the world have also taken precautions, with many increasing the police presence at holiday markets. "All security forces will keep to a maximum level of vigilance. Security at Christmas markets will be reinforced with immediate effect," the French interior ministry said in a statement Tuesday, according to the Washington Post. Police in London said they are reviewing security plans as a precaution. "The Metropolitan Police has detailed plans for protecting public events over the Christmas and New Year period," the department said in a statement. "As a matter of routine, as a precaution, we review our plans after attacks overseas, and we are doing so at present following the awful incidents in Berlin and Ankara last night." |
US | Tensions Cool in Ferguson After Days of Violence | Ron Johnson marched down the center of West Florissant Avenue, trailed by a crowd of raucous protesters as he weaved through a scene of orderly chaos. Hour after hour on Thursday night, a crush of cars teeming with people inched down the main drag of riot-racked Ferguson, Mo. Protesters flooded the street and sidewalks, hung out the doors of their vehicles, climbed up through their sun roofs and onto the hoods. A cacophony of car horns mixed with chanted slogans and blaring music. Men with bandanas and Guy Fawkes masks streamed through the streets, denouncing the police at the top of their lungs. For five restive nights, this suburban strip has been the site of gruesome clashes between the nearly all-white local police force and the town's mostly black inhabitants. After Saturday's fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot to death by a local police officer, this St. Louis suburb has been a disaster zone, with violent altercations punctuated by tear gas and rubber bullets. But the scene on Thursday was a dramatic departure a peacefulif extremely chaoticdemonstration that had the vibe of a street party. And some of the credit should go to Johnson, an African-American captain with the Missouri State Highway Patrol who was appointed Thursday by Gov. Jay Nixon to assume control of a situation that had veered badly out of hand. With the change in leadership came a change in tactics. Gone were the gas masks, the armored SWAT tanks and the semiautomatic weapons trained on angry crowds. There were no barricade lines, no cops in riot gear. For long stretches of the night, there were barely any police in sight at all. But there was Johnson, striding through the crowd in his blue uniform, approaching groups and glad-handing as if the contentious scene were a reunion of old acquaintances. "This is my family. These are my friends," he said. "And I'm making new friends here tonight.", Sweat pouring off his temples, he stopped to kibitz with a crowd of teens crammed into a car, interrogated a man about his motorcycle and clapped a hand on women's shoulders. He was engulfed by the crowd. "I think we all trust each other tonight," Johnson told TIME. "Because we're talking from the heart. They're telling me what they want and what they feel, and I'm telling them what I'm feeling.", After five days of aggression and confrontation, the hands-off approach inspired a joyous scene. Outside the QuikTrip convenience storenow a hollowed black shell after looters incinerated the storea man toasted the assembled crowd with a martini glass. A youth dance troupe called "Diamond Hearts" chanted cheers. Toddlers scampered around in superhero pajamas, and mothers cradled their children and tucked them into strollers. "This is how it should have been," said protester Richard Harrison of the rowdy but peaceful affair. "It's turning around," said Damon Rose, 30, a truck driver from Ferguson. "You feel like this is now being handled by somebody who wants to hear what you have to say.", This was the change that Nixon had in mind when he pulled overmatched and hostile city and county cops off a situation spiraling out of control. "This is a place where people work, go to school, raise their families and go to church," Nixon said during a news conference. "But lately it's looked a little bit more like a war zone and that's unacceptable.", The clashes had threatened to engulf national elected officials. President Barack Obama interrupted his vacation in Martha's Vineyard on Thursday to decry both the protesters' violence and the heavy-handed tactics of local police. "There is never an excuse for violence against police, or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting," Obama said. "There's also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests, or to throw protestors in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.", In interviews, protesters pointed to the changing tactics as a key ingredient in defusing the tension. "It is less oppressive," said Aaron Jackson, 45, a regular protester who lives in a nearby apartment complex. "We have a chance to go down in the history books, in a positive way.", The community is far from out of the woods. As the night dragged on, there were isolated incidents of violence. TIME reporters met a 21-year-old college student from nearby Washington University in St. Louis who had been punched, unprovoked, by an assailant. His mobile phone was stolen in the attack. The victim had bruises and fresh blood on his face, and several witnesses corroborated his story. He declined to give his name or be photographed, saying he had attended several nights of protests and did not want to taint the fight for justice. A photographer for a local news station was reportedly assaulted as well. It was a scene one almost never sees in the U.S. a strange mix of order and anarchy, giddiness and anger. Protesters calmly sipped drinks and goofed around on the sidewalk, chanting "Hands Up, Don't Shoot." A makeshift vehicle sputtered down the street, its grill adorned with the face of Thomas the Tank Engine and a banner that read "Stop Killing Us." The festive atmosphere felt capable of curdling given the right provocation. But after five bad nights it was a big step in the right directionand, one hopes, a sign of things to come. |
US | The Height of Hypocrisy Womens Groups Feel Betrayed by NY Attorney General They Once Saw as an Ally | Last November, Judy Harris Kluger stood next to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman at a press conference as he railed against a Brooklyn hospital that charged sexual assault survivors for their forensic rape kits. Kluger, the executive director of advocacy group Sanctuary for Families, thanked Schneiderman for his hard work on behalf of women. After The New Yorker reported that four women accused Schneiderman of physical abuse on Monday night, Kluger turned on the TV and saw footage from that moment as part of the local news coverage of the allegations. "You can only imagine the sense of betrayal. It's not about me personally, it's about the other advocates that work day and night to ensure the safety and well-being of women," Kluger told TIME. "He was someone who stands up at press conferences, making statements in support of issues that are important to women and calling out other men who engaged in inappropriate, violent behavior. Behind closed doors, he's engaging in the same sort of the behavior it's the height of hypocrisy.", Schneiderman, a Democrat, publicly positioned himself as a champion for women's rights and liberal darling throughout his career in politics. He vocally supported the MeToo movement, bringing a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein and praising The New Yorker for its role in reporting on sexual assault and harassment allegations. Schneiderman's carefully crafted image came crashing down on Monday night. Now, women's groups that once considered him a close ally are publicly rebuking him. Sanctuary for Families, which fights to end sexual and domestic violence, had partnered with Schneiderman on several issues involving women's rights, including human trafficking. When Schneiderman, as a state senator, introduced a bill make strangulation a violent felony in 2010, the group was one of the bill's most vocal supporters. "Someone champions that legislation but then engages in the same behavior?" Kluger said. "There's an element of sickness there. That's the only way I can characterize it.", Two women Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam told The New Yorker that Schneiderman slapped, choked and verbally abused them during romantic relationships. Schneiderman denied the allegations, telling the magazine "In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity. I have not assaulted anyone. I have never engaged in nonconsensual sex, which is a line I would not cross." Schneiderman, who was elected attorney general in 2010 and 2014, resigned hours after the allegations went public. Last week, the National Institute for Reproductive Health honored Schneiderman as a "champion of choice" at a luncheon, where he said it was time to "build a stronger, louder movement for women's freedom and equality than we've ever seen." The group is now revoking its award. "We were absolutely appalled and horrified," Andrea Miller, the president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, told TIME on Tuesday. "There is no way to reconcile his public record with his private actions. Even a lifetime of working to advance women's rights in the public sphere can never excuse or erase private abuse against women.", Ilyse Hogue, the president of pro-abortion rights advocacy organization NARAL Pro-Choice America, tweeted on Monday night "One more reminder that progressive credentials are no safeguard against sexual predation. Also why we simply need more women in these positions.", , Miller recommended that other progressive male leaders should examine their own political and personal histories to assure they are doing all that they can to promote women's equality. "The message here is actions matter, the personal is political, and we need to see action that moves us all forward," she said. "It's incumbent upon male leaders to look at what they're doing to advance women's rights, equality, dignity and autonomy are you acting according to those values across every sphere of your life?" |
US | Why You Should Worry About Hurricane Harvey | Hurricane Harvey brought torrential rain, wind and flooding to the Texas shoreline, as it made landfall as a Category 4 storm Friday night. It has since weakened to a Category 1 storm. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott urged people in the hurricane's path to evacuate, while weather forecasters employed uncharacteristically dramatic language as they warned of potential catastrophe. The storm is the worst to hit Texas in decades and the first major hurricane classified as Category 3 or higher to hit the U.S. since 2005. Here's why the storm has experts so concerned. The storm itself , This has the two elements that make for devastating hurricanes high wind and huge quantities of precipitation. Forecasters expect the storm to drop as much as 35 inches of rainfall in the worst hit spots. The wind speed alone is significant given that the U.S. has not experienced such winds in a hurricane since 2005, when the country experienced seven major hurricanes including Katrina. But, remarkably, the wind speeds may not be the most significant cause of damage. Forecasters expect the storm to linger over coastal Texas instead of dissipating quickly. And as it lingers it will pummel the region with days of intense rain, driving the National Weather Service's prediction of nearly three feet of rainfall by Wednesday. That's about as much or more than cities in the region receive in an entire year. In uncharacteristically strong language, the NWS described that level of precipitation as "catastrophic and life-threatening" in a Friday warning. Flooding, Several feet of precipitation in a short period of time will leave drainage infrastructure overwhelmed and streets flooded. But rainfall is not the only factorand in some cases even the most significant factorthat affects flooding. Storm surge in particular helped make Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina enormously damaging events despite relatively low wind speeds at landfall. Storm surge occurs when hurricane conditions raise water levels on the coastsometime as much as dozens of feet in the airand wind pushes that water ashore, leading to flooding. The NWS issued a storm surge warning for the Texas coast with predictions for a surge as high as 12 feet in some places near the spot where the storm makes landfall. Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy caused storm surges of nine and 25 feet, respectively. Storm surge also begins before the heaviest rainfall, sometimes catching local residents who chose to stay behind by surprise. And flooding does not disappear when the storm makes landfall. Forecasters warn that some of the greatest flooding come in the days following storms when residents may try to return. Preparation, Some of the most significant natural disasters to hit the U.S.think of Katrinahave been exacerbated by a lack of preparation. Effective evacuation notices and response operations saves lives and protects crucial assets in the region. Trump's choice to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees federal disaster response, took office in June, but other key positions in the agency remain unfilled. The Department of Homeland Security, FEMA's parent agency, lacks a secretary and top posts remain open at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees weather monitoring. Forecasters also fear that locals might not heed warnings following a lull in major hurricanes hitting the region. Energy, The hurricane is striking at the heart of the U.S. energy economy, potentially damaging crucial infrastructure and driving up gas prices. The Texas coastline is home to nearly a third of U.S. refining capacity, and by Thursday many oil companies in the region had stopped production, according to the Energy Information Administration. Gas prices will jump and could remain high depending on how long it takes to get facilities operating again. The hurricane could also lead to leaks of harmful chemicals and pollutants stored on sight in the many energy-related industrial facilities located in the area. |
US | Everything You Need to Know About Buying Legal Weed in Washington State | The first legal, recreational marijuana stores will open for business in Washington state Tuesday, making it the second state in the nation to allow pot to be bought and consumed more or less like alcohol. As Washington joins Colorado on America's weed frontier, here's what you need to know about the latest legal market, So, who is allowed to buy pot?, As with alcohol, only those 21 and older can purchase recreational weed. Out of state residents are allowed to purchase pot, but it must be consumed in Washington. Marijuana remains illegal in neighboring states. And plan on paying with cash. While some legal establishments may be able to take debit cards, none can accept credit cards because of federal banking regulations. Can you buy it at the gas station, like a pack of cigarettes?, No. Consumers can only buy pot in retail shops licensed by the state. Internet sales and delivery services are not allowed under the current rules. Nor are "marijuana food trucks," in case you were wondering. And not every part of the state is on board dozens of municipalities have banned or put moratoriums on pot sales. When, exactly, are shops going to open?, The Washington State Liquor Control Board, the body tasked with implementing the nuts and bolts of the new marijuana market, issued licenses to 24 retail shops on July 7. Shops are allowed to open 24 hours after the owners finish the licensing process, so July 8 is the earliest possible day. Sales are generally allowed to take place between 8 a.m. and midnight. And how do you know which shops are licensed to sell weed?, You can find information about the first batch of stores, such as the Happy Crop Shoppe and the Bud Hut, here. Brian Smith, the Liquor Board's director of communications, says the Board has tried to ensure a geographic range for the first stores, while also making sure to serve areas with the densest populations, like the Puget Sound corridor. But it's still a work in progress. Seattle, the state's largest city, has only one shop approved for opening day. Aren't there supposed to be shortages? , Likely so. As in Colorado, people will be drawn out by the historic nature of the occasion, and 24 retail shops is a fraction of the more than 334 the state plans to eventually license. Owners of those few open establishments might decide to ration their product, setting lower-than-normal limits on how much each person can buy, or raise prices while supply is low and demand is high. So how much will the legal weed cost?, Store owners likely to be licensed have said that they're aiming to sell their weed for about 12 per gram, but those prices may range up to 25 per gram. But when the supply is full, are there any limits on how much you can buy?, The law caps the amount you can purchase and possess at any one time at one ounce 28 grams. What about pot brownies and other edibles?, THC-infused treats won't legally be available for awhile. The Board has said that such products must be tested and approved, and so far none have made the grade. Colorado has had some problems with kids eating what look like normal brownies or candies and ending up dangerously sedated, which officials are working to prevent through stricter rules. Can you light up anywhere?, Nope. It's illegal to smoke marijuana in public places or even in legal marijuana shops. Those caught consuming in public will not be arrested, but can be given a 27 ticket akin to a parking violation. Driving while high is also illegal. So what about out-of-state shoppers who don't have private residences? , Only 25 of hotel rooms in the state are allowed to be designated as smoking rooms. Whether those allow marijuana smoking appears to be up to the individual hotel owners, so call beforehand if you're a tourist looking for a place to toke. According to the Washington Lodging Association, "There is no current protocol within the hospitality industry as to smoking medical or recreational marijuana inside hotels.", When will more shops be open?, The Board will keep churning through the more than 2,000 applications they have left to vet for aspiring growers, processors and retail shops. Smith says there's no set date when 334 shops are supposed to be open but emphasizes that a dedicated team will be working as fast as they can to get the market up and running. "It's going to be a bumpy start," says Randy Simmons, the Board's deputy director. "There's no question about that." The loose estimate from state officials is to have around 100 licensed stores open by year's end. |
US | Cities Parched by Drought Look to Tap the Ocean | After three years of drought, California's reservoirs are filled with more mud than water. Many farmers can't irrigate their fields and have no choice but to leave them fallow. As insurance against future droughts, San Diego is turning to a vast and largely untapped body of water for help the Pacific Ocean. A huge desalination plant is under construction just outside the city that is expected to provide 7 of the arid region's water needs. "Desalination isn't dependent on rainfall or snowpack," says Peter MacLaggan, a senior vice president with Poseidon Resources, the company that is developing the plant in Carlsbad, Calif. "Traditional sources have been cheap and plentiful, and that's not necessarily the case anymore.", Desalinization is an old technology used widely in the Middle East that is getting new attention in the United States because of innovation and lower costs. With growing populations and increasingly scarce water, more than 15 California coastal cities are considering the ocean as an alternative to fickle Mother Nature. But desalination is still far more expensive than damming rivers and pumping ground water. Furthermore, critics worry about the environmental consequences and argue that water conservation is a much cheaper option. When complete, the 1 billion Carlsbad desalination plant will be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, providing up to 50 million gallons of water daily to San Diego County and its more than 3 million residents. Seawater sucked up from an offshore pipe will be blasted through a series of membranes that have microscopic holes to help filter out the salt, sand and algae. Construction, delayed for years by lawsuits, is expected to be completed by late 2015 or early 2016. Ultimately, the water produced by the plant will be "bottled water quality," MacLaggan says. Over the years, desalination plants have had a mixed track record. A number of cities that tapped seawater during droughts later closed the plants after the rains returned, because of the high costs. Just up the coast, Santa Barbara, Calif. built a 34 million desalination plant in early 1990s amid a water shortage, but then closed it a few years later. With the latest drought, city officials are considering paying millions of dollars more for refurbishments so they can restart the plant. Meanwhile, several Australian cities spent billions of dollars over the past decade for seawater treatment plants. However, many of them were put on idle to save money after the droughts ended. "We end up spending a lot of money and getting very little water," says Conner Everts, executive director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance, who opposes desalination plants because of their cost and their potential impact on the environment. "Don't think of the ocean as an endless reservoir, but a fragile ecosystem.", In particular, Everts complains about desalination plants discharging briny waste into the sea that he says could kill marine life. San Diego's plant, for example, will suck up two gallons of seawater for every gallon of potable water it produces. The excess, which is 20 more salty that typical seawater after being diluted, will be pumped back out into the surf. The plant's operators insist the discharge will be safe for sea life. Opponents filed more than a dozen lawsuits to block the plant's construction based on environmental and other concerns. But the plant's supporters ultimately prevailed in court. San Diego officials pushed for the desalination plant following a serious drought across much of the West. With few rivers and an average of only 10 inches of rain annually, the San Diego region is particular vulnerable to water shortages. Officials agreed to a 30-year deal to buy desalinated water from the plant's developers for 2,014 to 2,257 per acre foot, about the equivalent of what a family of five uses in a year. The cost is nearly double traditional sources. County residents will ending up paying an extra 4 to 7 in their monthly water bills, on average. Over time, improvements in technology are supposed to drive down costs of desalination. Pumps, membranes used in the plants are becoming increasingly efficient and durable, for example. Whether the costs will ever fall in line with traditional water sources is a subject of much debate. For his part, MacLaggan predicted that the costs will reach parity by 2025. But Everts says water conservation and recycling waste water are much cheaper alternatives that should get a lot more attention. Encouraging home owners to rip out their water-guzzling lawns and install more efficient toilets are just some of the options. "Desalination is a sexy technology that sounds like a great idea," Everts says. "But it distracts us from putting resources to other things that could help us right now.", In any case, Mother Nature may be coming to the rescue. California's rainy season has got off to a good start with a series of strong storms. But the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the most important barometer, is still low. Moreover, a few wet months alone can't offset years of drought. MacLaggan, with the Carlsbad plant's developer, agrees that more conservation is necessary along with other strategies like treating wastewater so that it is clean enough to drink. "We need to do all these things," he says, adding that desalination should be part of the solution because conservation won't be enough to offset the growing population and the region's lack of rain. "This is a drought-proof supply.", This article originally appeared on Fortune.com |
US | Florida Family Hospitalized After Eating LSDLaced Steak | A family in Tampa, Florida consumed steak contaminated with the drug LSD, sending them all to the hospital, Tampa Police Department said Thursday. Ronnie Morales, his girlfriend who was nine months pregnant, and her two girls aged seven and six were hospitalized Monday with a "mysterious illness" that caused the children to hallucinate. Hospital staff induced labor, but all four patients were released in good condition Wednesday, and the baby boy was healthy. After investigating the food eaten by the family, the Tampa Police Department determined that a bottom round steak purchased from Walmart was contaminated with LSD. The police said results from toxicology samples of the victims will be available in three weeks. The police, who said this is an isolated incident, are examining meat from the Walmart store and are still working to determine if a crime occurred. |
US | Christmas Eve Travel Chaos in Aftermath of Storms | A day after killer storms raked the South, millions of holiday travelers wrestled Wednesday with wet roads and flight delays. More than 200 flights were canceled and more than 650 delayed as rain soaked the East Coast from Maine to Florida and another band of rain hit the critical air travel hub of Chicago. Delays of an hour were reported at Philadelphia International Airport and 45 minutes at LaGuardia in New York, according to FlightAware. Drivers on Interstate 95 dealt with rain, fog and wind. At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, security lines deepened to half an hour. , Read the rest of the story from our partners at NBC News |
US | How to Help the Victims of the Pulse Orlando Nightclub Shooting | The gunman who opened fire at a crowded gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning left about 50 people dead and dozens more injured, flooding hospitals with those who were hurt. As federal and local authorities continued to investigate the attack at the Pulse Orlando club, people across the city and the country mourned the victims and began searching for ways to respond. Here's how you can help the victims, Donate Blood, The OneBlood center put out an urgent call for blood donations for the Orlando victims on Sunday, and received an overwhelming show of support. Donors were told that blood bank had reached capacity but encouraged to return in the coming days, according to the Orlando Sentinel. "I've been here 13 years and never seen a response like this," Pat Michaels, a spokesman for OneBlood, told the Sentinel. "The sentiment is understood and appreciated, but it's a little too much, too soon.", These are the federal rules on who can donate blood. Donate Money, Equality Florida set up a donation page on GoFundMe to support the victims. The fund has raised more than 120,000 from more than 3,000 donors since being set up. Attend a Vigil, Vigils were planned in major cities across the country. Details are still being determined as of early Sunday afternoon. Orlando's LGBT community postponed plans for a vigil following guidance from law enforcement, the Sentinel reports. Provide Counseling, The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of Central Florida asked counselors from the Orlando area to come in and help field phone calls on a hotline, the Sentinel reports. Those who would like to speak to a counselor can call 1-407-228-1446. |
US | President Trump Says Hes Sending The Feds to Fight Crime in Chicago Heres What He Means | President Trump tweeted Friday that he is "sending in Federal help" to fight gun violence in Chicago. That federal help, it turns out, is in the form of 20 ATF agents. Chicago city officials said Friday that 20 agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were arriving to help the city reduce crime after years of rising murder rates. "Six months ago we made it clear that we would welcome additional federal support, and six months later we appreciate the 20 new ATF agents that are now arriving," Adam Collins, a spokesperson for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, said in an email. Over the last few years, homicide rates in Chicago have reached levels not seen in the city in decades. In 2016, 762 people were killed, a 58 rise from the previous year. The number of murders was more than New York City and Los Angeles combined. The 2016 homicide rate of 27.7 murders per 100,000 was the city's highest since the mid-1990s. The number of murders in Chicago accounted for almost half of the total increase in homicides last year in the biggest 30 U.S. cities. Read more What President Trump's Threat to Send in the Feds' Could Mean for Chicago, Just four days after his inauguration, Trump tweeted that he would "send in the Feds" if Chicago didn't reduce the "horrible carnage' going on." Some experts said he appeared to be suggesting bringing in the National Guard. On Friday, the President tweeted again that crime in Chicago has "reached such epidemic proportions that I am sending in Federal help.", , According to the Chicago Tribune, that number is actually 1,760, but is lower than it was at this time last year. Collins, the spokesperson for Mayor Emanuel, said the progress Chicago Police have made this year "happened without any of the new resources from the federal government we requested.", Read more See Chicago's Deadly Year in 3 Charts, Officials with the mayor's office said that the additional ATF agents come from a request the city made to the Obama administration last summer. The arriving ATF agents will work alongside local police to form the Chicago Crime Gun Strike Force, which will focus on combatting gun trafficking using ballistics technology. Roughly 40 ATF agents have already been working with local and state police on reducing gun violence in the city. The announcement comes ahead of July 4, often one of the deadliest periods in Chicago. Last year, more than 60 people were shot and four were killed around the holiday. |
US | Vladimir Putin Says Trumps Approach to North Korea Is Futile | Russian President Vladmir Putin has warned that the Korean peninsula is at risk of "large-scale conflict" if further pressure is put on North Korea to halt its nuclear program. "Russia believes that the policy of putting pressure on Pyongyang to stop its nuclear missile program is misguided and futile," Putin wrote in a letter published on the Kremlin's website ahead of a summit of the so-called BRICS nations next week. "The region's problems should only be settled through a direct dialogue of all the parties concerned without any preconditions," Putin added. "Provocations, pressure and militarist and insulting rhetoric are a dead-end road.", President Donald Trump said recently that "all options" were on the table after North Korea fired a missile over the northern island of Japan. It was the latest in a series of missile tests and threats against the U.S. Experts now believe that North Korean missiles have the capacity to reach the U.S. mainland. |
US | US Intel Chief Roughly 40 Americans Have Returned From Syria | About 40 Americans have returned from the jihadist battlefields of Syria but they don't pose a threat to American security, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Monday. Clapper said during a question-and-answer session at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City that about 180 Americans have attempted to travel or have succeeded in traveling to Syria since the ongoing conflict began. But he said the Americans who have returned went for "humanitarian purposes or some other reasons that don't relate to plotting" and they have not shown "nefarious" intentions. "If they come back, and they are not involved in plotting, or don't have nefarious purpose, that's their right and privilege as an American citizen to come back," Clapper said. The office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for more information. About 20,000 foreign fighters from more than 90 countries are believed to have gone to Syria, where the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria ISIS has seized large swaths of territory. That has raised fears of radicalized fighters returning to carry out attacks in their home countries. Last week, the FBI arrested three Brooklyn men and charged them with attempting to provide material support to ISIS. Two of the three men allegedly planned to travel to Syria, and the FBI said the men had discussed coordinating possible domestic attacks. On Monday, Clapper said the U.S. faces more global challenges than at any time in his half-century career in the intelligence community. "I've been in one capacity or another in the intel business for 52 years, and I don't remember a time when we have been beset by more crises and challenges around the world and the diversity of these crises and challenges than we have today," said Clapper, a retired Air Force lieutenant general. That comment came days after he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that 2014 was the most lethal year for global terrorism on record. In 2014, 13,000 attacks killed 31,000 people around the world, up from 11,500 attacks and 22,000 killed a year earlier, Clapper said at the Senate hearing on Thursday. Fifty percent of those attacks took place in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan and ISIS was responsible for more of the attacks than any other group. Clapper clarified on Monday that the terror assessment he gave Congress was not at odds with a statement from Secretary of State John Kerry, who drew criticism for telling a House subcommittee last week that global violent conflict is lower than it has ever been, saying that Americans were "safer than ever.", Kerry "was thinking of a different context," Clapper said. "What he was thinking about was the more cataclysmic case in point of case with the Cold War. And he's right in that context we are a safer country. But I was looking at more the here and now, you know, what happened in 2014 and what kind of what we project out in the next year." |
US | Lawsuit Claims Instacart Personal Shoppers Should Be Classified as Employees | A new lawsuit alleges that Instacart, an on-demand grocery delivery service valued at 2 billion, misclassifies its workers as independent contractors to avoid paying expenses like overtime, reimbursements for gas and workers' compensation. The class action complaint, which was filed on Jan. 9th but has not been previously reported, describes Instacart's business practices as "unethical, oppressive and unscrupulous" and seeks damages for anyone who has worked as a "shopper delivery person" for the company since 2012. The complaint, which contains allegations similar to those in two ongoing lawsuits also pending in California's Northern District Court against ride-app companies Uber and Lyft, is the latest potential legal hurdle for the surging on-demand economy. "Instacart does all it can to distance itself from the employer-employee relationship," says Bob Arns, whose San Francisco-based Arns Law Firm brought the suit on behalf of workers including Dominic Cobarruviaz, who was injured in an accident while delivering groceries for Instacart. "Why does a company want to do that? It's to keep the bottom line lower, to unfairly compete against other companies. That's the crux of our case.", The suit contends that Instacart, which is two-and-a-half years old and operates in 15 markets around the U.S. has violated labor laws due to the workers' "misclassification, unpaid workers' compensation insurance, unpaid tax contributions, unreimbursed expenses, and related misconduct." The complaint also claims that the company has committed fraud, knowing workers should be classified as employees, and used unfair business practices. "There is this narrative that I think companies like Instacart and Uber and Lyft want to become more mainstream," says Jonathan Davis, another lawyer for the plaintiffs, "that somehow these antiquated laws don't apply to these types of work relationships. And frankly it's ludicrous. Just because a worker is directed and controlled by an algorithm that comes through a phone as opposed to a foreman doesn't do anything to change the fundamental relationship of employment.", Instacart has not responded to requests for comment. The case names the company as Maplebear Inc. which does business as Instacart. Instacart customers order groceries through a smartphone app, choosing items they want from their preferred store. The app then relays grocery orders to workers, who shop for the products and deliver them using their own vehicles in as little as an hour or two. The company takes a cut from a delivery fee and gets an undisclosed amount from retailers that customers buy groceries from through the app. In late February, the case was assigned to District Judge Edward Chen, who is also hearing the Uber case, which claims that Uber drivers are employees rather than independent contractors and should be reimbursed for expenses like gas, insurance and vehicle maintenance. On March 11, Chen denied Uber's request for a summary judgment ruling that drivers are independent contractors, saying that a jury would have to decide whether the drivers are employees or "partners," as the company calls them. In his ruling, the judge said Uber's claim that it is a "technology company" and not a "transportation company" is "fatally flawed.", Instacart's CEO Apoorva Mehta has likewise said that Instacart is a software company, not a grocery delivery company. Arns believes that the terms the company sets out, which customers must agree to, could pass liability along to the person ordering groceries. If Instacart is "solely a communication platform" for facilitating a connection between the customer and the shopper, he says, damages from an accident or injury like the one Corbarruviaz had could be the responsibility of the customer who started the communication. The suit rejects the idea that Instacart is simply a middle man, claiming that the company "is in the business of providing online grocery shopping and delivery service." The suit seeks to define the class as everyone who "performed grocery delivery service" for Instacart from Jan. 1, 2012 to the present. As of June 2014, about 1,000 people were reportedly registered to shop and deliver groceries for the company. Arns estimates that the size of the class could be 10,000. The growing independent-contractor workforce is a key reason that companies like Instacart and Uber have been able to grow so quickly. In January, Forbes put Instacart at the top of its "America's Most Promising Companies" list. The cost of organizing independent contractors is much less than hiring employees. The companies who operate this way don't have to pay unemployment tax or overtime, or ensure that workers are making at least minimum wage. They don't have to pay for their own fleet of vehicles or costs associated with operating them since the workers use their personal cars. In many cases, they don't have to pay for the smartphones or data plans workers need to do the jobs. Arns and Davis say that after the costs of being a worker for Instacart are added up, many of them are not making minimum wage. Unlike drivers on platforms like Uber and Lyft, who can log in to work and log out at any time, personal shoppers for Instacart set their own hours in advance and work in shifts. "We can't sacrifice the gains that have been made over time in this country to create good, solid middle-class jobs simply at the altar of expediency and technology," Davis says. They contend that the lawsuit is beneficial for companies in the sharing economy in the long run, even if it ends up costing them millions. "We want to see Instacart succeed," says Arns, "and it can succeed by complying with the law.", Corbarruviaz v. Maplebear, Inc. , , Listen to the most important stories of the day. |
US | TorchCarrying White Nationalists March Through the University of Virginia | A group of several hundred white nationalists marched down the University of Virginia campus, torches in hand, before clashing with counter-protesters Friday night. The mass of people yelled chants associated with racist ideology like "You will not replace us!" and "Blood and soil!" according to NBC. The march came a day before a "Unite the Right" rally of white nationalists opposing the removal of a Confederate general Robert E. Lee statue. Violence broke out near the statue of Thomas Jefferson, who founded UVA, where counter-protesters were located, the New York Times reported. There were several minor injuries, and people on both sides of the conflict reported being pepper-sprayed, according to NBC. The clash itself lasted about 15 to 20 minutes. The Times also reported that at least one person was taken away in handcuffs. Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer condemned the protests on Facebook writing, "I am beyond disgusted by this unsanctioned and despicable display of visual intimidation on a college campus.", Signer also called the act "a cowardly parade of hatred, bigotry, racism, and intolerance." |
US | FBI Offers Reward for North Carolina Girl 13 Abducted Before School | An Amber Alert has been issued for a 13-year-old North Carolina girl who was spotted being forced into a relative's car in front of her home as she was waiting to be picked up for school. The FBI's field office in Charlotte reports that Hania Noleia Aguilar went missing just before 7 a.m. on Nov. 5 in Lumberton, North Carolina. The FBI said Hania was outside her Rosewood Mobile Home Park waiting on the rest of her family to come outside and drive to school when a witness saw a man dressed in all black and wearing a yellow bandana force Hania into a relative's car that was parked in the driveway. The FBI is describing the car as a green 2002 Ford Expedition with South Carolina license plate NWS-984. The paint on the hood is peeling and there is a Clemson sticker on the rear window, authorities said. Authorities are describing Hania as a Hispanic female with black hair, brown eyes and 5 feet tall. Police said she weighs approximately 126 pounds and was last seen wearing a blue shirt with flowers and blue jeans. The FBI said that one of Hania's Spanish-speaking friends initially told a dispatcher the abductor was a black male, but follow-up interviews confirmed the witness had not seen the race of the abductor because he was wearing all black, including long sleeves. The FBI is now offering a 15,000 reward for information leading to Hania's safe return. Authorities are asking anyone who spots the green Ford Explorer to call a hotline set for Hania at 910-272-5871. |
US | This Is What Hurricane Matthew Looks Like From Space | Hurricane Matthew strengthened to a Category 4 on Thursday as it headed toward the U.S. and Florida Gov. Rick Scott encouraged residents living in evacuation areas to leave before the storm is set to hit there on Friday. "This storm will kill you," Scott said at a news conference. "Time's running out. Leave. There's no excuses.", The storm has already killed more than 100 people and caused severe damage across the Caribbean. As it moved to the north of Cuba and toward the Bahamas this week, NASA captured some dramatic footage of the storm's path. Cameras on the International Space Station captured Hurricane Matthew on Wednesday when it was a Category 3, and was moving at about 12 mph with wind speeds at 120 mph. The hurricane could be the strongest storm to hit the U.S. in decades, according to the National Weather Service. With more than 2 million people told to evacuate and hundreds of flights canceled, people across the Southeast Atlantic coast have been preparing for an intense storm. |
US | Eric Schneiderman Sponsored Domestic Violence Law That Could Now Be Used Against Him | Former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sponsored legislation that criminalized strangulation a law that legal experts say could now be used to prosecute him, as he faces allegations from women who say he hit, choked and threatened them. Schneiderman resigned on Monday, and the Manhattan District Attorney's office is now investigating the accusations. "He seems to have seen himself as being above the law that he helped write. That seems, to me, to be a breathtakingly brazen level of arrogance," said Jane Manning, a former New York City prosecutor who is now the director of advocacy for the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women. Manning worked with Schneiderman's office to pass the Strangulation Prevention Act of 2010 when he was a state senator. "He took the political capital that came from working on an anti-strangulation bill and used it to try to get away with strangulation and assault against women in his own life," Manning said. "It's a stunning act of betrayal.", Schneiderman denies that he assaulted anyone. "In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity," he said in a statement. "I have not assaulted anyone. I have never engaged in non-consensual sex, which is a line I would not cross.", The New York Democrat sponsored the Strangulation Prevention Act, which made the intentional obstruction of breathing or blood circulation a misdemeanor. Strangulation that causes stupor, loss of consciousness or physical injury is a violent felony under the law. "The time to criminalize this horrific form of abuse is now," Schneiderman said when he introduced the legislation in 2010. "It sends a strong message that we must do everything in our power to ensure that no one is immune from accountability for committing such a heinous crime.", The passage of the law was considered a victory for women whose abusers had used choking to control them without leaving marks. "Prior to this law, a lot of strangulation attacks could not be prosecuted because if the attack didn't leave visible marks, the police would not consider it to be an assault," Manning said. , In a report published by the New Yorker on Monday, two women who were romantically involved with Schneiderman at separate times between 2013 and 2017, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, accused him of slapping them across the ear and face and choking them without their consent. "He was cutting off my ability to breathe," Selvaratnam told the magazine, describing one incident of abuse that took place when she was involved with Schneiderman from summer 2016 to fall 2017. Barish recounted an incident in 2013 when Schneiderman allegedly slapped her and pushed her onto the bed. "He then used his body weight to hold me down, and he began to choke me," she told the New Yorker. "The choking was very hard. It was really bad. I kicked. In every fibre, I felt I was being beaten by a man.", Manning said the conduct detailed in these accusations could constitute misdemeanor charges of assault and criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation the latter of which only became a misdemeanor with the passage of Schneiderman's Strangulation Prevention Act. The statute of limitations for a misdemeanor is two years in New York, which means Schneiderman might not face charges for allegations of abuse that took place before 2016. But Manning said Selvaratnam's accusations appear to fall within the statue of limitations and could lead to criminal charges. "It's the height of irony," said Bennett Gershman, a Pace Law professor and a former prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. "It's an incredible irony that the law that he passed could be used to prosecute him. You probably couldn't find anything similar like that anywhere in the country.", If Schneiderman is charged with strangulation, prosecutors would need to prove "intent to impede the normal breathing or circulation of the blood of another person.", "If you've got somebody who's pressing their hands around somebody's neck and she's screaming and he's pressing harder, you don't need much more evidence if you've got those facts in front of you," Gershman said. "It speaks for itself." |
US | 24 Amazon Employees Hospitalized After Can of Bear Spray Explodes at Fulfillment Center | Two dozen workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in New Jersey were sent to the hospital one in critical condition after a machine punctured an aerosol canister of bear repellent Wednesday. The incident occurred shortly before 9 a.m. at Amazon's fulfillment center in Robbinsville Township, outside of Trenton. Township spokesperson John Nalbone tells TIME that employees reported having trouble breathing and felt burning sensations in their eyes and throat. Nalbone says emergency crews responded to a call that 54 employees were experiencing symptoms. Of those, 24 were taken to the hospital. One is in critical condition in the ICU, but expected to have "a positive outcome.", According to Nalbone, an automated machine punctured a 9-ounce can of the bear spray, which contains highly concentrated capsaicin that is meant to repel aggressive bears up to 30 feet away. Multiple brands of bear spray are available for sale on Amazon's site. Amazon confirmed that a damaged canister caused the problem. "Today at our Robbinsville fulfillment center, a damaged aerosol can dispensed strong fumes in a contained area of the facility," Rachael Lighty, an Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement to TIME. "The safety of our employees is our top priority, and as such, all employees in that area have been relocated to safe place and employees experiencing symptoms are being treated onsite. As a precaution, some employees have been transported to local hospitals for evaluation and treatment. We appreciate the swift response of our local responders.", Nalbone says the building was given the all-clear by the health department a few hours later. He says the canister was punctured on the third floor of the building and impacted only a small area. No nearby residents were at risk. The workers who were not taken to the hospital were given a few extras hours for their lunch break and were expected to return to work around 4 or 5 p.m. Nalbone says |
US | Alabama Teen I Was Suspended For Refusing To Take Common Core Test | An Alabama eighth grader has claimed she was suspended from school after declining to take standardized tests associated with the controversial Common Core curriculum. Alyssa McKinney, 14, told WAAY-TV that she didn't believe in the educational requirements, which aim to set a national standard in K-12 education for math and English, and thus refused to take the tests on three separate occasions. While her first two acts of resistance were reportedly met with in-school suspensions, the third time landed her an out-of-school suspension. Although Whitesburg Middle School didn't talk to the press, the Alabama Department of Education wrote on its Facebook wall that "parents can choose to have their child be absent and follow all local absentee policies or have their child work in a supervised area of the school. They should put their refusal in writing and give to their school." It was unclear whether McKinney's mother gave her daughter the required opt-out note. The Common Core exists in 44 states and the District of Columbia and has proven highly controversial. Proponents of the educational standards, which were introduced by the National Governors Association in 2009, include President Barack Obama, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. , But there is strong resistance against the curriculum as well, emanating from conservatives who believe "Obamacore" represents federal overreach and an intrusion into states rights, but also encompassing left-leaning critics like comedian Louis C.K. who has said it destroyed his child's love of math. Common Core also underwent scrutiny in April when New York parents and educators were surprised to see brand names including Barbie, iPod, and Mug Root Beer in more than 1 million tests. McKinney isn't the only student to get in trouble for refusing to take the standardized tests. Seirra Olivero, a 13-year-old in upstate New York, claimed to have been suspended for insubordination last month after encouraging classmates to opt out of the Common Core English test. Other students have allegedly been denied ice cream by school administrators for opting out. Fox News |
US | Survivors Used MeToo to Speak Up A Year Later Theyre Still Fighting for Meaningful Change | The morning after Chloe Dykstra posted an essay online, she woke up and checked Twitter, as she does every day. "I opened trending and saw my face," she says. "It was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced. I was just like, No, no, no.'", Dykstra had written about what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with an unnamed ex-boyfriend. With a little investigative work, the Internet quickly identified her ex as Chris Hardwick, host of the Talking Dead show and founder of Nerdist. Hardwick denied the allegations. At first her account was flooded with encouraging messages. "Then the tide kind of shifted," she says. "I was attacked relentlessly. There was an organized group of people online whose sole purpose was to try to disprove me. I was terrified people were going to figure out where I lived.", In the glorious first moments of a revolution, shots ring out, tyrants fall, and visionaries rally the exploited. Last year, that rallying cry was MeToo, and as the hashtag went viral, with survivors sharing their stories of sexual assault and harassment, hundreds of alleged abusers lost their positions of power. What some dismissed as a moment a year ago evolved into a sustaining movement. In September, CBS head Les Moonves stepped down after six women accused him of harassmentallegations he denies. And Christine Blasey Ford has brought into question the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who she says assaulted her at a high school party in the 1980s, an allegation he denies. For decades, the public ignored or ridiculed claims of harassment or assault. Now the news of the day suggests women are more likely to be heard. But away from the headlines, it's not so simple. In a national poll of 1,000 women conducted by TIME with SSRS, 60 of the women surveyed felt the environment for women in their workplace had not changed since MeToo, and 51 say they are no more likely to report sexual harassment now than before the hashtag went viral. As the dust settles and the public's attention drifts, survivors and activists attempt the complicated work of creating lasting changecollecting signatures for new legislation, pushing to eradicate boys' clubs by urging the hiring and promotion of women, and assuring that the movement continues, especially in average workplaces. And that's all while dealing with what comes after publicly declaring MeToo. "After months of reading horrible things about myself, I got to such a low point that I considered ending it," Dykstra says. "I didn't really have guidance because you can't really Google, How to handle being an accuser?'", , When Trish Nelson took the stage in front of hundreds of chefs and restaurateurs at a conference in Copenhagen last month to talk about how they could improve kitchen culture, she froze. "I was terrified that I'd be booed off the stage," she says. "Finally I put down the script and just told them, I'm one of the women who came forward about Mario Batali and Ken Friedman.'" She'd already faced criticism for speaking out, and as she surveyed the crowd, she recognized friends and fans of celebrity chef Batali and prominent restaurateur Friedman, whom Nelson and nine other women had accused of grabbing them and making sexual comments in Friedman's New York restaurant the Spotted Pig. Friedman has disputed aspects of the accounts but apologized for his "abrasive" behavior. Batali has said he doesn't recall specific events but apologized for general behavior and is currently under investigation in New York and Boston following allegations of other assaults., Yet Nelson was pleasantly surprised when, afterward, dozens of chefs approached her to talk about how they planned to hire more female sous chefs or make their kitchens friendlier to female servers. Since coming forward in December, she has become an advocate for the fair treatment of women in restaurants, where some 80 of waiters and waitresses report experiencing sexual harassment at the hands of guests and chefs, according to a 2014 national survey. While the cultures of individual restaurants are determined by the attitude and whims of their owners and chefs, workers have been taking matters into their own hands. On Sept. 18, McDonald's employees walked out in what organizers called the first nationwide strike to protest workplace sexual harassment. They say the fast-food chain failed to make changes after employees filed 10 complaints of sexual harassment with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May. McDonald's said in a statement that it is currently "engaging third-party experts" to "evolve our policies, procedures and training.", In other areas of the service industry, survivors are making some progress. Housekeepers are routinely vulnerable to attack by guests a 2016 survey of Seattle hotel workers found 53 of housekeepers had experienced harassment or assault at work. In July, the Hands Off Pants On ordinance, which mandates that hotels equip employees with portable emergency-contact devices, went into effect in Chicago and labor advocates are working to push similar laws in states like California. This month, five major hotel chainsHilton, Hyatt, InterContinental, Marriott and Wyndhampledged to equip housekeepers with panic buttons. But other hotels remain resistant to change. Over a year after Dana Lewis alleged that two fellow employees at New York City's Plaza Hotel harassed herone following her into a supply closet and forcibly kissing her on three different occasionsonly one had been fired. The Plaza says the other was suspended for two weeks after an arbitration hearing. She joined a class-action lawsuit against the hotel two months before MeToo went viral and has taken medical leave from work on the orders of her psychiatrist to cope with the emotional strain of having to work with her alleged attacker. "I do feel like the push was extremely strong last year," Lewis says. "But it's dying down just from my own experiences with the Plaza. Nothing has changed there. It's still toxic." She cannot afford to leave the job she's a single mom, with a daughter to support. In California, hotel worker Juana Melarawho spoke out last year about being flashed and propositioned by guests on multiple occasions while she cleaned hotel roomsleft her job to put in long hours walking door-to-door collecting signatures for a bill like Hands Off Pants On in her area of Long Beach. "The hotels had a chance last year four weeks before MeToo became viral to support similar protections. They didn't," Melara says. "Now we've collected 46,000 signatures to try to pass the Working Woman's bill. We wouldn't have had to do that if they had just supported the law last year. But they can't see past their noses.", Advocacy can take a toll. "I don't know whether to call myself a victim or survivor," says Jessica Howard, who struggled with depression as she relived the abuse she suffered from former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, now serving up to 360 years in prison. "I had a dark 2017," she says. "It was a life-or-death situation for me in January.", Howard was among the first three women who came forward about Nassar and one of the 156 women who testified at his sentencing hearing. In the winter, the world watched as they took the stand, one by one, to share their experiences in a testimony that took days, and accumulated the same overwhelming effect that MeToo had the day that ordinary women flooded social media with their experiences. But for Howard, the fact that so many women had to take the stand in order for any action to be taken remains disconcerting. "I'm still struggling with the fact that it almost takes hordes of people to make it out of the he said, she said' realm," she says, "for a woman or girl or child to even be taken seriously.", After the testimony, the president of Michigan State University resigned, the athletic director retired, and Nassar's boss was charged with crimes related to sexual misconduct. The university will pay out 500 million to the girls and women Nassar abused. The entire board of USA Gymnastics and the CEO of the United States Olympic Committee resigned as well, but Howard and other survivors are pushing for a complete overhaul of the sport. "They said it was just a Nassar problem," she says. "Those organizations institutionally groomed us and handed us on a platter for a sexual abuser. Had they revealed what they knew years earlier, dozens of girls would never have been molested.", While Howard continues to work as an activist, some women want to exercise their right to be heard, then simply move on with their lives. Lindsay Meyer's proudest moment in the past year came when she was featured in a story on a local San Francisco blog, not because of her role in the MeToo movement but because her startup, Batch, was celebrating its one-year anniversary. Meyer, who spoke up last June about the harassment she says she endured from venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck, who invested in her previous company, doesn't want to be defined by her role in the movement. Caldbeck apologized to the women he "made uncomfortable" and resigned from his VC firm. Change is slow in that world too a recent poll by LeanIn.org found that men are more hesitant to interact with female subordinates in the wake of MeToo. "I think aside from a few nasty VCs who were ousted, the same decisionmakers are still enthroned," Meyer says. "You've got more of a PR campaign about why female investors have better returns, but to me it's a lot of messaging.", Such halfhearted attempts at change can be discouraging to advocates, as they watch powerful men resume their lives mere months after losing jobs over allegations of misconduct. Ryan Seacrest returned to E! after the network quickly cleared him of accusations of harassment that the host denies. Louis CK, who admitted to exposing himself to female comedians, quietly performed a stand-up set at a comedy club. And Chris Hardwick returned to host his show on AMC after a roughly two-month suspension after Dykstra's accusations. "When I found out he had gotten his jobs back, I was actually relieved because I knew the online harassment wasn't going to stop until he was reinstated," Dykstra says. Still, the vitriol has yet to abate. , Save for the uproar that follows a new accusation, public enthusiasm for the cause also appears to be fading even in the entertainment industry. In January 2018, the women who helped launch Time's Up wore black to the Golden Globes to protest sexism and invited anti-harassment activists as their guests. This year's Emmy Awards passed without any explicit mention of MeToo. Time's Up has, however, set up a 21 million legal-defense fund for women who suffer from harassment and assault at work in any industry. They're also pushing for entertainment-industry unions to create new codes of conduct that hold employers, rather than individuals, responsible for harassment in an industry where women account for 2 of cinematographers, 8 of directors and 10 of writers. "We have been working on this issue for 25 years," says Mily Trevio-Sauceda, co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, or National Farmworkers Women's Alliance, and herself a survivor of harassment. "There were women who came to us before this year and told us what happened but didn't want to publicly say anything because they felt shame. But when women in our community started seeing women in L.A. and women from different industries stopping the silence, they wanted to give a voice to the issue." The organization wrote a public letter of support after the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and marched alongside actors. But still, she says, it's hard to bridge the cultural divide between the farmworkers and Hollywood. There are other challenges. In August came the revelation that Asia Argento, an Italian actor and one of Weinstein's original accusers, paid 380,000 late last year to actor Jimmy Bennett, who had accused her of assault. The news came after Argento delivered a rousing speech at the Cannes Film Festival in support of MeToo and change in the industry. Argento has since now accused Bennett of assault. And last week, Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen's wife and the adopted daughter of Allen's former partner Mia Farrow, denied in an interview the claims that Farrow has made over the years that Allen sexually abused both Previn and Farrow's daughter Dylan. The case predates MeToo by decades, but with its conflicting accounts, show-business setting and elements of activism Farrow was an early, prominent crusader against abuse, Previn's comments added new complexity to a decades-old debate. Ultimately and unfairly, the burden falls upon survivorsany survivor, reallyto explain away these complications after news of the Argento allegations broke, many turned to early Weinstein accuser and fellow crusader Rose McGowan for an explanation, even though McGowan wasn't in the room when the alleged assault took place and had no means of clarifying the messy narrative. Meanwhile, thorny questions about Woody Allen's legacy have been thrust on the women and children in his life rather than on Allen himself. Even as hundreds of wrongdoers are fired from their jobs, investigated by police and, in the rarest of cases, actually sentenced for committing the crime of assault or rape, the women who lead MeToo will never be able to declare victory. "I still have to think about the worst moment in my life when I go to sleep every night," says Lewis, the Plaza Hotel worker. There will be no one moment that solves all the problems of sexism and the abuses that accompany it in any industry. For activists, including survivors, the past year has sometimes felt just, and often discouraging. But if revolutions come all at once, societies change slowly. That's a cause both of frustration and ultimatelyactuarially, evenof real hope. "Even if I'm not seeing change among those in power, I see changes in my generation, especially among men in my generation," says Meyer. "I have to hope that when those men and women rise to positions of power, that's when things will finally, really, be different.", Read more 7 Women on What Their Lives Are Like After Coming Forward About Sexual Harassment and Assault, Correction, Sept. 21, The original version of this story misstated when Chicago's "Hands Off Pants On" ordinance passed. It passed in 2017, not in July of this year. It went into effect in July. |
US | Chuck Schumer Calls for Investigation of SmartphoneShaped Gun | New York Sen. Chuck Schumer has called for an investigation into a new kind of gun that looks like a smartphone. The gun, made by a company called Ideal Conceal and scheduled to debut in mid-2016. The company claims the 380-caliber double-barrel handgun can fold into the shape of a smartphone, the New York Daily News reports. Thousands of people have already pre-ordered the weapon, which costs 395. "At first glance or even second glance it looks like an iPhone," said Schumer, a longtime gun control advocate. "Take a closer look and you will see that it's a real, deadly handgun.", Schumer said the weapon's ability to blend in suggests "It's clearly being marketed for nefarious purposes," asking, "Why would we want to make it easier for criminals or terrorists like those who attacked Paris and Brussels to wreak havoc?", NYDN |
US | Father of Three Abuse Victims Tries to Attack Larry Nassar in Court | The father of three victims of Larry Nassar tried to attack the disgraced sports doctor in a court hearing on Friday morning only to be restrained by bailiffs. "I would ask you to as part of the sentencing to grant me 5 minutes in a locked room with this demon," the father, Randall Margraves, said after two of his daughters spoke, according to the Associated Press. "You know that I can't do that. That's not how our legal system works," Judge Rosemarie Aquilina responded. , , At that, Margraves ran across the court room toward Nassar, prompting bailiffs to tackle him to the floor. Nassar is in court this week for his final sentencing hearing, where he faces a third prison sentence on charges of sexual abuse. More victims have confronted Nassar in court this week, after dozens of victims made powerful statements at another sentencing hearing last week, when Nassar was sentenced to a minimum of 40 years in prison. More than 265 victims have now come forward to accuse Nassar of abuse. |
US | Freddie Gray Court Mixup Mistakes Ordinary Citizens for Indicted Officers | A school cafeteria worker and a plumber from Maryland said their lives have been turned upside down after court documents mistakenly identified them as the police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray. A lawyer representing Alicia White, a cafeteria worker from Baltimore who happens to share a name with one of the arrested officers, said her client's life had been turned into a "living hell" since the court records were made public, the Baltimore Sun reports. "Her address, her height, her weight, her driver's license number all of the information was my client's information," the lawyer said. Officials have not yet commented on the error, though court records have since replaced the defendants' home addresses with a general address for the Baltimore Police Department. Freddie Gray suffered a lethal spinal injury while under police custody, triggering an explosion of protests and riots across Baltimore last week. Read more at the Baltimore Sun. |
US | Army General Pleads Guilty to Lesser Charges in Sexual Assault Case | Updated 1115am, March 17, The Army general accused of forcing his mistress into oral sex and threatening to kill her family pleaded guilty Monday on lesser charges, bringing his closely watched assault case to a close as the military seeks to clamp down on sexual violence in its ranks. A judge accepted a guilty plea by Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair to disobeying a commander's order not to contact his mistress, misusing his government travel charge card, using demeaning language to refer to female officers and using a curse word when confronted about that conduct, the Associated Press reports, bringing a humiliating two-year affair to an unsettled end. The case against Sinclair was derailed earlier this year after prosecutors found that their chief witnessthe general's mistress and an army captainmay have lied under oath at a pretrial hearing. But Army officials say they believe his former lover's testimony that the general forced her to perform oral sex against her will. , Had Sinclair been convicted on sexual assault charges, he could have faced life in prison. AP |
US | Why the Criminal Case Against Flint Water Regulators Is So Unusual | Two Michigan state employees tasked with ensuring the safety of the public water supply were charged with multiple felonies on Wednesday in connection with Flint's lead water crisischarges that experts say may be unprecedented for a water contamination case. The charges against two Michigan Department of Environmental Quality MDEQ employees, which include misconduct in office and tampering with evidence, follow the disclosure late last year that officials at the state agency falsified reports about Flint's water to make the lead levels appear lower than they actually were. In cases involving environmental contamination, prosecutors usually go after the operators of water systems, who actually pump the water into residents' homes, says Jane Barrett, a University of Maryland environmental law professor. It's much rarer to see charges against the government regulators tasked with ensuring that the water is safe to drinkand in this case, those regulators now face the most serious charges of anyone involved so far. "What you have here are regulators providing false information," Barrett says. "It's highly unusual for agency personnel charged with enforcing a law to be found tampering with evidence to the level at which a city's water supply ends up being poisoned.", Read More See What Flint's Poisoned Water Looks Like, The two MDEQ employees, Michael Prysby and Stephen Busch, have been charged with multiple felonies and misdemeanors, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced Wednesday. Michael Glasgow, Flint's utilities administrator, has been charged with a felony for tampering with evidence and a misdemeanor for willful neglect of duty. The felony charges could each entail four to five years in prison, while the misdemeanors could mean fines of up to 10,000. "They had a duty to protect the health of families and citizens of Flint," Schuette said at a news conference Wednesday. "They failed.", Internal MDEQ documents released last November showed that at least one MDEQ draft report from last year appeared to have been doctored so that samples of high lead levels in two Flint homes were dropped from the final report. That allowed officials to say that Flint was still meeting federal regulations involving the federal lead and copper rule. Glasgow, the utilities administrator, told Michigan Radio in November that he was pressured by MDEQ to take those high samples off the report. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said Wednesday after the charges were announced that Prysby and Busch had been suspended without pay, the Detroit Free Press reports. Snyder referred to the allegations as "deeply troubling and extremely serious.", Snyder was asked if he might face criminal charges in connection with the Flint crisis. He replied that he didn't want to speculate, but said, "I don't believe so.", Read More Go Behind TIME's Flint Water Crisis Cover, In 2014, Flint switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River to save money, but the city failed to properly treat the water, allowing lead from the city's pipes to leach into the public supply. For months, officials repeatedly said the water was safe to drink despite reports from residents and independent researchers that it was contaminated. In January, Snyder declared a state of emergency, and several state and federal investigations have been launched to determine what officials knew about the water. The city's water supply is still not safe to drink without filters. Earlier Wednesday, Schuette said his investigation was ongoing and more charges could be filed. "This is just the beginning," he said. "Nobody's above the law." |
US | A California City Revolts Against Undocumented Immigrants | Being the mayor of Murrieta, Calif. is only a part-time job, and Alan Long, who's held the post since January, earns his living as a battalion chief in a nearby fire department. There, he's in charge of emergency management and preparedness, skills that have been particularly handy in recent days. Now Long and Murrieta, a midsize city about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, have become a new flash point in the fierce and often contentious debate over how to handle a recent crush of children and families streaming across the Mexican border. In what's been called a humanitarian crisis, from October 2013 to June 2014, more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors were caught illegally crossing the border, according to federal officials. More than half of the children came from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, seeking refuge from violence in their home countries and lured by rumors that it's easy to obtain legal status in the U.S. The tidal wave has prompted border-patrol offices in Texas, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of children and families, to transfer undocumented immigrants to processing facilities in other states. The move has raised concerns that a broken federal immigration system is burdening local communities far beyond the border. This concern came to a head Tuesday, when protesters in Murrieta confronted several buses transporting 140 immigrants to a border-patrol center there. The passengers presumably all undocumented and said to be children and parents had been apprehended in Texas and flown to San Diego when they boarded buses bound for Murrieta. But facing a roadside crowd stationed blocks from the processing center and carrying signs that said, "Stop Illegal Immigration," "Return to Sender" and "No New Illegals," the border-patrol agents on board turned back and went to a center in San Diego instead. "I wasn't surprised the protest happened," Long told TIME in an interview. Rumors of the immigrants' arrival had been swirling in the city for weeks. On Monday, Long held a news conference in which he confirmed that 140 immigrants would land in San Diego at 11 a.m. on Tuesday and travel by bus to Murrieta that afternoon. Long said he never intended to incite a protest and that local residents most concerned about the immigrant transfer already knew about it, even without his announcement. He said he was just trying bat down false information being passed around the community including that the immigrants on the way were criminals or carrying diseases and present the hard facts. "I'm getting credit for organizing this protest, but I've never organized or told people to protest," Long said. Rather, he said he hoped to encourage Murrieta residents to contact elected officials in Washington and urge them to repair the immigration system and beef up border enforcement. Calls from Murrieta to members of Congress may have taken place at Long's urging, but the protest itself has garnered far more attention and been held up by anti-illegal-immigration activists as proof that locals can stand their ground against the intrusion of undocumented immigrants and by immigrant-rights activists as an example of xenophobia and compassionless behavior at its worst. Long, who was born in the U.S. but is ethnically half-Mexican, said Murrieta residents are concerned that a large influx of undocumented immigrants will strain local resources. Judging by comments made by some residents at Long's Monday news conference, they're also concerned that undocumented immigrants will be released into their community en masse. "They're going to be dumped in minivans throughout the county," one woman present said. Immigrants like those on the bus to Murrieta typically face three possible scenarios, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE. If they are a threat to public safety or national security, they could be detained. Those who are not eligible to attain legal status could be deported, although that process often takes time. If they are not a threat, pass background checks and health screenings and have a claim that they could obtain legal status, they could be released into a community in California or elsewhere and monitored while their application is reviewed. Monitoring, according to ICE, can include electronic bracelets, in-person required check-ins, voice-recognition telephonic software or in-home visits by immigration officials. Immigrants who believe they may be able to attain legal status risk that if they do not comply with monitoring requirements. It's not clear whether the border patrol will try to transport another group of immigrants to Murrieta. But already, Long said, more rumors in the community are swirling. "We are a very compassionate community," Long said. "We understand these immigrants are coming from a less desirable location. It's not about them. We're opposing the federal system that's broken." |
US | Shakespeare Theaters Nationwide Are Getting Threats Amid Caesar Controversy | Theaters nationwide that perform the works of William Shakespeare are receiving threatening phone calls, messages, and social media posts linked to a controversial New York City production of Julius Caesar. The Boston Globe reports theaters in Massachusetts, Texas, and Washington have gotten abusive messages ranging from death threats to accusations that the theater is responsible for the recent shooting in Alexandria, Va. that left four wounded, including Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana. "We just got slammed," the executive and artistic director of Shakespeare Dallas Raphael Parry told the Globe. "It's pretty amazing the vitriol, the wishing we would die and our family would die. A whole lot of them say that we should burn in hell.", The various Shakespeare theaters across the country are not linked to the New York performance. The Public Theater in New York has been staging a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar with a Trump-like figure in the titular role. The interpretation has been met with criticism from those offended by the scene in which Caesar is assassinated by a group of senators. A pair of protestors interrupted Friday's performance and were heard shouting "Stop the normalization of political violence against the right!" and "you are inciting terrorists.", The Public Theater's artistic director recently responded to the controversy by saying the organization does not advocate violence. "This play, on the contrary, warns about what happens when you try to preserve democracy by nondemocratic means," said the director, Oskar Eustis. While the assassination scene is the play's most well-known moment, it also portrays the Roman Empire descending into chaos after Caesar is killed. |
US | Your Complete Guide to March for Our Lives Rallies From NY to LA | From coast to coast, throngs of teenagers will be joined by celebrities, teachers, parents and everyday Americans this Saturday to march for their lives. They'll be taking part in a nationwide demonstration called March for Our Lives organized by the student survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were shot and killed by a former student on Valentine's Day. More than 500,000 people in major cities like New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland are expected to march in solidarity with the Florida shooting survivors to advocate for gun control and school safety. Following the shooting now the deadliest high school shooting in the country the students from Parkland, along with students around the country, have been taking action Visiting statehouses to demand legislative action, staging walkouts, and organizing marches. More specifically, a group of students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have been organizing March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. and satellite marches have popped up around the world. The March for Our Lives website has a search feature to find an event location., , Here's everything we know about seven satellite March for Our Lives protests planned across the U.S. including meet-up locations, timing and who is expected to speak, Time 12 p.m. E.T. Meeting spot Pennsylvania Avenue, between 3rd and 12th street NW. There are pedestrian entrances at Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street, NW, Constitution Avenue and 7th Street, NW, and Indiana Avenue and 7th Street, NW. A map of the route can be found on the March for Our Lives website. Speakers and performers There are more than half a dozen singers set to perform at the March for Our Lives protest in D.C. including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt who also dedicated this month's Hamildrop to create an anthem for the marchers, Miley Cyrus, Jennifer Hudson, Demi Lovato, Vic Mensa, Ariana Grande, Common and Andra Day. , The D.C. march is the main protest planned by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and they set up a website and app that will include up-to-date information on March 24 for those looking to join them. , , Time 10 a.m. E.T. Meeting spot Central Park West, West 72nd Street, Manhattan, New York, 10023, Speakers and performers The New York City event states that the "program will feature survivors of gun violence, activists, and musical performances.", , For security purposes, organizers in New York City are asking participants not to bring large bags or signs that include metal or wood, and plastic bags must be transparent. , Time 9 a.m. P.T. Meeting spot 603 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles, California, 90013, Speakers and performers A slew of celebrities will be speaking at the Los Angeles march in addition to student speakers and performers. Amy Schumer, Yara Shahidi, Connie Britton, Olivia Wilde, Mayor Eric Garcetti, Rebecca Mieliwocki, the 2012 National California Teacher of the Year are all set to speak or perform at March for Our Lives LA . , Time 1 p.m. P.T. Meeting spot San Francisco Civic Center Plaza, 335 McAllister St. San Francisco, California, 94105, Speakers and performers The event, organized by Shoshana Ungerleider, will put students front and center. "Every adult onstage is there to introduce a student," Ungerleider told the San Francisco Chronicle. Speakers include students, a Columbine High School shooting survivor, and the father of a student killed during the Isla Vista massacre at University of California, Santa Barbara. Other marches in the area can be found at the March for Our Lives website. Time 10 a.m. P.T. There will be sign making before the event, if you want to get there early. Meeting spot Cal Anderson Park, 1635 11th Ave. Seattle, Washington, 98122. The route will be from Cal Anderson to International Fountain, Seattle Center. Speakers and performers Speakers will include U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell D-Wash., Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, musician Brandi Carlile, Gregory Pleasant from Youth 4 Peace, and two March for Our Lives student founders and organizers Rhiannon Rasaretnam and Emilia Allard. More information about this march can be found at the March for Our Lives Seattle website or Facebook page. Students are encouraged to bring materials needed to register to vote. , Time 11 a.m. C.T. Meeting spot Union Park, 1501 W Randolph St. Chicago, Illinois, 60606, Speakers and performers It's unclear who will be speaking at the Chicago event. Event details are being posted on March for Our Lives Chicago's Facebook page. , Time 11 a.m. E.T. Folks will start gathering before the march at 9 a.m. E.T. Meeting spot Madison Vocational High School, 75 Malcom X Boulevard, Roxbury, Massachusetts, 02120, , Speakers and performers The March for Our Lives Boston website has a 14-page resource booklet for those interested in the event. There is currently no information on who will be speaking at the Boston rally. Time 10 a.m. P.T. Meeting spot North Park Blocks, Portland, Oregon, 97204, Speakers and performer There will be student speakers along with a performance by Portugal. The Man. |
US | I Was Very Young Nicole Eggert Details Sexual Abuse Allegations Against Scott Baio | The actress shared her story with Megyn Kelly following a Saturday tweet she posted referencing the alleged abuse. After the tweet, Baio posted a 16-minute-long video on Facebook denying the allegations, citing previous statements Eggert had made about their relationship. , Eggert told Kelly the alleged abuse began when they met on the set of the 1980s sitcom Charles in Charge. Baio was 11 years older than her, and the age of consent in California is 18 years old. "He immediately took to me and befriended me and earned my trust. And then he started expressing his love for me, and talking about marriage and the future," Eggert told Kelly while tearing up. "Then, I was still 14, before my 15th birthday, we were at his house in his car in his garage, and he reached over and he penetrated me with his finger. That is when the sexual touching and abuse started, after that.", Baio would allegedly grope her, pull her up onto his lap and sneak kisses with her while on set, Eggert said. They had intercourse for the first time when she was 17 years old while the show was still on, according to Eggert. Baio has denied this and said they had sex was when she was 18 years old. "I was very young and it was shocking a little," she said. "I had never experienced anything like that either so he was playing on not only my emotions but my hormones and all of those things," she said. Another issue, she told Kelly, was that Baio was the boss on set. Eggert said Baio told her not to tell anyone about their relationship since it was "illegal" and he would "go to jail," thus ending the show. "It's scary," Eggert said. "That's intimidating, especially when you're that young.", "It wasn't until getting a little bit older that I started to realize this is not love," Eggert said. Eggert said she had told a few close friends about the allegations at the time, but "they didn't have a good reaction to it." She said she "always lied about it" in interviews years later. "I got really good at bearing it and putting it away in a box," she said. Speaking with other women who had gone through similar experiences helped her come forward, she said. During the interview, Kelly shared a statement from Nik Richie, a radio host who said Eggert had told him Baio had molested her. Kelly also said Charles in Charge actor Alexander Polinsky witnessed inappropriate cuddling between Eggert and Baio on set. Additionally, Kelly pointed to a tweet from Adam Carl, who worked on the set of Charles in Charge, that said he remembers being with Eggert while she cried about Baio on set. "When I worked on Charles in Charge in '88, I sat with you while you cried about that abusive asshole," Carl said in a tweet to Eggert on Saturday. "I know you're telling the truth and I'm so glad to see you speaking out.", , In statements before Eggert's interview aired, Baio said he and Eggert had a consensual relationship when she was over 18 years old. A representative for Baio did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Eggert's allegations. A number of men have been accused of sexual abuse, misconduct and harassment in recent months amid a national reckoning in Hollywood and other industries. |
US | Wheaton College Suspends Christian Professor After She Wears Hijab | Wheaton College has put a tenured professor who donned a traditional headscarf as a part of her Christmas Advent devotion on administrative leave. Political science professor Larycia Hawkins announced last week that she would wear a hijab in support of Muslims who have been under scrutiny since mass shootings in both Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. reports the Chicago Tribune. "I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God," Hawkins wrote on Facebook. Wheaton College, which is a private evangelical institution, read her statement as a conflation of Christian and Muslim theology. "While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God's revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation and the life of prayer," Wheaton College said in a statement. College administrators did not denounce her gesture, but said that more conversation should have taken place before her announcement. "Wheaton College faculty and staff make a commitment to accept and model our institution's faith foundations with integrity, compassion and theological clarity," the college wrote. "As they participate in various causes, it is essential that faculty and staff engage in and speak about public issues in ways that faithfully represent the college's evangelical Statement of Faith.", While Hawkins did not seek approval from Wheaton College when she decided to wear the veil, she did seek advice from the Council on American Islamic Relations so as to not offend Muslims. |
US | Martin Shkreli Is Worth At Least 45 Million | Martin Shkreli is worth at least 45 million, according to newly released court filing. According to the New York Times, a court filling disclosed by federal prosecutors Thursday shows that a brokerage account containing 45 million was used to secure the 5 million bond posted by Shkreli after his Dec. 17 arrest. The Times says this brokerage account at E-Trade is the first public accounting of how much money Shkreli,the Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO who became infamous for raising the price of a life-saving pill from 13.50 to 750, has made. Shkreli was arrested in December for securities fraud. |
US | OffDuty FBI Agent Under Investigation for Accidentally Shooting a Man While Performing a Backflip | Police are investigating an FBI agent who was showing off his dance moves at a bar in Denver, Colorado when his gun accidentally fired and shot a man. The off-duty officer wounded the man when his handgun fell from his holster while he performed a backflip on the dance floor at the Mile High Spirits distillery, the Denver Post reports. The victim was shot in the lower leg and transported to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries, according to a Denver police news release. In a video obtained by Denver7, the agent can be seen throwing down some moves before a crowd of onlookers before launching into a backflip. While flipping, the gun flies from his waistband. As the man reaches to pick it up the gun fires. The crowd appear shocked as the agent replaces the gun and raises up his arms. , "When the agent retrieved his handgun, an unintended discharge occurred," the police release said. After the incident, the agent, whose identity has not been released, was taken to Denver police headquarters and then released to an FBI supervisor, the the Post reports. The Denver police homicide unit is investigating the incident and the city's district attorney's office will determine whether any charges will be filed. |
US | Everything We Know About the Kalamazoo Shootings | A gunman killed six people at random during a nearly seven-hour long shooting rampage Saturday in western Michigan, authorities said. Here's every major detail we know about the killing spree so far, The Suspect Jason Dalton, 45, was arrested without incident following a massive manhunt in connection with the shootings. The Kalamazoo, Mich. man was a driver for Uber and had passed a mandatory background check, the company said Sunday. The ride-sharing service declined to say whether he was on duty during the shooting spree. Authorities said Dalton had no criminal record. He was a former insurance adjuster and is a married father of two children, the Associated Press reports. Neighbors described Dalton as a "quiet" and nice" man who "liked guns" and was part of a "typical American family," according to CNN. The Victims Six people died in the "random murders," including 17-year-old Tyler Smith and his 53-year-old father, Richard, who were both gunned down while looking at cars at a dealership, authorities said. Four others were killed in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. They were 62-year-old Mary Lou Nye, 60-year-old Mary Jo Nye, 68-year-old Barbara Hawthorne and 74-year-old Dorothy Brown, the AP reports. A 14-year-old girl was also shot at the restaurant and is in critical condition, while another woman shot outside an apartment complex was expected to survive. The Timeline The violence began Saturday about 6 p.m. when a woman was shot multiple times outside the Meadows apartment complex, authorities said. The shootings at the car dealership, which was about 15 miles away, followed about four hours later. The last lives were taken about 15 minutes after that outside the restaurant. Dalton was arrested after a deputy spotted his vehicle driving through downtown Kalamazoo, according to the AP. The suspect reportedly took fares in between shootings. Local resident Matt Mellen says the driver acted recklessly to the point that he jumped out of the car and ran away. "He wouldn't stop. He just kind of kept looking at me like, Don't you want to get to your friend's house?' and I'm like, I want to get there alive,' " Mellen told local media. "I'm upset because I tried contacting Uber after I had talked to the police, saying that we needed to get this guy off the road." Uber has not commented on Mellen's or others' claims about fares. Uber's Reaction Uber said in a statement Sunday that it was "horrified and heartbroken at the senseless violence." "Our hearts and prayers are with the families of the victims of this devastating crime and those recovering from injuries," said Joe Sullivan, the chief security officer at Uber. "We have reached out to the police to help with their investigation in any way that we can." The ride-sharing service did not offer additional details on Dalton's work history. What's Next? Dalton was expected to be arraigned Monday. Authorities are still trying to figure out his motive while they investigate a woman's Facebook post that said he was driving erratically during the series of shootings, Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety Chief Jeff Hadley told TIME on Sunday. Hadley also said authorities are looking into whether Dalton took fares in between the shootings. "We don't know that for sure right now. It kind of seems that way, just based on the anecdotal stuff we're getting, but I can't say that with any level of certainty," he said. "That will come out as we continue to investigate over the next 24 to 48 hours, tracking his movements." |
US | Its Perfectly Legal to Take a Ballot Selfie While Voting in Indiana Judge Rules | A judge ruled Monday that an Indiana law making it a felony offense to shoot a "ballot selfie" at polling stations and/or post a ballot selfie on the Internet was unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker wrote in her opinion that the law violated the First Amendment of the United States and was nearly impossible to "survive strict scrutiny because it neither serves compelling state interests nor is narrowly tailored to achieve those interests," she wrote. The state argued the law was a way to deter vote-selling, since a photo of the ballot might show which candidates a voter had chosen. Indiana argued that groups could pressure people to vote a certain way with this kind of information and access. Barker, however, disagreed, saying that the law was too sweeping, pointing to laws already in place against buying votes. The law was enacted on July 1 of this year, with a person caught taking a selfie subject to a "level six" felony penalty. In August, the American Civil Liberties Union sued. |
US | A Charlottesville Photographer Took His Tragic Pulitzer PrizeWinning Shot on His Last Day Now He Wor | On the last day of his job at a local newsroom, photojournalist Ryan Kelly took a picture that would end up winning him a Pulitzer Prize. Now, he works for a brewery. Kelly captured the award-winning image in Charlottesville, Va. on Aug. 12, 2017, when an Ohio man drove a car into a crowd of counter-protestors at a white nationalist rally, striking several people and leaving 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead. Kelly was employed at the city's sole daily newspaper, The Daily Progress, at the time. His photograph ran on the paper's front page and served as a snapshot of the deadly incident. On Monday, Kelly was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography. , He wrote in TIME last year, "It was pure reflex. Years of photojournalism experience had prepared me to react instinctively, and it was more muscle memory than intentional composition that led to those photos.", Kelly still works as a freelancer, but now runs social media for a Richmond, Va. brewery, according to Poynter. Days after the rally, he told the website "It is very bizarre right now to be sitting in a cushy office, talking about websites and calendars and beer promotions when 48 hours ago I was in the middle of the biggest news story I've ever covered in my career.", "I would die a happy man if I never witness anything like I saw on Saturday," Kelly added. On Monday, he told his former employer that he learned of the prize after stepping off a flight from Amsterdam, where he was awarded second-place for the photograph by the World Press Photo organization. , "I'm just standing here, waiting for my luggage, and it feels wild," he told The Daily Progress. "I've looked up to the Pulitzer prizes for a long time and it's hard to believe I'm part of that.", He added, "The violence was terrible and I'm still heartbroken for the injured, and especially Heather Heyer's family." |
US | 2 Dead in Virginia Navy Base Shooting | , The world's largest navy base was briefly on lockdown Monday night after a sailor was fatally shot and security forces killed a male civilian suspect on board a guided-missile destroyer at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. According to a base spokeswoman speaking to the AP, the shooting occurred around 1120 pm on Monday night on board the U.S.S. Mahan, a guided-missile destroyer that had returned to Norfolk in September after an eight-month deployment to the Mediterranean Sea, where it had been positioned for a potential strike against Syria. Navy officials offered few details about the shooting other than that both the sailor killed and the civilian suspect were men. Officials said the suspect was authorized access to the base however, the spokeswoman said she could not say whether the suspect had permission to be aboard the ship. The shooting briefly caused a lockdown on the base, which is home to more than 46,000 military members, 21,000 civilians and contractors, and is the home port for 64 ships. By Tuesday morning, operations on the base had returned to normal, and an investigation into the shooting was ongoing. AP |
US | Report Executioner Errors Led to Botched Lethal Injection | Oklahoma prison officials failed to properly place IVs in Clayton Lockett's veins after numerous attempts, according to preliminary autopsy findings released Friday. The death row inmate's execution made national headlines and became a rallying cry for death penalty opponents. While many of lethal injection's problems have focused on the drugs being used, it appears that Lockett's execution went awry due to the actual administration of those drugs. The autopsy found that Lockett's arms and thighs showed evidence of skin and needle punctures. IVs are typically administered through the arms, but according to the autopsy, Oklahoma's executioners appear to have failed in accessing his veins and as an alternative attempted to deliver the fatal drugs through his femoral arteries, located in the thighs. The autopsy found that Lockett's veins were not damaged prior to the execution and stated that there was "excellent integrity of peripheral and deep veins for the purpose of achieving venous access." There was also evidence of "vascular injury indicative of failed vascular catheter access," meaning the executioners actually damaged Lockett's veins during the attempted execution. The drugs likely leaked into his surrounding tissues rather than going directly into his bloodstream, causing a much more prolonged death. Lockett's execution lasted 45 minutes. The postmortem was conducted after Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin called for an investigation into the April 29 execution. President Obama asked the U.S. attorney general to look into the problems surrounding lethal injection following Lockett's death as well. A series of lawsuits around the country have challenged lethal injection methods based on the drugs' origins, which are often kept secret. Many states have had trouble obtaining execution drugs lately and have turned to new mixtures which are loosely regulated and not overseen by the federal government. But the Lockett execution may put more of a spotlight on the actual training of executioners, which is also a concern for many who challenge lethal injection's constitutionality. The amount and quality of training which executioners receive is often unclear. The preliminary autopsy findings did not confirm whether Lockett died of a heart attack, which state officials claimed at the time. A full report is due within the next few weeks. |
US | Cleveland Police Officers Will Not Face Charges in Death of Tamir Rice | The white police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland in 2014 will not face criminal charges, the county prosecutor announced Monday. "Based on the evidence they heard, and the law as it applies to police use of deadly force, the grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback," Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty said at a press conference Monday afternoon. "That was also my recommendation and that of our office after the reviewing the investigation and the law," he continued. Loehmann fired the shots that killed Rice, and Garmback was his partner. "Given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes and miscommunications by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police," McGinty said. Rice was shot on Nov. 22, 2014, while playing with a toy gun. McGinty said a recent enhancement of the security video of the shooting shows that Rice was in fact pulling the pellet gun from his waistband as the officers approached. Rice likely "either intended to hand it over to the officers or show them it wasn't a real gun," McGinty said. "But there was no way for the officers to know that.", The grand jury that made the decision had been meeting since mid-October. The burden of proof for an indictment is much lower than the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard in criminal trials for an indictment, the grand jury needs only determine that a crime might have been committed. "The outcome will not cheer anyone, nor should it," McGinty said of the lack of indictment, speaking of the Rice family's loss. McGinty said he had already told Rice's mother of the decision, calling it a "tough conversation.", The Rice family attorneys issued a statement shortly after the press conference condemning the decision, the Washington Post reports. "It has been clear for months now that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty was abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against indictment," the Rice family attorneys said. "Even though video shows the police shooting Tamir in less than one second, Prosecutor McGinty hired so-called expert witnesses to try to exonerate the officers and tell the grand jury their conduct was reasonable and justified. It is unheard of, and highly improper, for a prosecutor to hire "experts" to try to exonerate the targets of a grand jury investigation.", Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential race, also put out a statement, urging people to continue moving forward from the tragedy, , At Monday's press conference, McGinty called for reforms including dashboard cameras on all police cruisers and body cameras on all officers, and said makers of toy guns should differentiate them more from real weapons. |
US | San Francisco Lawmakers Take on Big Soda Again | Big Soda beat San Francisco lawmakers in 2014, when the industry spent 10 million to defeat a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages and narrowly succeeded. Now three lawmakers are returning fire with new measures aimed at reducing residents' consumption of beverages that have been linked to health problems such as obesity and diabetes. One of the proposals would make the city the first to require that advertisements for drinks like sodaon billboards, atop cabs, outside convenience storescarry a warning label like cigarette advertising does. San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener, the man behind that plan, anticipates that hundreds of locations around the city would be spreading this message, "The big picture here is that these drinks are fueling an explosion of Type 2 diabetes and other health problems and we have a responsibility as policy-makers to act to protect public health," Wiener says. "It's a big problem and it's only getting worse." The measure would only affect new poster-like advertisements, so while the 80-foot tall sculpture of a Coke bottle at ATT Park is safe, any new ads pitching fans on Pepsi inside the stadium would have a label to bear. The measure requires that the warnings take up at least 20 of the ad's area for drinks that have added sweeteners and more than 25 calories per 12 oz. Natural fruit juice, formula and milk get a pass., A complementary piece of legislation set to be introduced by Supervisor Malia Cohen would ban advertisements for sugary drinks on publicly owned property such as transit shelters ads for alcohol and tobacco are already non grata in those spaces. Another measure, from Supervisor Eric Mar, would ban city departments or contractors from using city funds to purchase sugary drinks. Former Mayor Gavin Newsom, who called sodas "the new tobacco," issued an executive order in 2010 banishing high-calorie soft drinks from vending machines on city property. The latter measure would give that sentiment the force of law. The language in Wiener's proposal was borrowed from a bill in Sacramento. In February, state Sen. Bill Monning reintroduced a measure that would require similar warning labels to be plastered across the front of sugary drinks themselves or at their point of purchase. Monning introduced a similar bill last year, which passed the Senate and then failed to make it out of committee in the state Assembly. "This bill will give Californians the at-a-glance information they need to make more healthful choices every day," he said in announcing that he'd go another round in 2015. If his measure passes, it too would be a first for the nation. During the fight to pass the soda tax in San Francisco, proponents like Wiener argued that history has proven education simply isn't enough on its own. As he pursues this educational reform, he won't say whether he's going to try for a soda tax again. But he lauds the success health advocates had across the bay in Berkeley, where voters passed the nation's first soda tax last year, and he says there is momentum for more of the same. "There are discussions happening," he says. "But it's too soon to say." |
US | Watch Live Donald Trump Announces Carrier Plant Deal | Donald Trump is visiting Indianapolis Thursday to announce that he has reached an agreement with Carrier, officially fulfilling his campaign promise to keep jobs in Indiana. The announcement comes after the plant, which produces air-conditioners and other products, was slated to close. The reversal will save more than 1,000 jobs. Trump also plans on making similar deals with other companies that are considering outsourcing American jobs, as a way to reverse the "generational decline in U.S. manufacturing," according to a previous report. The live stream will begin 2 p.m. Eastern. |
US | President Trump Once Criticized the Horror Show of Trophy Hunting Now Hes Lifting a Ban on Elephant | The Trump administration has lifted an Obama-era ban on importing legally hunted elephant remains known as trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia, National Public Radio reports. If that sounds familiar it's because this is the second time in recent months the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service FWS, a federal agency under the Department of the Interior, has moved to ease trophy import restrictions. This time around, agency head Ryan Zinke a hunting advocate appears to be working more discreetly. When the FWS initially announced it would lift the ban in November, outrage ensued. Criticism came from conservationists, as well as celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres and Leonardo DiCaprio President Donald Trump said he would pause deregulation "until such time as I review all conservation facts.", But in a memo dated March 1, the FWS writes that it will now consider imports "on a case-by-case basis" rather than banning outright trophies from certain countries. The agency's original decision was based on the theory that money paid by big game hunters assists conservation efforts. But groups such as the Humane Society and Save the Elephants say it's not a good idea in these two countries, especially at this time. Read more President Trump's Controversial Reversal of the Elephant Trophy Ban, Explained, The agency's position also appeared at odds with Trump's public remarks. Two days after pausing the ban, Trump said on Twitter that he would be "very hard-pressed" to change his opinion "that this horror show in any way helps conservation of Elephants or any other animal.", , In a January interview with British broadcaster Piers Morgan, the U.S. President said "I didn't want elephants killed and stuffed and have the tusks brought back into this country." Addressing Zinke's claim that hunting license fees would fund local conservation efforts, Trump added "In that case, the money was going to a government that was probably taking the money, OK?", The latest FWS memo cites a Washington D.C. court ruling in favor of a lawsuit brought by Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association. According to NPR, the court determined that the Obama administration did not adequately observe rules around passing the ban, such as inviting public comment. |
US | Sister Remembers Dallas Officer Killed by Sniper He Took Care of Me | Last week, Officer Patrick Zamarripa was researching Disney Cruises to plan a family vacation for his girlfriend, his 8-year-old stepson, and his 2-year-old daughter. But dreams of Disney were cut short Thursday night, when Zamarripa and four other cops were shot and killed by a sniper targeting officers at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest. Instead of making plans for the future, Zamarripa's family is now mourning the 32-year-old Navy veteran, who had always dreamed of becoming a police officer so he could help keep people safe. His protectiveness even extended to his older sister Laura Zamarripa, 34, who remembers him having her back even when they were kids. "He was my bug killer," she recalled Friday as the family gathered to grieve together in Texas. "Even thought I was the big sister and I was strong and stuff, I could never kill bugs. He would get up in the middle of the night.", "He took care of me," she added. Later, Zamarripa served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even as he was facing dangerous situations in the military, he always checked up on his sister, who was also enlisted. "I was on a ship, and my brother was stationed on an oil rig, and I would get letters from him weeks later delivered via helicopter," she remembered. "He was keeping up with the status of my ship and asking questions, even though he was my little brother.", Two years ago, Officer Zamarripa's entire world changed with the birth of his daughter, Lyncoln. She made him a "happy spirit," Laura said. "He just had a constant smile on his face after he became a father.", He was a "super proactive" dad who took his baby daughter to the gym with him and was an expert diaper changer, she added. "I think he finally found someone to play with," Laura added of the birth of her niece. "He filled some part of his heart that was obviously empty.", The world Zamarripa had hoped to build for his daughter was "nothing like last night," Laura said the morning after the shooting. The only part of his job he disliked was witnessing violence against children. "He would say this is the only thing I don't like about my job, is that I have to see children who are helpless get mistreated,'" she said. At the end of each year Zamarripa and his two siblings always discussed their wish for the year ahead, Laura recalled "We have this thing between the three of us, and we'd say what do you want for Christmas?'" she said. "And we'd always say world peace and happiness." |
US | Texas Senate Moves Forward With Controversial Bathroom Bill | Texas lawmakers spent nearly 21 hours listening to tense questions and arguments over a proposed "bathroom bill" that would require people to use public facilities such as restrooms and locker rooms that align with their "biological sex" before voting 8 to 1 to pass the bill out of committee in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Hundreds of people testified on Tuesday, ranging from concerned parents to transgender children to tourism bureau leaders and even the lieutenant governor of another state. Though the majority of citizens who signed up to comment on the bill opposed its passage, the first several hours of the hearing were largely devoted to lawmakers and invited speakers who expressed support for the bill. "In Texas, this is what we value. We do value safety, protection and privacy in those most intimate settings," said state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, the primary sponsor of the bill. "It's a place where many of us find ourselves vulnerable." The bill will now be considered by the full state Senate, likely later this week, before moving to the state House of Representatives for consideration. Of the 13 states that are currently considering similar bills, Texas is the most populous and several argued during the hearing that it will prove a bellwether particularly now that the Trump administration has rescinded Obama-era guidance in support of transgender rights, saying this is an issue that should be left to the states. The bill, known as SB6, would affect facilities in public schools, universities and government buildings, though not private businesses. In the measure, "biological sex" is defined as the sex listed on one's birth certificate. Like many of Tuesday's speakers, Kolkhorst made the argument that the state must prevent policies that allow bathroom access based on gender identity because predators will falsely claim they are transgender in order to enter women's spaces. "While the media makes it so much about transgender issues," she said, "this is a bill to say men should not go into the women's restroom.", But she and other lawmakers also skirted a fundamental question related to the status of transgender people in American society whether their sense of themselves should be considered authentic by the government. If a transgender woman "born male, but identifies as a woman" goes into the women's bathroom, Democratic state Senator Jose Rodriguez said, "It sounds to me like you feel that's a man actually going into a women's bathroom, not a woman, is that correct?" Kolkhurst was silent and he rephrased, saying it was his understanding that "it's not a man going into the bathroom.", "Senator, you and I may disagree on this," Kolkhorst responded. Other speakers debated the nature of sex and gender, some saying that transgender people should be respected but anatomy must also take legal precedence over one's sense of self. and some speakers suggested that anatomy was the true dividing line. San Antonio-based pastor Charles Flowers called the idea that gender is determined by someone's brain "foolishness.", LGBT rights advocates have repeatedly called the predator argument a red herring, pointing to the lack of problems occurring in cities, school districts and states that have policies affirming the rights of transgender people in the public square. Before the meeting adjourned for a break around noon local time, one panel of speakers opposed to the bill was invited to give testimony and among them was David Wynn, a Texan pastor and transgender man. He said the public-safety argument is not borne out by research and that the bill "feels like discrimination to me.", Appearing in his clerical dress, with little hair on the top of his head and a bushy beard, Wynn said he would not only feel uncomfortable in the women's room but cause much more disturbance there than in the men's. "We're people. Let's not forget that we're talking about people," Wynn said. "Transgender people are the ones who need protection." When a lawmaker asked which restroom he would use at the state capitol, he noted that he had used the men's before speaking at the hearing without incident. As the day wore on, a long line of transgender people including the first openly transgender mayor in Texas testified that such a bill, even if aimed at predators, would make it difficult for them to participate in public life. Transgender kids said they worried they would be bullied in school and many of their supporters feared such a measure would "turn every citizen of the state into a potty patrol officer," as one former school teacher put it. Among panelists opposing the bill were some well-known social conservatives such as Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, who said the bill would serve as a necessary "deterrent" to bad actors and embolden ordinary citizens to "sound the alarm" if they felt something was amiss in a women's-only space. North Carolina's lieutenant Gov. Dan Forest was also present. Forest has been one of the strongest proponents of HB2, a controversial law in his state that like the Texas bill restricts bathroom access and also bans cities from passing non-discrimination protections that force businesses to allow transgender people to use facilities that match their gender identity. He was mainly there to counter a potent argument the bill's opponents have repeatedly deployed that passing such a law would cause economic havoc in the state because many organizations view these measures as hostile to LGBT rights. Though Forest acknowledged that the state has lost hundreds of millions in economic impact because of the law from businesses that canceled expansions, performers that canceled concerts and sports leagues that cancelled events he said that economic gains in the last year have outpaced any negative outcomes. He listed several companies that had added scores of the jobs to the state in February alone and said that actions such as the NBA moving its All-Star Game to another state should not influence lawmakers. "I will never trade the privacy, safety and security of a woman or a child for a basketball ticket," Forest said, "and neither should you.", The last speaker to have a say before the committee adjourned early in the day, before reconvening until nearly 5 a.m. local time, was a elementary-aged transgender child who appeared with her tearful mother. "From the moment she could communicate, she let us know she was a girl, " the mom said. "Dadgummit, transgender people are real.", The mom invited anyone who hadn't met a transgender person to come to their house to have dinner with their family. Then her child ended the session by suggesting, in a childlike way, that the culture wars have blown something simple out of proportion. When she goes to the restroom, "I've got to tinkle and get out," she said. "That's all." |
US | Howard University Students Stand Up for Michael Brown in Viral Photo | An image of Howard University students standing up in protest against the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. went viral on Wednesday. More than 300 students gathered in Cramton Auditorium on Howard University's campus in Washington D.C. to stand together, hands raised, in a pose inspired by the presumed stance of the unarmed teen killed by a police officer last weekend. The incident has led to violent protests in the St. Louis suburb, and inspired a national conversation about race and policing. The shooting also hit close to home in the Howard University communitya recent alum and St. Louis native, Mya White, was allegedly shot in the head on Tuesday during protests in the St. Louis town. The wounds were non-fatal and White is recovering, but the incident has resonated across the Washington D.C. campus. Vice President of the Howard University Student Association, and one of the photos organizers, Ikenna Ikeotuonye told TIME Thursday, he believes White's injury sparked a sense of urgency among the student body. "Howard has a history of social justice, inspiring social change," Ikeotuonye, a senior chemical engineering major said. "Our idea was just to organize somethingbut the fact that there was a Bison hurting for protesting hit close to home.", The image spread rapidly on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Wednesday night, driven by hashtags including dontshootus, dontshootme, and HowardU. , The post came as violent clashes between police and protesters escalated Wednesday night. A heavily militarized police force fired tear gas, smoke bombs and rubber bullets into crowds as protestors lobbed Molotov cocktails and rocks at police. At least 10 people were arrested. |
US | The Hispanic Community Are Iowans Mollie Tibbetts Dad Rebukes the Politicization of Her Death | At the funeral for his "hero" and 20-year-old daughter Mollie Tibbetts, Rob Tibbetts spoke of her zeal, her kindness, her strength and her passion. He also broke his silence on the rampant politicization of her death that began almost immediately after a suspect in her murder was named. Authorities arrested Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a 24-year-old who is reportedly an undocumented Mexican immigrant, last week. His immigration status quickly became a hot-button issue amongst Republicans including President Donald Trump who tried to draw a direct line between Mollie Tibbetts's death and the need for stricter immigration laws. But at her funeral Sunday, Mollie's father said the Hispanic community embraced him during these difficult past few weeks, and rebuked the narrative swirling around his daughter's death. "The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans," Tibbetts said at his daughter's funeral, according to the Des Moines Register. "As far as I'm concerned, they're Iowans with better food.", The crowd at the funeral erupted in applause following his comments, the Register reported. The remarks were the first public comments a direct family member has made about the politicization of Tibbetts' death. Not long after Rivera's immigration status was revealed, Trump claimed in a video posted on Twitter that Mollie Tibbetts' death was "one instance of many" and reiterated his campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. A slew of other Republican politicians have commented on her death in a similar matter, including Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who said "a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community.", There is no evidence that an illegal immigrant or any immigrant for that matter is more likely to commit a crime than a person who is born in the U.S. Mollie Tibbetts' further removed family members and friends responded last week to these claims, asking for her death to stay removed from the debate around immigration. "Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color," Mollie Tibbetts' aunt, Billie Jo Calderwood, said in a Facebook post last week. As for Mollie's father, he hopes to remember her as "nobody's victim" and instead for her life. "Today, we need to turn the page. We're at the end of a long ordeal," Rob Tibbetts said at his daughter's funeral, according to the Register. "But we need to turn toward life Mollie's life because Mollie's nobody's victim. Mollie's my hero." |
US | California Scraps Plan to Build HighSpeed Railroad Between Los Angeles and San Francisco | California Governor Gavin Newsom is abandoning plans to build a high-speed railroad between Los Angeles and San Francisco, saying the ambitious project that was approved by voters and championed by his predecessor is too costly. Instead, the state will finish roughly 120 miles of track already under construction in the Central Valley, a mostly rural agricultural region that runs down the spine of the state, Newsom said. "The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long," Newsom told lawmakers in Sacramento during his first State of the State address. "There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency.", California was one of the first U.S. states to champion a government-owned high-speed rail system like those that are ubiquitous in parts of Europe and Asia. Former Governor Jerry Brown defended the project as part of the state's nation-leading effort against climate change, an issue that Newsom has made a centerpiece of his administration. The project was long opposed by Republicans in the statehouse and in Congress, who tried to choke off federal funding. The decision to derail the most ambitious parts of the line contrasts with proposals from Congressional Democrats in Washington to boost taxpayer funding on a sweeping package of climate-change measures unveiled by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that would boost funding for high-speed rail across the U.S. The California project's envisioned 800-mile network, with trains speeding as fast as 220 miles per hour, made it one of the largest, and most costly, public works developments in recent U.S. history. But since 10 billion of bonds were approved by voters more than a decade ago to jumpstart the line, it's been beset by cost overruns, construction delays and lawsuits by property owners and taxpayer groups. The California High Speed Rail Authority had estimated the full line would have cost 77 billion to complete. Backers were counting on the private sector to finance most of the costs, though much of that private funding remained uncertain. The Central Valley segment was expected to cost 10.6 billion, according to the latest business plan. Newsom said workers will continue building a stretch of the line between Merced and Bakersfield. He said his administration would seek to align economic and workforce development strategies in that region anchored by high-speed rail and pair them with tools like opportunity zones, to form the backbone of a reinvigorated Central Valley economy. "I know that some critics will say this is a train to nowhere.' But that's wrong and that's offensive," he said. "The people of the Central Valley endure the worst air pollution in America and have some of the longest commutes in this state. And they have suffered too many years of neglect from policymakers respectfully here in Sacramento." |
US | The NSA Shared Sexually Explicit Photographs Says Edward Snowden | Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor turned whistle-blower, claims that "incredibly weak" oversight of U.S. surveillance programs enabled military personnel to obtain sexually explicit photos of people under surveillance and to sometimes share them with others. In an interview with the Guardian, Snowden talked about the impact of poor auditing systems within the NSA. He claimed many people sifting through monitored communications were 18 to 22 years old and suddenly put in a position of extraordinary responsibility that was sometimes abused. "In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work, for example an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they're extremely attractive," said Snowden. "So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker says Oh, hey, that's great. Send that to Bill down the way,'" he said. Snowden, who lives in Moscow after being granted temporary asylum last year, added that this information is never reported and nobody knows about it because of inadequate oversight. He said the interception of intimate images was "routine enough" and described it as "sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.", He added, "The mere seizure of that communication by itself was an abuse. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communication stream, from the intended recipient, and given to the government without any specific authorization, without any specific need, is itself a violation of your rights.", NSA spokeswoman Vane Vines gave a comment to the New York Times on the allegations. The Times paraphrased her as saying that "the agency had zero tolerance for willful violations of authority or professional standards, and that it would respond as appropriate to any credible allegations of misconduct.", The Guardian |
US | US Sends 100 Troops to Afghan City Threatened by Taliban | The United States has sent about 100 troops to the Afghan city of Lashkar Gah to defend it from Taliban forces, which have seized several neighboring districts and now threaten to overtake the capital of Helmand province. The soldiers will provide training and support to Afghan troops, the Associated Press reported, citing an announcement by U.S. forces spokesman Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland on Monday. Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook also confirmed the deployment at a press briefing on Monday, ABC News reported. "They've gone down there to assist the police zone headquarters and their leadership team with a focused train, advise and assist mission," Cook said, according to ABC News. "This will not be a permanent presence.", The Helmand province was originally a focus for U.S. troops because of its role as the epicenter of the country's opium industry, but troop levels had declined in recent years. There about 8,730 U.S. troops in Afghanistan as of March 2016, the AP reported. |
US | 7 Things to Know About Passage of the Civil Rights Act | Fifty years ago Thursday, the U.S. Senate brought the nation a step closer to equality by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law, signed by President Lyndon Johnson less than two weeks later, outlawed racial discrimination in education and employment as well as racially segregated schools, buses, and swimming pools. TIME went back to our archives to rediscover our coverage of the bill's long journey to becoming law. Here are seven things to know on the 50th anniversary. It's still the longest debate in Senate history, The House-approved bill arrived in the Senate on Feb. 26, 1964. It was passed 114 days later on June 19, after occupying the Senate for 60 work days including seven Saturdays. The Senator who wrote much of the bill worked through a bleeding ulcer, Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois appeared on TIME's cover the day the bill passed due to his instrumental efforts in advancing it through a procedural cloture vote June 10. Dirksen worked tirelessly with both sides of the aisle to get the bill passed, despite suffering from a bleeding ulcer. TIME reported on Dirksen's floor speech, Sen. Robert Byrd filibustered the bill for 14 hours straight, West Virginia Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, still the longest-serving U.S. senator and a former leader of the KKK, filibustered for 14 hours straight to keep the bill from coming to a vote. Although Byrd, who died in 2010, later changed his tune on racial integration, his history against it followed him to the end of his life. One California Senator appeared for the cloture vote despite still recovering from brain surgery, Democrat Clair Engle of California had recently undergone two operations on his brain leading up to the vote and had not appeared in the Senate in two months. However, The Kennedys pushed for a narrower Civil Rights bill , The passage of a Civil Rights Act had been a campaign promise of John F. Kennedy, whose assassination a year earlier somewhat sped up the bill's passage. Johnson urged Congress to pass the bill as an homage to the fallen leader, even though JFK and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had resisted a more comprehensive Civil Rights bill proposed by a New York congressman, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in jail the week the bill passed the Senate, TIME's 1964 Man of the Year spent time in a Florida county jail the week the Senate passed the bill, after he attempted to integrate a local restaurant. King attended the bill's signing two weeks later and received one of the 75 pens Johnson used to sign it. He considered it one of his most treasured possessions. A senator read a constituent's letter on the floor during debate that thanked God for being born white, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield read a letter from one of his constituents, a mother of four |
US | Joe Biden Officiates His First Wedding Ceremony for Two White House Staffers | Vice President Joe Biden presided over his first wedding ceremony Monday, which saw the marriage of two longtime White House staffers. Biden posted a photo on Twitter with the message, "Proud to marry Brian and Joe at my house. Couldn't be happier, two longtime White House staffers, two great guys.", His wife Jill later tweeted, "Love is love!", , The two staffers, Brian Mosteller and Joe Mahshie, were wedded in an intimate ceremony attended by their families in Biden's residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, CNN reports. The Vice President obtained a temporary certificate from the District of Columbia to perform the wedding. Biden publicly endorsed same-sex marriage in 2012. |
US | White House to Seek 2 Billion to Stem Rise in Kids Crossing Border Illegally | The White House will ask Congress on Monday for more than 2 billion to address the increasing number of unaccompanied minors traveling from Central America and illegally crossing the border into the U.S. a White House official said. The Obama Administration will urge lawmakers to pass emergency legislation to improve border security, provide additional immigration judges and more quickly remove those who cross the border illegally. It will also ask Congress's help in increasing penalties for human traffickers and expanding the Department of Homeland Security's discretion in processing unauthorized arrivals. The exact details and dollar amounts are still being finalized, but the official said the request will likely exceed 2 billion as the Obama Administration ramps up the federal response to a pattern of unaccompanied minors attempting to cross the border into the U.S. Over 52,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended along the southwest border since Oct. 1 last year, up from only 15,700 in 2011. The majority are not from Mexico, but from Central American countries such as Honduras and Guatemala. The surge has reportedly been prompted by widespread rumors in Central America that the Obama Administration permits mothers with young children and young children crossing the border alone to stay in the U.S if they are detained. Obama attempted to counter those rumors in an interview with ABC News on Sunday. "Do not send your children to the borders," he said. "If they do make it, they'll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.", The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security are adding extra immigration attorneys and personnel and opening additional facilities in the Southwest to better handle the influx. The government response will involve both detention of immigrants as well as the Alternatives to Detention program. The two departments are also expanding the personnel investigating the smuggling rings that organize border crossings, and they are collaborating with Mexican and Central American law-enforcement bodies to address causes, issues of border security and immigrants' re-entry to their home countries from all sides. On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will also meet with leaders of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to discuss the matter. |
US | The God Squad The Next Generation of Catholic Priests | When 19 college guys go to Jamaica for spring break, they usually hit the bar and the beach. Not Nicholas Morrison and his friends. Their trip to Montego Bay this March was far more medieval. Every morning they rose at 530 a.m. and prayed. Then they visited abandoned children with disabilities and dug an irrigation trench to protect the kids' homes from flooding in the coming summer rains. The young men joked as they moved 100 lb. boulders without machinery, naming one rock "Happy Birthday" and another "JP2," a nickname for Pope John Paul II. Their chosen spring-break hashtag? SemsOnMission. Morrison and his friends are Catholic seminarians, studying to become priests. Philosophy majors at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. they live and study at the nearby St. John Paul II Seminary, which opened six years ago to meet a growing demand from millennial men who want to join the priesthood. It has reached capacity at 50 students and is already expanding, for the second time. "The four years I have been there have been totally incredible," says Morrison, 22, a 2017 graduate from Maryland who is headed to Rome to continue his studies. "I'm much more confident that this is something that the Lord wants me to continue to pursue.", For a limited time, TIME is giving all readers special access to subscriber-only stories. For complete access, we encourage you to become a subscriber. Click here. , The precise way that Morrison and his generation choose to pursue their calling is what sets them apart. Products of the 21st century, they use Facebook and Snapchat, and text their friends funny GIFs. Some brew their own beer, protest at Black Lives Matter rallies or go to the shooting range with Marine buddies. Some are comfortable with legalizing recreational pot. They are more likely to wear their clerical attire than jeans in public, faster to share details of their prayer life than to keep them private and keener to give their Friday nights to the homeless than to Netflix. When it comes to politics, they are hard to pin down as liberal or conservative, and not all think preaching antiabortion homilies is a good idea. Instead they speak openly with their supervisors about their struggles with chastity, and some even discuss their struggles with sexual orientation. Perhaps most important, there are more of them now than there were before 1,900 men under age 30 were enrolled in graduate-level Catholic seminaries in 2016, up from 1,300 in 2005, according to Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate CARA. In June the next wave of graduates will finish and pack up to move to churches across the nation. This shift comes at a time when Pope Francis, who became the Pontiff in 2013, is calling for a new kind of priest to serve in parishes around the world. His predecessor was known as a scholar, but Francis is renowned as a pastor for the people. For the first time in 30 years, the Vatican this past winter revised its global guidelines for educating priests, and modeled it after Pope Francis' example of humility and vision for accessible and genuine leaders. He is open to the idea of studying how some married men can be ordained to serve in a priestly function, to serve in rural areas short on ministers. Next year he will call the world's bishops to Rome for a summit to discuss youth, faith and vocational discernment. As they prepare, he is asking Catholics "not to yield to discouragement" but to pray for the new priests to be "living signs of God's merciful love." Millennial priests are the cutting edge of his effort. The Pope makes a point to visit young seminarians when he travels to different countries, as he did in Philadelphia in 2015. "Pope Francis has been a game changer," Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago says. "He's made people rethink their aspirations for the priesthood.", Francis' papacy is just four years old, and the millennial priests are not a homogeneous group, but already they share a mission. Forget the old stereotypes of the priesthoodreserved men, removed and dogmatic, who present themselves at the lectern to guide their congregations. The generation heeding the Francis call looks a lot like Father Chris Seith, the parochial vicar at Our Lady of Mercy in Potomac, Md. Seith, now 28, does CrossFit, rides a bike through the halls of his parish's Catholic school donning a goofy fake mustache and gondolier's hat to greet all the students, and bakes cakes on Catholic feast days to encourage people to celebrate holy days as real parties. Pope Francis' mission of mercy and first major writing, The Joy of the Gospel, guides his purpose. "Joy is contagious, energy is contagious," Seith says. "I just want to be the face of that joy.", To find a Pope Francisstyle pastor in Chicago, you need look no further than Father Matt O'Donnell. O'Donnell, 30, was the youngest-known pastor in the archdiocese's history when he got the job to lead St. Columbanus Church four years ago, just months after Francis' election. The parish is mostly African American, and it sits between two of the most violent neighborhoods on the South Side. In February, when an 11-year-old girl was shot and killed blocks away, O'Donnell went to the scene to find her family. The neighborhood is not Catholic, and neither was the girl. But O'Donnell offered to help her mother with funeral costs, and then he attended the memorial. "I get to be a pastor for a whole lot of people besides those who just come on Sunday morning to mass here," he says. "My hope is that people realize that St. Columbanus is a place that's trying to provide more opportunities for the community around economic development, jobs and food insecurity.", The rise of millennial leaders like O'Donnell comes at a critical moment for the Catholic Church in the U.S. where congregants are declining as a share of the population. Even among millennials who are Catholic, only about a quarter attend church weekly, and three-quarters of younger millennial Catholics support same-sex marriage in defiance of church teaching, according to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center. The church also faces an overall priest shortage in the U.S. The number of priests in the country has dropped from 58,600 to 37,200 over the past 50 years, and a whopping 3,500 parishes did not have their own pastor in 2016, according to CARA. That means that while young priests like O'Donnell might in the past have worked for a decade or two as an assistant before leading their own congregation, young priests now must take on more responsibility sooner and with fewer resources. No generation may ever be able to repeat the postWorld War II priest boom, when droves of men were ordained at the average age of 28 and fewer laypeople could serve in leadership roles. But the share of men under age 29 who enter Catholic seminary has risen 15 in the past 15 years, according to CARA, and the average ordination age has fallen from 37 to 34. The new priests represent a cultural change in the church. For the first time, the next generation of Latino Catholics in the U.S. is larger than that of white Catholics. Only seven in 10 of the newest priests in the U.S. are white, compared with more than 9 in 10 U.S. priests overall, according to CARA. In Chicago, where 44 of Catholics but only 14 of priests are Latino, church leadership is recruiting young priests with brochures that read, S un lder. S un hroe. S un sacerdote! Be a leader. Be a hero. Be a priest! As part of their studies, seminarians often learn Spanish. In Silver Spring, Md. Father Mario Majano, 30, says many immigrants question the choice to become a priest because of expectations that the next generation should help the family advance economically. "How can I be a source of stability for my family in a different, good way?" Majano recalls thinking about his decision to become a priest. "I wish we had more young Hispanics.", All this leaves bishops looking to millennials for new leadership. Bishop Timothy Senior, who leads St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, near Philadelphia, says, "The style of the priesthood absolutely has to change" to elevate "servant leadership." In Chicago, Cupich, 68, invited O'Donnell and Father James Wallace, 31, to be on the steering committee for the archdiocese's strategic outlook plan, called Renew My Church, to explore how parishes should function in the future. They hosted a dinner in February for the archdiocese's other young priests to discuss how to make the church more vibrant in their city. "The demands on their leadership are going to be altogether different from their predecessors', " Cupich explains. "What distresses them the most is that there might be a leadership sometimes that says, We're just going to kick the cans down the road and not deal with them. We're not going to worry about buildings that have huge capital needs or shrinking numbers of parishioners.", Pope Francis has encouraged the shift. He tells church leaders to put their community first, avoid clerical bureaucracy and, above all, evangelize with kindness. In November he elevated two key American archbishops to cardinals Cupich, who is responsible for the largest Catholic seminary in the country, Mundelein Seminary at the University of St. Mary of the Lake and Joseph Tobin of Newark, N.J. who leads the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' committee that is responsible for new priests. Both are important players for ensuring that the Francis vision takes root. For young priests in Cupich's Chicago, that vision already comes naturally. St. Columbanus, for example, is named for a 6th century Irish saint, but recently O'Donnell decided to rebrand to better serve his neighborhood. He put up new mosaics that imagine the church's namesake with a black and brown face. Now he keeps the church baptismal font heated and full of water, ready for converts at any moment. "Pope Francis, he has made me excited again about becoming a priest," O'Donnell says. "He models to me what I want to be as a priest, the ability to be creative, imaginative and not get stuck in what has to be.'", For many of the new generation, Pope Francis is just one of several key role models. It takes at least five years to be ordained, so most of the millennial priests of today chose their path before Francis was elected, and they owe a lot to the Popes of their youth, including John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Students at a recent Mundelein Seminary roundtable praised Pope Francis' simplicity, calling his spirituality raw, hands-on and organic, a sentiment they say fellow millennials appreciate. But when they named their biggest spiritual influences, they did not name Popes or Vatican officials. Instead, they talked of pastors back home, mothers, friends and women like St. Teresa of Calcutta and St. Thrse of Lisieux. The newest priests see the priesthood as a rebellion, if an unusual one. Seminary programs often offer a technology fast, for a week or a year, and young men are quick to say how much they enjoy it. Like Pope Francis, many will take a selfie, but they caution against friendships that exist mainly on social media. The priesthood has largely resisted cultural change brought on by new family structures and a changing sense of communitymost millennial seminarians have been Catholic since birth, have parents who are still married and celebrate the Eucharist every day. "They know they are going countercultural, but it is not out of ignorance," Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, who founded the St. John Paul II Seminary, says. "There has to be some vision, some purpose, some goal.", The next priesthood is bound by this strong sense of mission. Some seminarians may trade knowledge of bishops like baseball cards, but by the time they are in churches, they are more focused on outreach. Father Dominic Clemente, 27, of Chicago, started his church's first ever youth program, filmed videos for the church's website and hopes to develop a new relationship with the Muslim Community Center down the street. Wallace, the 31-year-old on the Renew My Church team, calls himself socially progressive, but for him that means he's not afraid to play dodgeball with the kids, do a shot of Jameson with off-duty cops at a St. Patrick's Day party or sit on the front lawn with a cigar and an extra lawn chair so people will come and talk. "The big talk is evangelization How do we go out and get people to fall in love with Christ?" says Wallace, of Edison Park in Chicago. "For a certain generation of priests, they weren't trained with that concept, so evangelization is just totally foreign to them. It's not that they are opposed to it it's just not on their radar." Wuerl, 76, says the young generation is far more open about their prayer life and their encounters with God than he was at their age. "If you define humility as simply recognizing the truth, they are very humble people, because they have no problem talking about their own failures and their own accomplishments," he says. Sexuality, and their willingness to wrestle with it openly, also sets millennial priests apart from their predecessors. Pope Francis has reiterated that marriage is not an option for priests, and seminarians are required to refrain from sexual activity. But seminary leaders say young men are not afraid to confess struggles with pornography, and they discuss how their sexuality fits with their pledge of abstinence. "I think they've embraced that sense of, I'm here to live a chaste life, whatever my sexual orientation might be,'" Father John Kartje, president of Mundelein Seminary, says. "That conversation doesn't have an asterisk on it for one person as opposed to another." Adds Father Jeffrey Eickhoff, who leads St. Gregory the Great Seminary near Lincoln, Neb. "In some sense, scandal has happened, priests have failed. There's not so much stigma that priests are perfect anymore.", The child sex-abuse scandal defined the church of their parents, and young men are eager to turn the page. Seith, the Maryland CrossFitter, was a young teenager in 2002 when the scandal broke. When he applied to seminary, his program required that applicants complete a background check and a comprehensive psychological evaluation, and curriculums trained seminarians on how to report abuse. He says his classmates from dioceses like Boston, where the abuse numbers were particularly high, confronted more of a stigma than he did. But he also personally knew an abuse victim, and that makes him want to set the best example of a priest that he can, especially in his work at his local Catholic school. "We talked about, How do we make sure we are approachable and people can trust us?" he says of his training. "We want to make sure the kids know they are really loved.", Even in a new era of openness, millennial priests have limits. They believe what the culture does not, that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is sinful and that Jesus rose from the dead. Young priests embrace institutions and rituals their millennial peers eschew. "People say, Well, I can worship God in my bedroom, I can worship God from the bar, I can worship while I'm lying down watching Netflix,'" Father Michael Trail, 27, of Oak Forest, Ill. says. "But taking that solid time out of your week just to thank God for the way that he's come in your life, that only happens with structure.", Many young priests even take this conservatism to a new level. For some, the old mass of their grandparents is now hip and exotic. Students at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary host outreach events that replace Christian rock music with a very solemn, high mass, complete with incense. Many choose to wear their collar even on their off-days or when out at a bar to stand out, while their rector, Bishop Senior, says his seminary classmates 30 years ago would wear jackets and ties to fit in. In a speech to Polish Jesuits, Pope Francis even encouraged young seminarians to be less rigid, to avoid narcissism and to discern "shades of gray.", Wallace says that unlike older priests, his peers are less willing to identify with a political party. Eickhoff, whose seminary draws from mostly red states, says young men are conservative on moral issues like marriage and abortion but push back against President Trump on immigration. And while pockets of church leaders may hope Rome's pendulum will swing right after Pope Francis, these young men are more politically independent. "I don't think we are in an age here in the United States where the young men are going archconservative," says Father Robert Panke, rector of St. John Paul II Seminary. In the months ahead, Pope Francis plans to spotlight this next generation. He has dedicated the next triennial bishops' synod at the Vatican in October 2018 to discuss youth and vocation, which will cover both calls to the priesthood and to marriage. He has asked bishops worldwide to survey young people in advance, and the Vatican is planning a website for youth to submit reflections for the event. After the synod comes the 2019 World Youth Day in Panama, which he hopes will cement the synod's reforms. At age 80, Francis knows that the future of the church depends on the direction millennial Catholics choose. "The church and society need you," he told young people in a recent video message. "With your dreams and ideals, walls of stagnation fall and roads open up.", For now, church leaders in the U.S. are hopeful that the Pope's efforts will stick. "I say to the priests here, Anytime you've had a bad day, just go up to the seminary and see this next generation coming along," Cardinal Wuerl says. The millennial priesthood is ready for the spotlight. "If we can keep those doors open for at least 100 years, we will be good," Clemente says. "Hopefully the next guys behind us will use those open doors to continue welcoming people in." |
US | Texas Newlyweds Die in Helicopter Crash Just Hours After Their Wedding | A pair of newlyweds were killed early Sunday morning when the helicopter that carried them from their wedding crashed in northwest Uvalde County, Texas. Will Byler and Bailee Ackerman Byler had married in Uvalde, around 100 miles west of San Antonio, on Saturday night. The wedding was planned at the Byler family ranch, according to local news site mysanantonio.com. The news was first reported by The Houstonian, a student newspaper at Sam Houston State University, where Byler and Ackerman Byler were both seniors. , The National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday it was investigating a crash of a Bell 206B helicopter in the area. The Uvalde County Sheriff's Office has not yet confirmed how many people died in the crash. |
US | Court Strikes Down Virginia Order Restoring Voting Rights to ExFelons | Virginia's state Supreme Court ruled Friday that Gov. Terry McAuliffe's executive order restoring the voting rights of more than 200,000 ex-felons violated the state's constitution. The 4-3 decision follows the controversial executive order signed by McAuliffe in April, which granted voting rights to ex-offenders who had completed their prison sentence as well as their term of supervised probation or parole. It was met with criticism from Republicans in the state, and the court ruled Friday that such clemency powers could only be applied on a case-by-case basis. "The assertion that a Virginia Governor has the power to grant blanket, group pardons is irreconcilable with the specific requirement in Article V, Section 12 that the Governor communicate to the General Assembly the particulars of every case' and state his reasons' for each pardon," Chief Justice Donald Lemons wrote in the majority opinion. "This requirement implies a specificity and particularity wholly lacking in a blanket, group pardon of a host of unnamed and, to some extent, still unknown number of convicted felons.", In turn, McAuliffe vowed to individually sign orders restoring voting rights to former felons in the state, beginning with those who had already registered to vote, saying the court's decision "placed Virginia as an outlier in the struggle for civil and human rights.", "I will expeditiously sign nearly 13,000 individual orders to restore the fundamental rights of the citizens who have had their rights restored and registered to vote," he said in a statement on Friday. "And I will continue to sign orders until I have completed restoration for all 200,000 Virginians.", Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton praised McAuliffe for his "dauntless leadership" on Saturday. Clinton's newly named running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, was mentioned in the court decision because as governor of Virginia, he declined in 2010 to issue a blanket order restoring voting rights, even though he had "openly expressed his disagreement" with the policy of permanent disenfranchisement. Virginia is one of nine states that requires voting rights to be restored only by executive order or court action, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Laws in 38 states and the District of Columbia allow most ex-felons to regain voting rights automatically after they complete their sentence. In Maine and Vermont, citizens never lose the right to vote, even while incarcerated. |
US | Record Number of US Prisoners Exonerated in 2013 | The number of U.S. inmates exonerated after being falsely convicted of a crime hit a record high last year, according to a new study. Eighty-seven were found in 2013 to have been wrongly convicted, according to a report out Tuesday by the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law. Nearly half of those exonerated prisoners had been convicted of murder. About one-third of the exonerations involved cases in which no crime had occurred, the Registry found, and fewer convicts were exonerated through DNA evidence than in the past. That slow trend has been occurring for much of the last decade. The report also noted that 17 percent of those exonerated had originally pleaded guilty to crimes they hadn't committed, specifically because those types of plea bargains can lead to reduced sentences. Rob Warden, the co-founder of the Registry and executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, said the numbers reflect a noteable improvement in the criminal justice system. "First, the courts and prosecutorial apparatus are more willing to take these cases seriously than they once were," he told TIME. "There was a time when you wouldn't have gotten a court to look at a case where there was a confession. Now we know that false confessions happen quite regularly.", Texas had the most exonerations with 13, followed by Illinois 9, New York 8, Washington 7 and California 6. Rounding out the top 10 were Michigan and Missouri with five a piece, and four each for Connecticut, Georgia and Virginia. The Registry has 1,304 exonerations on its list dating back to 1989. Over the 1,281 documented between January 1989 and December 2013, 92 percent were men and 47 percent were black. Within that range, New York has had the most with 152, followed by California 136 and Texas 133. All together, the 1,281 defendants spent nearly 12,500 years in prison for crimes of which they were wrongly convicted. |
US | Chicago Police Question Two People of Interest in Connection to Jussie Smollett Attack | Chicago police have questioned two people of interest in connection to an attack on Empire actor Jussie Smollett that detectives are investigating as a possible hate crime. Chicago Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement that detectives have questioned two people who are alleged to have been in the area where the attack occurred. They are not considered suspects at this time, he said. "After a meticulous investigation with the use of advance technology, interviews with the victim and witnesses and transportation records, detectives have identified two persons of interest in the Empire cast member case," Guglielmi tells TIME. "No further information available at this time.", On Jan. 29 Smollett reported that he was approached by two men as he was walking down a Chicago street. The men allegedly began yelling racial and homophobic slurs at him and beat Smollett's face with their hands, according to the Chicago Police Department. Police said Smollett told them that the attackers poured an "unknown chemical substance" on him and wrapped a rope around his neck. The two attackers then fled the scene and Smollett took himself to Northwestern Hospital. Detectives have recovered surveillance footage of Smollett arriving home with a rope around his neck, but have still not found footage of the attack, police said. On Jan. 31 Chicago Police released images of two men caught on surveillance in the area who were wanted for questioning, it is not confirmed if these are the same men detectives have questioned. , Smollett, an openly gay actor, is best known for his starring role on the FOX hit Empire, where he plays the role of Jamal Lyon. His character on the show is also gay. |
US | Judge Shoots Down Drone Ban | A federal judge on Thursday struck down a fine imposed by the FAA against drone operators, saying there is no law preventing commercial use of small unmanned aerial vehicles. In his ruling, National Transportation Safety Board Administrative Law Judge Patrick Geraghty said the government's policy notices were not enforceable because they had not been written as part of a formal rule making process. In the case, the FAA fined a Swiss drone operator 10,000 for for operating a drone recklessly while filming an advertisement for the University of Virginia's medical school. Geraghty's ruling dismissed the fine. The ruling could open up airspace below 400 feet to myriad commercial activities, from farmers surveying crops to pizza delivery. The FAA's policy was based on handling model aircraft, but in 2007 the agency began applying it to drones as well. In the intervening years, businesses have found more and more uses for small drones, from filming aerial shots for movies to delivering small goods. After a video went viral of a Minnesota beer company delivering beer via drone to ice fisherman, the FAA prohibited the practice. After Thursday's decision, the FAA could issue an emergency rule banning small drone use while launching an appeal, which would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Politico |
US | Chelsea Mannings Lawyers Confirm She Made a Suicide Attempt | Chelsea Manning made a suicide attempt in prison last week, her lawyers confirmed on Monday. Reports that she had been hospitalized trickled out last week, and while she would have preferred not to have her medical details released, her lawyers said in a statement, "the government's gross breach of confidentiality in disclosing her personal health information to the media has created the very real concern that they may continue their unauthorized release of information about her publicly without warning. Due to these circumstances, Chelsea Manning requested that we communicate with the media and her friends and supporters on her behalf.", ACLU attorney Chase Strangio shared the statement on Twitter, explaining that the legal team had spoken with her on Monday. "Last week," the statement continues, "Chelsea made a decision to end her life She knows that people have questions about how she is doing and she wants everyone to know that she remains under close observation by the prison and expects to remain on this status for the next several weeks. For us, hearing Chelsea's voice after learning that she had attempted to take her life last week was incredibly emotional. She is someone who has fought so hard for so many issues we care about and we are honored to fight for her freedom and medical care.", Manning, who is transgender and was previously known as Bradley Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in military prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. |
US | Appeals Court Rules Texas Can Enforce Abortion Restrictions | A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Texas can immediately begin to enforce strict new abortion restrictions that will in effect close all except seven abortion facilities in the second largest state in the country. In August, U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel ruled that part of a 2013 Texas law requiring clinics in the state to spend millions of dollars on upgrades, to meet equipment and staffing standards as hospital-style surgical centers, was designed not to make the clinics more safe but to make it harder for patients to access abortions. Yeakel's ruling suspended the upgrade requirements, reopening abortion clinics in the state. But Thursday's ruling by the three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, will close these facilities again, since the appeals court decided to enforce the law during the appeals process. The same court is still considering the constitutionality of a 2013 state abortion law. More than a dozen clinics will be forced to close their doors across the state. There will only be abortion facilities available in Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. There will be none along the Texas-Mexico border, one of the largest urban areas in the state. And women in McAllen, Texas will face a 300-mile drive to reach the nearest abortion facility. Clinics and pro-choice advocates say that the 2013 law is a backdoor way to outlaw abortion, which has been a constitutional right for women since the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973. Attorneys for the state balk at this claim, arguing that 9 in 10 women will still be within 150 miles of a provider. Abortion is a hot-button topic in the state leading up to November's gubernatorial race. Abortion restrictions are heavily supported by Republican candidate Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who faces off against democrat Wendy Davis, who garnered fame last summer for a 13-hour filibuster that temporarily blocked the law in the state Senate. |
US | A Las Vegas Flight Was Delayed Because a Passenger Got Naked | A Spirit Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Oakland was delayed Saturday after a passenger reportedly stripped naked shortly after boarding. "He removed his clothes and then approached a flight attendant," McCarran International Airport spokesman Chris Jones told a local NBC News affiliate about the passenger. The police were called to the scene and officials say the passenger received medical attention after the incident. There are no reported injuries as a result. Spirit Airlines Flight 359 flight was delayed for about 30 minutes, according to USA Today, and arrived in the Bay Area 20 minutes later than scheduled. The Las Vegas occurrence is one of many airline-passenger related incidents to make headlines in recent months. In May, an American Airlines passenger was arrested for opening the door of the plane and jumping on to the tarmac while it was taxiing. The passenger in that incident, Tun Lon Sein, also reportedly bit a flight attendant. |
US | Portlands E Coli Scare Has Residents Boiling Tap Water | Portland has issued a notice advising residents to boil tap water after samples taken from the city's water system tested positive for the bacteria E. coli. Residents are advised to boil for at least one minute any water used to drink, make ice or cook. "While we believe at this time that the potential health risk is relatively small, we take any contamination seriously and are taking every precaution to protect public health," Water Bureau Administrator David Shaff said in a statement. "The chance of any health problems related to this water test result is low. If any problems occur, we would expect diarrhea," said Dr. Paul Lewis, a county health officer. Contamination in the water system can occur due to a loss of water pressure, a broken pipe or any conditions that expose drinking water to the elements, according to a statement from the city. Residents will be informed when it's ok to use water without boiling it first. |
US | This Program Improved College Graduation Rates So Why Was It Abandoned | Summer school was boosting college graduation ratesbut not anymore. By the time Leah Stone got her bachelor's degree this spring from New Jersey's Montclair State University, her four-year higher education had stretched to six years. It would have taken even longer had she not been able to stay in school during the summers. An unexpectedly popular experiment allowed Stone and other students to use federal Pell Grants to pay for summer classes. But the program ended after the summer of 2011. And just as policymakers try to speed up the pace at which students get through college, the principal federal financial-aid program no longer covers courses taken in the summer. It's a conundrum in which the government wants to increase the number of people with university and college degrees, higher-education analyst Sandy Baum said, while at the same time telling students that "If you take more credits during the summer, we're not going to help you.", Congress decided that the two-year experiment with making Pell grants available for summer classes was too expensive, and President Barack Obama agreed to eliminate it. That saved up to 8 billion per year, the U.S. Department of Education said at the time. Now lawmakers are considering bringing back the summer Pell grants in some form. But they're also struggling to keep up with increases in tuition that have propelled the annual cost of Pell grants for the traditional academic year above 33 billion. "There's pretty bipartisan support for the Pell program overall," said Rep. John Kline R-Minn., chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. But before expanding it again, Kline said, Congress needs to find ways to deal with "incredible increases" in tuition. A group of Democratic senators led by Mazie Hirono of Hawaii has introduced a bill to restore summer Pell Grants. Among other options being discussed by the House education committee is a "Pell Well" of funds from which students could withdraw over the course of their educations, regardless of the time of year. The debate comes against a backdrop of evidence that taking summer courses improves a student's chances of finishing college. Students who enrolled in summer classes were three times more likely to finish their degrees, according to a 2009 study by researchers at California State University, Sacramento, though the study noted that summer students often are more motivated to graduate than others to begin with. And community colleges surveyed by a coalition of researchers said the Pell experiment succeeded at boosting summer enrollments at their campuses. Advocates for summer Pell grants argue it's unrealistic to assume all 18-year-olds graduate from high school and go to college for four years, as may have once been true. In reality, they said, students often work for several years before or during college, and many take closer to six years to graduate. Forty-four percent of students take more than six years to earn degrees, or drop out altogether, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Summer courses also are an important piece of the higher-education puzzle for the increasing number of students who are older, raising families, and holding jobs, said Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. "Higher education has changed pretty dramatically in the past decade," Draeger said. "We're talking about courses that don't run on traditional schedules. Year-round Pell helps get at that.", It also helps students at public universities like Montclair, where budget cuts have made it harder to get into courses in the fall and winter/spring semesters, Stone said. "The university is not equipped to have students finish in four years," said Stone, a board member of the U.S. Student Association. "There will be a class you're required to take, but it's only offered once a year and it has a 30-student limit.", Financial-aid officers at campuses across the United States said the short-lived summer Pell Grants were well-used. As many as 1.2 million students paid for summer classes with the scholarships in 2011 alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Although Pell grantswhich this year maxed out at 5,645 annuallyusually do not come close to paying the full price of tuition and other expenses, financial-aid directors said they often mean the difference between attending and dropping out of school for eligible students. What's happened in the summers since the Pell grants ended puts the picture in sharp focus, said Heather Nardello, the associate financial-aid director at the University of California, Merced, where 60 percent of the students are eligible for Pell awards. "We always see a number of students drop classes in the summer because they don't have the money to pay for them," Nardello said. Even without the grants, she said, about a third of the university's students take summer courses, using loans or their own savings. "I think it's still doable for students to get out in four years without summer classes," Nardello said, "but it definitely helps." |
US | The First US Memorial for Lynching Victims Will Open in Alabama | An Alabama-based civil rights organization will construct a monument in Montgomery to commemorate victims of lynchings across the South. The Equal Justice Initiative will also construct a museum nearby focused on African-American history, the group announced in a press release on Monday. Both are scheduled to open in 2017. The memorial will be the first in the country to pay tribute to the more than 4,000 black victims of lynching who were killed between 1877 and 1950. The 6-acre monument will feature a series of columns, each representing a county where "racial terror lynchings" took place, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. The names of the victims will be engraved on the columns. Bryan Stevenson, the organization's director, said in an interview with the Associated Press, that by acknowledging the darker aspects of the country's history, hopefully the U.S. can work toward a more unified future. "I don't think we can afford to continue pretending that there aren't these really troubling chapters in our history," Stevenson said. "I think we've got to deal with it.", A few blocks away from the memorial in Montgomery, a new museum, called From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, will rise on the site of a former slave warehouse, near a former slave auction house and a river dock and train station from which slaves were trafficked. The museum will trace the history of slavery to the mass imprisonment of black Americans today, which scholar Michelle Alexander has dubbed the "New Jim Crow.", News of the museum comes days after the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the first Smithsonian Institution dedicated to the contributions of black Americans. During remarks at an opening ceremony on Saturday, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama said the museum helps America acknowledge the full truth of its past. "As President Bush just said, a great nation doesn't shy from the truth. It strengthens us. It emboldens us. It should fortify us," Obama said. "It is an act of patriotism to understand where we've been." |
US | Southern California Blaze Kicks Off What Could Be Especially Dangerous Wildfire Season | As he looks ahead to summer, firefighter Steve Abbott is worried about the down and dead. The term refers to the dry, lifeless leaves and branches that are explosive fuel for wildfires and which are more abundant in California this year thanks to an unprecedented drought that has gripped the state. "The combination of temperatures and fuel adds to our concern," says Abbott, one of more than 500 firefighters now battling what's known as the Etiwanda Fire in San Bernardino County east of Los Angeles. The fire, which started on April 30, has burned about 1,600 acres and was 53 percent contained by Thursday evening. In addition to the drought conditions and temperatures that climbed above 90 in Southern California this week, fierce Santa Ana winds helped propel the blaze and prevented fire crews from fighting it from the air. Although the fire has not yet destroyed any structures, Etiwanda is effectively opening night for a wildfire season that fire officials say could be one of the most severe and dangerous on recordand a preview of what life in a hotter and drier world could be for Californians. That's because the Golden State is primed to burn. California is suffering through its most severe dry spell in decades, with the entire state now in some category of drought. At the beginning of May the snowpack level in the Sierra Nevada mountainsa key source of stored waterwas just 18 of normal. This winter, meanwhile, was the warmest on record for the state. The drought and the heat mean that plants and trees haven't grown as many green leaves as usual. Those leaves help trees maintain moistureand without them, the plants are that much more likely to ignite in a blaze. And it might not even take a fire to kill some of these parched trees. "If you don't have the vegetation receiving water, not only do you have lower humidity levels in the plants, but some of the trees will actually die," says Carlos Guerrero, a Glendale, Calif. fire captain and a spokesman for the multi-agency unified command battling the Etiwanda Fire. Dead trees means even more fuel on the ground as the height of the summer wildfire season approaches. Guerrero and his fellow firefighters are getting the Etiwanda blaze under controlthe mandatory evacuation orders announced after the fire began on Apr. 30 were lifted by the next day. But the changing climate means that the threat from wildfires is likely to only increase in the months and the years to come, in California and in much of the rest of the West. A study published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the number of large wildfires in the West had increased by a rate of seven fires a year from 1984 to 2011, while the total area had increased at a rate of nearly 90,000 acres a year. Since 2000 more than 8 million acres have burned during six separate years. Before 2000, no year had seen 8 million acres burned. The authors connected the increase to climate change, as did the researchers behind a 2012 study in Ecosphere that predicted that global warming would likely cause more frequent wildfires in the Western U.S. within the next 30 years. Even the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, considered the gold standard for climate science, concluded that there was high confidence that global warming was already intensifying wildfires in the West. Climate change isn't the only factor behind the increasing wildfires in California and the West. Successful firefighting in the past has allowed some forests to grow beyond their natural limits, ironically providing more fuel for megafires. And the number of people who have moved to areas that border wild land has increased as well. Given that most wildfires are begun by human beingseither purposefully or by accidentmore people near a forest means more chances for forest fires. For people like Mia Hidayat, who lives in a housing development near the border of the Etiwanda Fire, that means the simple sight of dry brush and bushes in her neighborhood has taken on a new danger. "I'm afraid," says Hidayat. As California's wildfire season grows, many others are sure to feel the same. |
US | Jury Convicts Woman Who Laughed During Jeff Sessions Confirmation Hearing | A jury on Wednesday convicted a Virginia woman who laughed during Jeff Sessions' confirmation hearing of disorderly conduct. Desiree A. Fairooz, a Code Pink protester, was removed from the Jan 10 hearing after she laughed when Sen. Richard Shelby R-Ala. stated that Sessions has an "extensive record of treating all Americans equally under the law." The jury on Wednesday also found guilty her parading or demonstrating on Capitol grounds, according to the New York Times. Fiarooz told the Times that she was "really disappointed," but that it was too early to discuss a possible appeal. , Two other Code Pink protesters were also convicted Wednesday. Tighe Barry and Lenny Bianchi, who were dressed as Ku Klux Klan members, were acquitted of disorderly conducts charges, but were convicted on one charge each for parading or demonstrating. The trio could each be sentenced to 12 months in prison, according to the Times. Barry, Bianchi and Fairooz are scheduled to return to court in June, according to HuffPost. |
US | Robert Mueller Subpoenas Paul Manaforts Bank Records in Russia Investigation | U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller is bearing down on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as he directs a wide-ranging probe into Russian interference in last year's presidential election. Mueller's team of investigators has sent subpoenas in recent weeks from a Washington grand jury to global banks for account information and records of transactions involving Manafort and some of his companies, as well as those of a long-time business partner, Rick Gates, according to people familiar with the matter. The special counsel has also reached out to other business associates, including Manafort's son-in-law and a Ukrainian oligarch, according to one of the people. Those efforts were characterized as an apparent attempt to gain information that could be used to squeeze Manafort, or force him to be more helpful to prosecutors. Manafort's spokesman confirmed that FBI agents raided the political consultant's home in Virginia two weeks ago to secure documents related to the investigation. That raid was initially reported by the Washington Post. As prosecutors gather many years of information about his financial affairs, Manafort could be dragged deeper into any number of legal disputes. He has a history of doing business with oligarchs and politicians in Ukraine and Russia that predates his political work for Trump, with payments routed through foreign banks and investments in U.S. real estate. Part of the reason Manafort is getting intense early scrutiny is that Mueller is drawing on investigations that were well underway, including one by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, when he was appointed in May. With prosecutors combing through his financial life, the 68-year-old has been toeing a fine line, cooperating with congressional requests for information about the campaign, and insisting he has nothing to hide from Mueller's team of prosecutors who are delving into his past. Privately, his supporters question Mueller's work to unearth conduct with no apparent connection to the 2016 election. Manafort's spokesman, Jason Maloni, declared last month that Manafort was not a "cooperating witness" a legal term for someone who agrees to provide evidence and testimony to prosecutors. When reached Wednesday, he only addressed the revelation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raid, saying, "Mr. Manafort has consistently cooperated with law enforcement and other serious inquiries and did so on this occasion as well.", As a practical matter, the blitz of recent subpoenas to global banks poses a challenge to Manafort's ability to continue his day-to-day business activities as a consultant and investor, said one of the people familiar with the matter. Of course, the Manafort inquiry is just one thread of Mueller's multifaceted effort, which includes the purchase of Trump real estate properties by wealthy Russians going back a decade, the foreign ties of Michael Flynn, who was briefly the administration's National Security Adviser, and the dismissal of FBI chief James Comey by the President. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan were investigating Manafort earlier this year, examining allegations that he laundered money from eastern Europe into New York properties, according to two people familiar with the earlier inquiry. The Southern District of New York handed off their work to the special counsel's team once Mueller was appointed, the people said. Along with the real-estate inquiry, the special counsel has taken over a review of Manafort's late filings to comply with the foreign-agent registration act, known as FARA, according to one of the people. A spokesman for Mueller's office, Joshua Stueve, declined to comment. The 6 a.m. raid on Manafort's Virginia home last month seemingly caught his legal team by surprise. It came the day after he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and after he had provided his notes to the committee. In fact, Manafort had alerted authorities to a controversial meeting on June 9, 2016, involving Trump's son Donald Jr. other campaign representatives and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton, according to people familiar with the matter. The president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were dragged into the matter as details repeatedly emerged that contradicted the initial accounts of that meeting. Manafort's business associates also risk being engulfed by the probe. Jeffrey Yohai, who is the estranged husband of Manafort's daughter, is under investigation by FBI agents working with prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles, according to people familiar with their work. With cash infusions from Manafort, Yohai formed real-estate partnerships that took in investor money in New York and Los Angeles. Some of the partnerships subsequently declared bankruptcy, court filings show. U.S. authorities are now looking into claims by an investor that Yohai operated a Ponzi scheme, the people explained. Yohai is contesting a civil lawsuit over one of the soured deals, having won an initial round challenging the jurisdiction. Yohai's lawyer, Aaron May, declined to comment. How a Grand Jury Fits in the Trump-Russia Probe QuickTake QA, Rick Gates's relationship with Manafort dates to at least 2006, when the younger man joined Manafort Davis, a consulting firm that re-packaged a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician as a leader friendly to the West. Eventually, Gates helped manage a Manafort-directed private equity fund called Pericles, which was supposed to invest in Ukraine. Michael Dry, a lawyer for Gates, also declined to comment. Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, invested 25 million in a real-estate venture started by Manafort a decade ago that subsequently attracted the attention of investigators. Now in Austria, Firtash has been charged in an unrelated case with paying bribes in India in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He is facing a Justice Department request for extradition to the U.S. in that matter. Firtash's attorney, Dan Webb, said, "My client is not in any way cooperating with the special counsel office on Paul Manafort or any other issue. Because of the indictment pending in Chicago, I will not make any other comment.", The inquiry by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan initially focused on a Manafort-backed business called CMZ Ventures, which sought to develop a luxury skyscraper on Park Avenue in 2008. The partnership received 25 million from Firtash, according to court records filed in a New York federal lawsuit. But the money was never invested in a project, and the firm was shuttered in 2009. The plaintiffs in that CMZ civil suit, including the former prime minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, alleged the real purpose of the firm was to launder money through the U.S. financial system that Firtash had obtained improperly by skimming sales of natural gas to Ukraine. In court papers, lawyers for CMZ Ventures and fellow defendants argued that U.S. laws didn't apply to gas transactions abroad and that the New York court had no jurisdiction in the matter. A federal judge agreed, dismissing the lawsuit in 2015. By the time Mueller inherited the New York investigation, it extended well beyond the Manafort-Firtash relationship, according to a person briefed on the special counsel's probe. Those circling Manafort include various congressional committees, the New York Attorney General and the Manhattan District Attorney. The New York authorities are examining an unusual combination of mortgages and loans assembled by Manafort. Even the National Enquirer, which veered away from celebrity news to endorse Trump during the campaign, took a swing at Manafort. The tabloid published a story Wednesday with embarrassing details about his personal life. |