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US | A Brief Guide to the Keystone XL Pipeline Debate | What is the Keystone XL Pipeline?, It is a proposed extension of a pipeline that transports oil from Alberta, Canada to a major petroleum exchange in Cushing, Okla. and from there to the Gulf of Mexico. The existing smaller pipeline takes a more circuitous route. The Canadian company TransCanada's solution is to build a larger-capacity, more direct link from Alberta to the existing pipeline. That project is known as Keystone XL. , Why is Obama involved?, Because the Keystone XL link would cross an international boundary between the U.S. and Canada, the project requires presidential approval. Proponents say Keystone XL will reduce the need to move oil by freight trainwhich can lead to potentially dangerous accidentsand create perhaps tens of thousands of jobs. President Obama, who has not taken a public position on the project, has cited a State Department analysis that concludes the pipeline will create only about 2,000 jobs during construction and 50 around permanent jobs once it's complete. Why is it controversial?, Climate activists have rallied around the Keystone XL pipeline as an environmental litmus test. They worry that it will intrude on property rightscourts have allowed TransCanada to run sections of the pipeline over private land, despite objections from the property owners and warn that it could be vulnerable to environmentally dangerous leaks along its proposed 1,700 mile route. But their primary objection is that the project will encourage the burning of fossil fuels and worsen climate change. The oil shipped through the new pipe would come from Canada's so-called tar sands, which climate activists say is dirtier and worse for the environment than regular oil. A State Department review released in January found that Keystone XL would have little effect on the planet's environmental health because the oil in Canada's tar sands will be extracted and sold through another avenue if the project is blocked. What happens next?, The southern portion of the Keystone pipeline connecting Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico will open for business in 2015. The northern extensionthe one everyone's arguing abouthas yet to be approved. But the Dec. 6 runoff for the Louisiana Senate seat of Democrat Mary Landrieu gave the project a jolt in Washington, as Landrieu and her Republican challenger, Rep. Bill Cassidy, jockey to claim credit for getting it built. The House passed legislation sponsored by Cassidy allowing Keystone XL on Nov. 14 and the Senate votes on a similar measure backed by Landrieu on Nov. 18. President Obama has signaled that he may veto the legislation, but he has not taken a public stance. No matter what happens at the federal level, Keystone XL is likely to face court battles in states through which it passes. |
US | Republicans Held a Locker Room Kegger for Kavanaughs Confirmation on Last Nights Saturday Night Live | Republican senators partied in the "GOP locker room" after the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh on last night's Saturday Night Live cold open. "Republicans read the mood of the country, and we could tell that people really wanted Kavanaugh," said Beck Bennett as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "Everyone's pumped, from white men over 60, to white men over 70.", Judge Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed earlier on Saturday after a 50-48 vote in the Senate. The vote was delayed after multiple women accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault, including Dr. Blasey Ford, who testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27. SNL had previously mocked Judge Kavanaugh's furious response to the allegations in last week's cold open. This week's sketch played out as a straightforward expression of liberal disappointment following the confirmation. "We made a lot of women real worried today," said Kate McKinnon, reprising last week's role as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. "But I'm not getting pregnant so I don't care.", Slightly more cutting was the sketch's depiction of Republican senators considered swing votes to Kavanaugh's confirmation. "The last thing I wanted was to make this about me," said Cecily Strong as Maine Sen. Susan Collins. "That's why I told everyone to tune in at 3 p.m. so I could tell all my female supporters, psyche!'", "Listen, I think it's important to believe women until it's time to stop," she continued. Pete Davidson portrayed a somber Senator Jeff Flake, commiserating with many Americans' disappointment following the confirmation up until he was pied in the face by fellow Republicans. "We all know who you are," Bennett's McConnell bellowed. "Flake the snake. You would never vote no.'", Watch this week's SNL cold open here |
US | The One Battle Michael Browns Family Will Win | In the fevered moments after the grand jury's decision not to charge Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, the family of the slain 18-year-old released a statement pleading for peace and urging people to join their campaign to get police around the nation to wear cameras. "We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen," the statement read. "Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.", The crusade is understandable. No video recordings of the Aug. 9 confrontation between Wilson and Brown exist, and eyewitness accounts of the incident were often in conflict. Some said Brown had his hands up when he was shot. Others said Brown was charging toward Wilson when he officer fired. To many, a camera on Wilson's uniform would have ended the uncertainty and potentially avoided the subsequent tumult that engulfed the St. Louis suburb. |
US | A Runner Fought Off and Killed a Mountain Lion During an Attack | A man fought off and killed a mountain lion that attacked him while he was running in a mountain park in northern Colorado on Monday, authorities have said. The man, who has not been named by authorities, was running on West Ridge Trail in Horsetooth Mountain Park in Larimer County when he was attacked from behind, Reuters reports. He suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries and was able to reach a local hospital, according to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife department. Authorities have not said how the runner killed the animal, but confirmed its body had been found on the trail and brought to a lab to be examined. "Mountain lion attacks are not common in Colorado and it is unfortunate that the lion's hunting instincts were triggered by the runner," Ty Petersburg, area wildlife manager for the CPW told Reuters in a statement. "This could have had a very different outcome.", Mountain lions rarely attack humans and have killed fewer than twenty people have been in the last century in the U.S. Only sixteen attacks have been recorded in Colorado since 1990, officials told Reuters. |
US | Idaho Pastor Shot 1 Day After Delivering Prayer for Ted Cruz | The pastor of a prominent Idaho church was shot and critically wounded in the church's parking lot Sunday, a day after he delivered the invocation at a campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, authorities told NBC News. Tim Remington, 55, senior pastor of the nondenominational Altar Church in Coeur d'Alene, was taken to Kootenai Health and Medical Center in critical condition, police and the hospital told NBC News. The hospital reported his status as stable late Sunday night. Coeur d'Alene police Detective Jared Reneau said that when officers arrived shortly before 2 p.m. 5 p.m. ET, they found Remington with multiple, Read the rest of the story from our partners at NBC News |
US | See All the States Where Governors Oppose Syrian Refugees | In the wake of the attacks on Paris, a slew of American governors have expressed opposition to President Obama's plan to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees to come to the U.S. Some states like Alabama and Texas say they would not allow these immigrants into their states some like Massachusetts and Nevada have requested more information from the federal government before they make a decision and others like Idaho and North Carolina land in the middle, saying they oppose the idea but stopping short of refusing to receive refugees. On the other end of the spectrum, a handful of governors have pledged to accept Syrian migrants. , Since 2012, most American states have taken in at least a few refugees from Syria, with nearly 2,000 immigrants arriving from Syria since then. Some of the states that have taken in large numbers, like Texas and Arizona, are now among the states that oppose accepting more. |
US | Ted Cruz Wants Recently Convicted Mexican Drug Lord El Chapo to Fund Border Wall | While the country waits to see whether President Trump will accept the new border security plan negotiated by Congress, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has come up with an unlikely solution of his own to pay for the President's much-touted wall make recently convicted Mexican drug lord El Chapo pay for it. On Tuesday, the Republican lawmaker pushed a bill that looks to use seized assets of the notorious drug lord to fund the controversial barrier. Cruz first introduced the bill in 2017. The Texas senator's tweet came the day after he appeared with Trump at a rally in El Paso, in which the president repeated false claims that the border wall in the city has led to a decrease in crime. "America's justice system prevailed today in convicting Joaqun Guzmn Loera, aka El Chapo, on all 10 counts," Cruz tweeted. "U.S. prosecutors are seeking 14 billion in drug profits other assets from El Chapo which should go towards funding our wall to SecureTheBorder.", , Cruz' bill, Ensuring Lawful Collection of Hidden Assets to Provide Order, or the "El Chapo Act," would reserve the right for the country to use any amount of the assets seized in the criminal prosecution of El Chapo and any other convicted drug lords to fund border security and the completion of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2017, the U.S. Justice Department said it was seeking more than 14 billion in drug proceeds and illicit profits from El Chapo, which is more than double the 5.7 billion president Trump has been demanding to fund the U.S.-Mexican border wall. Joaqun "El Chapo" Guzmn was convicted on all charges related to drug trafficking in a Brooklyn Federal Court on Tuesday. He is expected to be sentenced to life in prison on June 25. El Chapo headed the notorious Sinaloa cartel. After escaping from two Mexican prisons, he was extradited to the U.S. in 2017 to face trial for drug trafficking related crimes. While the infamous Mexican drug lord made his fortune by smuggling drugs, he allegedly did so by creatively smuggling them at multiple legal points of entry using a wide range of transportation modes including submarines, planes, tractor trailers and trains. According to prosecutors, El Chapo smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine across the U.S. Mexican border by hiding drugs in jalapeo pepper cans. |
US | Politicians Who Destroy Confederate Symbols Should Be Lynched a Mississippi Lawmaker Says | A Mississippi State Legislator wrote an incendiary Facebook post over the weekend in response to the removal of Confederate symbols in New Orleans. Rep. Karl Oliver, a Republican from Winona, Miss. suggested leaders of the city "should be lynched" if they intend to "destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY.", The full post was removed from Oliver's Facebook page as of Monday afternoon. It read, "The destruction of these monuments, erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans, is both heinous and horrific. If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, "leadership" of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED! Let it be known, I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening in our State.", As of May 20, New Orleans has removed four monuments that commemorated the Confederacy from public view, but the statutes have not been destroyed. The city's mayor has defended the act, saying the city has moved to "correct" history. "We're actually correcting history," Mayor Mitch Landrieu recently told TIME. "Those monuments have never reflected the totality of who we are.", Oliver was not immediately available for comment, but some of his fellow lawmakers have blasted the post calling it offensive and saying they were angered by it. "The shameful, but seemingly extremely comfortable, choice of words used by my colleague Rep. Karl Oliver, were offensive to me as the act of lynching was commonly used and most targeted toward African American men, women and children in the south and especially in our state," Rep. Sonya Williams Barnes, a Democrat, told Mississippi's WJTV. Another Democrat, Rep. Chris Bell, wrote on Facebook that he was "angered beyond words" by Oliver's post. "His constant and consistent disrespect for those who are offended by the images of hate is unacceptable! I will fight with vigor and tenacity to ensure not only our current state flag is removed along with those images that glorify hate," Bell wrote in a post that included a screenshot of Oliver's Facebook page. The Root notes that Oliver's remarks are particularly striking given the fact that a county in his district, Leflore, is home to Money, Miss. where Emmett Till was killed in 1955. On Monday afternoon, Oliver issued an apology to Mississippi Today. The statement reads, "I, first and foremost, wish to extend this apology for any embarrassment I have caused to both my colleagues and fellow Mississippians. In an effort to express my passion for preserving all historical monuments, I acknowledge the word lynched' was wrong. I am very sorry. It is in no way, ever, an appropriate term. I deeply regret that I chose this word, and I do not condone the actions I referenced, nor do I believe them in my heart. I freely admit my choice of words was horribly wrong, and I humbly ask your forgiveness." |
US | Federal Judge Rules US Ban on Female Genital Mutilation Is Unconstitutional | In a historic ruling that strikes a chilling blow to women's rights, a federal judge in Michigan declared unconstitutional the U.S. law against female genital mutilations FGM, and dropped charges against two doctors for carrying out the procedure on underage girls. U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman said Tuesday that Congress lacks the authority to outlaw the procedure, and insisted only states can make such a decision, the Detroit Free Press reports. "As despicable as FGM may be," Friedman said, Congress "overstepped its bounds" by banning the practice. The trial was the first federal case to involve FGM, which is common religious practice in some cultures, but is internationally recognized as a human rights violation. The defendants, including three mothers, are all members of the Indian Muslim Dawoodi Bohra community. Friedman dismissed the main charges against Jumana Nagarwala, a doctor who prosecutors said may have performed the procedure on up to 100 girls. Another doctor who allowed Nagarwala to use his clinic, that doctor's wife and five others also saw their charges dropped. The doctors continue to face lengthy prison terms on conspiracy charges. According to the court records, two of the mothers tricked their 7-year-olds into thinking they were going to Detroit for a girls' trip. Instead, they had their genitals cut. FGM typically involves cutting or even wholly removing the clitoris. The World Health Organization calls it "a violation of the human rights of girls and women" that "has no health benefits.", In 2012, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution to ban the practice, which affects an estimated 200 million women and girls worldwide. It has also been outlawed in more than 30 countries, including the U.S. which passed a law in 1996 criminalizing FGM with a 5-year prison term. , Twenty-seven states separately passed similar measures, including Michigan in 2017. But the defendants in this case are not retroactively subject to the new law. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in Detroit said the government would review the ruling before deciding whether to appeal. Michigan State Senator Margaret O'Brien, who backed the state ban on FGM, said she was "appalled" by Tuesday's ruling. Yasmeen Hassan, executive global director for gender rights group Equality Now, warned the ruling sends the message to women and girls that "you are not important." |
US | Trump Says Crazy and Dumb as a Rock Morning Joe Hosts Are Not Bad People | President Donald Trump took to Twitter to comment about various NBC anchors. Trump seemingly ended his feud with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of Morning Joe on MSNBC. "Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!" Trump tweeted Saturday morning. This comes after he said Scarborough and Brzezinski tried to join him at Mar-a-Lago. "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me don't watch anymore. Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!" Trump said over two tweets. That tweet launched back-and-forth comments from the President and the show hosts. He also commented on Greta van Susteren's exit from MSNBC. The anchor was let go after less than six months at the network, the New York Times reported. "Word is that @Greta Van Susteren was let go by her out of control bosses at @NBC @Comcast because she refused to go along w/ Trump hate!'" Trump also tweeted Saturday morning. |
US | San Bernardino Shooter Syed Farook Traveled to Saudi Arabia | The man suspected of killing 14 people with his wife during a shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. on Wednesday traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2014. Syed Farook, a 28-year-old county health inspector, journeyed to the Middle Eastern country for about a month and came back to the U.S. with a wife, his coworker Patrick Baccari told the Associated Press. Baccari worked in a cubicle near Farook and also attended the banquet the couple targeted in a conference room at a center for developmentally disabled people. The Saudi embassy in D.C. confirmed that Farook spent nine days in the country in the summer of 2014. Farook, a U.S. citizen, returned to America in July 2014 with his then-fiance Tashfeen Malik, 27, according to David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI's Los Angeles field office. It's still unclear where else Farook may have traveled before the deadly rampage. "We know he did go to Pakistan at one point," Bowdich said. Malik, who has a Pakistani passport, was in the country on a K-1 visa, which is issued to the fianc of a U.S. citizen to enter the country. Authorities still don't know the couple's motive. "There was obviously a mission here. We know that. We do not know why," Bowdich said. Farook and Malik killed 14 people and injured 17 others in their attack at the Inland Regional Center before they were gunned down in a police shootout. President Barack Obama said Thursday authorities still don't know if the mass shooting in California was related to terrorism or was workplace-related. |
US | Colorado Still Cant Figure Out Final Rules for Edible Marijuana | A working group convened to help Colorado regulate edible marijuana products failed to come up with consensus recommendations at its final meeting Monday, punting the issue to the state legislature. Officials have long been worried that edible products, which can take the form of sweets like lollipops and treats like brownies, will lead children to experiment with marijuana or accidentally ingest it. In May, the largest children's hospital in Colorado reported that nine children had been brought in after accidentally eating such products, double the amount the institution had seen in the previous year. Despite fears that Halloween would see a spike of such incidents, the hospital didn't report any cases of accidental ingestion. The working group was formed to develop ideas for keeping edibles safe and out of children's hands. The ideas ranged from making all marijuana edibles a certain color to banning most forms of edibles, limiting production to only lozenges and tinctures. A variety of suggestions will be presented to the state legislature when it reconvenes in January. Makers of edible products don't want to see their section of the market shrunk and point out that every "preparation of the plant" was given the green light when state voters approved Amendment 64 in 2012. Washington, which opened its recreational market after Colorado, instituted emergency rules about edibles in June that require state approval of every edible product, including its packaging and labeling. Colorado's working group rejected a proposal from the state health department to create a similar review commission. |
US | The Volunteer Army Hunting Floridas Invasive Pythons | As I write in TIME's cover story this week, Burmese pythons invaded Florida years ago, and they've thrived in the warm tropical climate. There may be tens of thousands of pythons slithering around south Florida, but the truth is that no one really knows. That's because when they don't want to be foundwhich is most of the timeBurmese pythons are all but impossible to locate. At a 2013 state-sponsored hunt, nearly 1,600 participants found and captured just 68 pythons. "For every one snake you'll find, you can walk by at least 99 without seeing them," says Michael Dorcas, a snake expert at Davidson College. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Just ask experts like Jeff Fobb, a dangerous-animal specialist with Miami Dade County Fire Rescue department. Fobb helps train volunteers for the Python Patrol, an initiative begun by the Nature Conservancy and now run by the state of Florida. Training as many people as possible improves the chances of actually capturing a python when one is found. But it's not always easy, as this video shows. To see the full cover story click here Invasive Species Coming to a Habitat Near You |
US | President Trump Just Banned Transgender People From the US Military Heres What to Know | President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday morning that transgender individuals will not be able to serve in the military "in any capacity," reversing a policy under former President Barack Obama that allowed transgender people to serve openly. "After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military," the President said in a series of tweets. "Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.", Here's what to know about the President's announcement banning transgender people from the military. Trump said on Twitter that allowing transgender people to serve in the military would bring "tremendous medical costs and disruption." A 2016 RAND Corporation study, which was commissioned by the Defense Department, found that expanding medical coverage to transgender members would cost between 2.4 million to 8.4 million, with an average median cost increase of 5.4 million annually. That median cost would amount to a health-care spending increase of 0.22 per service member per month, according to RAND. But that's only a small drop in the bucket when it comes to total military health care costs. In total, active-component health-care spending amounts to 6 billion annually, and the Department of Defense spends 49.3 billion each year on health care, the RAND report said. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how it will address transgender servicemembers that already openly serving in the military. "We will continue to work closely with the White House to address the new guidance provided by the Commander-in-Chief on transgender individuals serving in the military," Pentagon spokesperson Capt. Jeff Davis said in a statement, according to ABC News. "We will provide revised guidance to the Department in the near future.", RAND's 2016 analysis estimated that between 1,320 and 6,630 people serve in the military on active duty and another 830 to 4,160 serve in reserves duty. This makes up 0.1-0.5 of both active duty and selected reserve service members. In total, there are about 1.2 million in active military service and another 800,000 in reserves, according to the Department of Defense. Former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who was nominated by Obama, announced in July 2016 that the military would end its ban on open service of transgender troops. The ban was formerly lifted on July 1, 2016. At the time, the five branches of the military were given a year to create new transgender-inclusive guidelines. Obama's White House voiced its support at the time, issuing a statement saying "The President agrees with the sentiment that all Americans who are qualified to serve should be able to serve. We here at the White House welcome the comments from the Secretary of Defense.", LGBTQ activists have come out against Trump's ban. GLAAD, an organization dedicated to promoting acceptance for the LGBTQ community, said the announcement was a "direct attack on transgender Americans." Chelsea Manning called the move "cowardice" in a tweet on Tuesday. Many politicians, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, voiced their opposition on Twitter as well. , , |
US | Why Its So Hard to Gauge Level of Hate Crimes in US | The fatal shooting of nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, S.C. by a white gunman has been called a hate crime by the city's chief of police. But a civil rights nonprofit that tracks hate crimes says chronic underreporting makes it impossible to determine the extent of racially motivated incidents in South Carolina and throughout the U.S. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are roughly 250,000 to 300,000 hate crimes in the U.S. every year. The FBI, however, only reports about 5,000 to 6,000 incidents a year as hate crimes. In 2013, it reported 5,928 hate crimes but none at all in South Carolina. "The data is horrible," says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which tracks hate crimes. "It's horrifically underreported.", Beirich says that state and local jurisdictions routinely either don't report hate crime incidents to the FBI or don't categorize or treat them as hate crimes. "When you see South Carolina reporting no hate crimes, you understand how ridiculous that data is," she says. The shooting on Thursday appears to follow the pattern of a single person with violent motivations based on race. Since 2009, more than 60 cases of domestic terrorism have occurred in the U.S. with 74 of them considered "lone-wolf," or carried out by just one person, according to the SPLC. In a report released earlier this year, the SPLC reported that despite the lack of FBI data, a so-called "lone-wolf" plot is broken up every five weeks. In the last few years, there have been several incidents of white individuals targeting black or minority communities. In 2010, Ronald Pudder set fire to a predominantly African-American church in Ohio. He later pled guilty. In 2012, Jake England and Alvin Watts, both white, opened fire in black neighborhoods in Tulsa, Okla. killing three. Both pled guilty. |
US | Kalamazoo Uber Driver Had a 473 Rating Before Shooting Rampage | Uber responded to criticism over the Saturday night shooting rampage by a Kalamazoo driver on Monday, emphasizing that no differences in its background check system could have predicted the incident which left six dead. The company said in a conference call that the accused, Jason Dalton, had no criminal record, and a high customer feedback rating of 4.73 out of 5 stars on the platform. The company says Dalton had been approved to begin picking up passengers on Jan. 25, and had given a little more than 100 rides since then. Asked whether changes to the background check policy might be in order, Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan said no, pointing out that the company's current system involves checking if a driver has any criminal record with local authorities, county courthouses and federal databases. Sullivan says when the company receives reports that a driver has been violent, "we will suspend the driver immediately while we investigate the allegations." But when the complaint is just about bad driving, like a call placed by a passenger in Dalton's car earlier in the day, "we will typically talk to the driver first before suspending his or her account. That's because we get a lot of complaints about bad driving, not all of which turn out to be 100 fair or accurate, and it's important we hear both sides.", Asked whether Uber might implement a "panic button" in its app, as it has in India, Sullivan said American riders know to consider calling 911 as their version of a panic button. Uber Safety Advisory Board member Ed Davis, the former police commissioner of Boston from 2006 to '13, agreed it was necessary for riders to consider 911 their go-to source for emergency help. "When there's an ongoing crime, especially a violent crime, you don't want to confuse people" about who they should contact. "You don't want to set up a second system that will not only confuse people but may delay help when it's desperately needed." |
US | Woman at Center of Silicon Valley Sex Discrimination Trial Takes the Stand | A woman behind a closely watched trial over gender bias at a well-known venture capital firm in Silicon Valley took the stand on Monday to share her side of the story. Ellen Pao, who will testify again on Tuesday, said Monday that a male colleague at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins with whom she had an affair became hostile toward her when she broke things off. Pao is seeking 16 million in damages in her suit and says she was passed over for jobs and retaliated against because of her gender. Kleiner lawyers say the company is simply a meritocracy, and employees are judged purely on the strength of their work. Previous witnesses have tried to paint Pao as quiet and inarticulate, USA Today reports, but on the stand Monday she came across as calm and a good presenter. Pao said when she was first offered a job at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's largest firms, she turned it down because it didn't meet her qualifications. She was later offered another position, but says she was given the boot from the firm in 2012 after complaining about gender bias. The suit has highlighted the lack of gender diversity in Silicon Valley, and the "bro-grammer" culture that exists there as a result. USA Today |
US | Kansas City Shooting Suspect to Face Hate Crime Charges | The suspect accused of killing three people in a shooting rampage outside of a Jewish center and a retirement community Sunday will face hate crime charges, authorities said Monday. "We have unquestionably determined through the work of law enforcement that this was a hate crime," Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass told the Associated Press. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder issued a statement earlier on Monday saying federal prosecutors would work with their local counterparts "to determine whether the federal hate crimes statute is implicated in this case.", Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, was arrested Sunday in an elementary school parking lot after he shot two people at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park, Kan. before driving to a nearby retirement community, where he shot a third. Cross reportedly shouted "Heil Hitler!" while in police custody. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, identified Cross as a well-known white supremacist and a former "grand dragon" of a wing of the Ku Klux Klan. Cross is also known to have contributed writings to the Vanguard News Network, an anti-Semitic organization that he supported financially. All three people Cross killed were Christians, the AP reports. AP |
US | Baltimore Mayor Defends Handling of Riots | Barely 24 hours after the city she leads was engulfed in a spasm of violent riots, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake defended her handling of the crisis in an interview with TIME. "I'm not green to these types of issues. I've been mayor for five years. I've led a city. And directed a police department. I know how to use resources. We've done it and we responded to protests," she said Tuesday evening, hours before police began enforcing the first night of a week-long 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. "I'm comfortable with how we've responded in very, very challenging times.", MORE Baltimore Mom Explains Why She Smacked Son at Riot, As Rawlings-Blake spoke inside City Hall, some of the 2,000 National Guard troops mobilized by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan were stationed outside the building. Hogan deployed the soldiers Monday night after rioting broke out following the funeral of Freddie Gray, 25, who died on April 19 after sustaining an injury in police custody. But Hogan made clear that he was ready to do so earlier had the mayor requested, and implied that Rawlings-Blake was unreachable during a critical stretch as the riots were escalating. The remarks were among a series of incidences that highlighted the frosty relationship between the Republican governor and the Democratic mayor. Rawlings-Blake fired back at Hogan on Tuesday. The governor "didn't have a full understanding of all things that were being put in place," she told TIME. "When we are in the midst of dealing with an issue, you have to be very judicious about the use of the National Guard. They're viewed by the community as a sign of militarization. They're viewed by many as a sign of escalation of an incident.", Rawlings-Blake said she asked Hogan to activate the Guard only when the situation was more than city police and their reinforcements from other neighboring agencies could handle. "When it was very clear that the situation was changing and changing fast and we needed people that had the authority to hold ground while we went into do the enforcement," she said, "that's when we called them.", Read next The Pain of Watching Baltimore BurnAgain |
US | The Weekend Brief Trumps Defense OJ Simpsons Release SNLs Return | Good afternoon. Here are the top stories from this weekend. President Donald Trump on Saturday praised leaders in Puerto Rico and urged residents of the hurricane-battered island not to believe in "fake news" about poor U.S. relief efforts. His compliments to Puerto Rican officials come after he slammed San Juan Mayor Carmen Yuln Cruz and others for their apparent "poor leadership ability." Separately, Trump on Sunday said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was "wasting his time" pursuing negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. O.J. Simpson walked out of prison a free man Sunday after spending nine years behind bars for an armed robbery. The former football star had been granted parole in July. He was released shortly after midnight, according to the Associated Press. Saturday Night Live debuted its season premiere, which was hosted by actor Ryan Gosling and featured performances by rapper Jay Z. Standout moments included Jay Z's silent show of support for Colin Kaepernick and Alec Baldwin's takedown of Trump in the cold open. Also, Hundreds of people were injured in violent clashes in Catalonia, Spain. A knife-wielding man killed two women at a train station in Marseille, France. Marilyn Manson was hospitalized after a stage prop fell on him during a concert. Two new judges have signed on for the 2018 reboot of American Idol. |
US | Uber Is Not in Kansas Anymore | Uber shut down its operations in Kansas on Tuesday after state lawmakers overrode Republican Governor Sam Brownback's veto of a bill that would impose new rules on ride-sharing services. The Republican-held Senate and House both had more than a two-thirds majority to override the veto of the bill, which would require drivers undergo Kansas Bureau of Investigation background checks and enhance its auto insurance, the Associated Press reports. "We're saddened by the loss of hundreds of jobs, safe rides and transportation choice for consumers in Kansas," Uber spokeswoman Lauren Altmin said in a statement, the Kansas City Star reports. On Tuesday afternoon, users in Kansas were prompted with this message, , Only last month, Uber was celebrating an agreement with the city council in Kansas City and the continuation of its operations there. A main competitor, Lyft, has not operated in the city since the fall. |
US | Facebook Will Review Video Reporting Procedures Following Cleveland Murder | Facebook is reviewing its method of reporting and reviewing videos flagged to by users after a man posted a video featuring himself shooting an elderly man in the head. "We are reviewing our reporting flows to be sure people can report videos and other material that violates our standards as easily and quickly as possible," Facebook Global Operations Vice President Justin Osofsky said in a statement. Facebook finds itself embroiled in controversy after a suspected killer, 37-year-old Steve Stephens, announced his intent to murder on Facebook, and subsequently published a video on the platform killing a 74-year-old man, Robert Godwin Jr. in Cleveland, Ohio. Facebook removed the video, but only after it was up for three hours. READ MORE What to Know About Cleveland Facebook Murder Suspect Steve Stephens, Osofsky said the company did not receive a report about the first video, where Stephens announced his intention to murder as part of an "Easter Day slaughter," and only received a report about the video where the actual shooting happened over an hour and 45 minutes after it was posted. Although Osofsky noted that Facebook disabled the suspect's account 23 minutes after receiving the first report, he acknowledged the need for improvements. "We know we need to do better," he said. He also said Facebook is exploring new technologies that can increase the safety for users, like artificial intelligence. |
US | Family of 8 Believed to Be Inside the SUV That Plunged off a California Cliff | Authorities believe there were six children inside an SUV that plunged off a cliff in California Monday one of them a black boy whose tearful image went viral after he hugged a white police officer during a 2014 protest. Two women, Jennifer and Sarah Hart, and three children were killed in the accident, authorities said. Three more children are still missing after the crash. One of the missing children, 15-year-old Devonte Hart, appeared in the viral photo during a protest in Portland, Oregon over the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The six children ranged in age from 12 to 19. "An entire family vanished and perished during this tragedy," Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allmon told reporters Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. Officials have not yet determined what caused the accident. There were no skid marks or no brake marks, Allmon said, adding that there is no evidence the crash was intentional, according to the AP. A couple who lived next to the Hart family in Woodland, Washington said they had called child welfare officials on Friday to report concerns that the children weren't being well fed, AP reports. They said Devonte Hart had come to their house asking for food. , Another neighbor told the AP that the family was friendly but private, and the children were home-schooled. Portland photographer Zippy Lomax, a friend of the family, told the Oregonian that "Jen and Sarah were the kinds of parents this world desperately needs.", "They loved their kids more than anything else," she said. |
US | What We Know and Dont Know About the Michael Brown Shooting in Ferguson | It's been 11 days since Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot dead by Darren Wilson, a white policeman in Ferguson, Mo. Since then, the violent protests that followed have drawn national attention and flummoxed authorities and elected officials looking to lower the temperature. But we're still missing a lot of key facts about the incident and the ongoing investigations. Despite a calmer night on Tuesday, no one knows when the nightly clashes will end. Here's a rundown of what we knowand what we don'tabout the turmoil playing out in this St. Louis suburb. How did Wilson encounter Brown?, Shortly before noon on Aug. 9, Brown walked into Ferguson Market and Liquor, a convenience store on West Florissant Avenue. He was with a friend, 22-year-old Dorian Johnson. At approximately 1151, according to a police report, an unidentified officer received a call that a robbery was in progress at the store. But the suspect, who a Brown family lawyer has acknowledged "appears to be" Brown from surveillance footage, was gone when the officer arrived. , Minutes later, Brown and Johnson turned onto Canfield Drive, where they came upon a second officer, Wilson, at 1201 p.m. At that point, Wilson didn't know Brown was suspected of committing the robbery minutes earlier, according to Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson. He just saw a pair of people blocking traffic. Ferguson police have provided conflicting reports on whether Wilson received information that Brown was a robbery suspect between the moment that the officer encountered Brown and the fatal shooting. So what led to the shooting?, It's unclear and witness accounts differ. What we know is that within about three minutes, Brown was dead of multiple gunshot wounds to the head and torso. Pictures show him sprawled face down in the middle of the street, with a trail of what appears to be blood seeping from his body. Johnson has said that Wilson ordered them onto the sidewalk and when they didn't move right away, the office pulled up to Brown. A struggle ensued, and in Johnson's version of events, Brown was shot from inside the car before they both took off running with Wilson in pursuit. Johnson has said Wilson fired multiple times despite Brown having his hands up. Other witnesses have provided conflicting accounts, alternately alleging that Brown was shot in the back or while on his knees in a posture of surrender. And Wilson's version of events is even harder to ascertain, because he's in hiding He fled his St. Louis-area neighborhood a few days after shooting and hasn't spoken publicly. Police have said Brown reached for Wilson's gun and the shooting occurred during that struggle. It's unclear why Brown was shot so many times. Why has it taken so long for details of the shooting to come out?, Wilson's name was withheld for almost a week out of concerns for his safety. Three dueling autopsies have either been conducted or orderedthe standard one by the local medical examiner, a private one requested by the family, and a third one ordered by federal authorities. And federal and state authorities have mostly declined to comment on their pending investigations, while leaks have been kept to a minimum, likely to avoid fanning the cycle of violence that has roiled the city's downtown streets. Who's investigating all this?, Multiple authorities at various levels of law enforcement are looking into the shooting. A St. Louis County grand jury is probing the matter. And a federal civil rights investigation is also underway. Why does violence keep breaking out every night?, It's instigated by a small faction of what police describe as "agitators." They mix in with the crowd of peaceful demonstrators, but they're on the scene to confront cops as much as to mourn Brown. These people are shooting guns, hurling bricks, bottles and Molotov cocktails, and looting and vandalizing businesses. After dark, West Florissant Avenue and the neighboring streets are extremely dangerous, and several people have been shot. Who's trying to keep the peace in Ferguson?, On the demonstrators' side, it's a diverse collection of pastors, politicians, community leaders, black power groups, and many ordinary citizens who are disheartened by the way in which the violence has subverted the quest for justice. The vast majority of the protesters in the streets are peacefulat least, until dark. Riot-gear clad officers from the county and state highway patrolnow backed by the Missouri National Guardhave responded to provocations from protesters with tear gas, flash bangs, and other methods. What happens next?, A St. Louis County grand jury will begin hearing evidence on Wednesday. But there's no hard timetable on how long the whole process will take, and it could be weeks or months before the details of the investigation are know, the U.S. Attorney in Eastern Missouri told TIME Tuesday. |
US | Why So Many States Are Fighting Over LGBT Rights in 2016 | The Supreme Court's same-sex marriage ruling was supposed to settle the fight over LGBT rights, right? Not a chance. In 2016, states across the nation have been divided by a raft of new legislationmore than 200 bills advocates consider anti-LGBT have been introduced so far this year, according a tally by the Human Rights Campaign. These measures take many forms and have many aims, but they are often rooted in social conservatives' reaction to two things. Here's a primer, The Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Caused a Backlash, Support for marriage equality is at a record-high 60, but plenty of Americans remain strongly opposed, according to organizations like Gallup. The court's ruling has energized this large, if declining, group, and has led state lawmakers to propose versions of religious freedom bills in response. Not all religious freedom bills are controversial. Many states and the federal government passed their own in a different era. More on that here. Today, these measures become lightning rods when they contain language that has the potential to provide legal cover for individuals or organizations to treat LGBT residents differently because of a religious or moral belief. Maybe the bill is something a baker could cite when refusing to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. Or perhaps it would allow an adoption agency or foster program to refuse to help a gay couple find a child to rear. In Georgia, where the governor vetoed a high-profile religious freedom bill on March 28, one lawmaker sponsoring it explained that "when the Supreme Court changed the definition of marriage, dynamics changed. There was a need for a law for this law." Some state lawmakers in Indiana, where the governor signed and then amended a much-maligned religious freedom law last year, made similar statements. An important backdrop is that while there is a federal law that protects people from being discriminated against based on qualities like race or religion, there is no statute that explicitly forbids firing someone because they are gay or evicting someone because they are transgender, for example. Advocates have been trying to pass one since the mid-90s and have never gotten through Congress. Most states don't have non-discrimination laws that explicitly cover sexual orientation and gender identity either, though many cities do. Some courts have found implicit protections for gay or transgender people in prohibitions on sex discrimination. Other courts have ruled otherwise. Several cases turning on this point are pending, like this ACLU lawsuit in Virginia. Many people mistakenly believe these protections already exist. And there is broad support for such protections, even among a good chunk of people who are against same-sex marriage. Transgender People Are More Visible, The second factor driving many of the state bills in the news is the growing visibility of transgender people. Long marginalized even in the LGBT rights movement, transgender people are increasingly prominent in American culture and are fighting for stronger protection under the law. And many federal interpretations of existing laws are coming down in their favor. Read More Everything You Need to Know About the Debate Over Transgender People and Bathrooms, This emergence has been met with vitriol among some lawmakersone described it as a "virus that has broken out." Such language is reminiscent of the 1970s, when the increasing openness of gay and lesbian people prompted some fundamentalists to argue that they were out to "recruit" children. Until the mid-70s, many in the medical community still classified their sexual orientation as an illness. "Trans people were never this visible before," says Equality Federation executive director Rebecca Isaacs. "It's been both a really positive thing and its really also brought out the opposition with all of its fangs.", The "virus" comment was made by a Republican lawmaker earlier this year in South Dakota, where the legislature passed a bill that would have required public school students to use bathrooms based on their "chromosomes and anatomy" at birth. Essentially, the bill would have served to ban transgender girls from girls' bathrooms and locker rooms and likewise for transgender boys, had the governor not vetoed it. Actually implementing such a law would come with a host of complications and privacy issues. What Does This Have to do With Bathrooms?, Arguments about which bathroom transgender people should be using are often at the heart of today's debates over public accommodations, a cumbersome legal phrase that basically refers to the way people are treated in the public square. When gender identity is protected in that sphere, that gives transgender people legal support for using the bathroom that aligns with their innate sense of who they are. The North Carolina law that started causing such outcry in late March was largely driven by this issue. Charlotte, the state's largest city, had passed non-discrimination protections for LGBT people in February. It was controversial and the bathroom question was at the center of it. The new law invalidated those protections and similar ones in about a dozen other cities by essentially saying that the state would be in charge of non-discrimination matters and barring cities from adding protected classes that the state doesn't recognize. But the first thing one reads in the new law is language that explicitly requires people like students to use bathrooms that match their "biological sex," defined as the sex listed on their birth certificate. The Department of Justice and U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission have issued multiple rulings that say barring transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity is a form of sex discrimination. The Department of Education has issued similar guidance, saying students' gender identity must be respected. State lawmakers pushing bills that aim to keep transgender people out of certain bathrooms often see themselves as pushing back against government overreach and a "commingling of girls and boys" that they believe is wrong. In South Dakota, state senator Brock Greenfield urged his colleagues to support the bill by looking at "what has happened in Washington, D.C. relative to this issue and the promotion thereof." Until, "extraordinarily recently," he said, "this issue was not an issue.", In North Carolina, LGBT rights activists are asking not only that the law be repealed but that the state go further in the other direction, adding explicit protections covering sexual orientation and gender identity in non-discrimination laws. What happens in that state will flesh out this story further just days after Gov. Pat McCrory signed the bill, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of transgender and lesbian residents, alleging that the new law is a form of sex discrimination, as well a a violation of constitutional protections like the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. The state attorney generala Democrat who is running against McCrory for governorcalled the law "a national embarrassment" and refused to defend any named parties challenged in the lawsuit. McCrory, meanwhile, has since said he's "open to new ideas and solutions.", But don't expect that to bring an end to these fights. On March 30, the Mississippi senate passed the "Protecting Freedom of Conscience From Government Discrimination Act." Among its stipulations gender is determined at birth, and the belief that reserving "sexual relations" to marriages between men and women should be protected. |
US | A Get Out of Jail Free Card Why Church Abuse Survivors Want to Abolish the Statute of Limitations Af | A Pennsylvania grand jury's report alleging decades of horrific child sexual abuse by Catholic priests is casting new light on the state's statute of limitation law which the grand jury and state officials says is stopping them from filing criminal charges. The law also means few, if any, of the 1,000 people who say they suffered abuse at the hands of 300 Roman Catholic priests will be able to sue for civil damages. "We ask the Pennsylvania legislature to stop shielding child sexual predators behind the criminal statute of limitations," the grand jury said in its report. In response to the shocking allegations, state Rep. Mark Rozzi, who was abused by a Catholic priest when he was a child, announced plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the criminal statute of limitations. He also wants to create a two-year opening that would allow accusers to file civil claims against the church. Currently, the statute of limitations law allows victims of child sex abuse to come forward with criminal allegations until they are 50 years old. Victims can file civil claims until they are age 30. Most of the allegations in the grand jury report go back decades many of the victims are in their 60s and 70s meaning they are years past the time when criminal charges can be filed. "Basically the statute of limitations in my view is a get out of jail free card," Tim Lennon, the President of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests SNAP tells TIME. , Lennon, who was abused by a priest in Iowa, says most sexual abuse survivors never step forward and for many it takes decades. Lennon was abused when he was in elementary school a priest who was kicked out of three different parishes due to accusations of abuse. Lennon says he "buried his memories" of the abuse did not remember it until 2010 when other Catholic Church abuse survivors publicly stepped forward. He said it was only then that he could recall in detail what happened to him. , "I did not remember my abuse or some of it for 30 years," he says. , Lennon says states should work to abolish statute of limitations law entirely for child sex crimes and open a window of opportunity for older victims to file a lawsuit to expose the truth and obtain justice. Pennsylvania's law has become a national issue during two other prominent sex abuse cases. There was a call to change the law in 2011 in the wake of child sex abuse allegations against Penn State University football coach Jerry Sandusky. Sandusky was found guilty of 45 counts of sex abuse and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison. Attorneys said one victim was not allowed to sue because he missed the statute cutoff by nine months. Earlier this year, Bill Cosby was found guilty of indecent assault in Pennsylvania for an incident that took place in 2004. The investigation was reopened in 2015, meeting the state's 12-year statute of limitations to prosecute. But Cosby faces more accusations in California for alleged assault dating back to the 1960s. In California, the statute of limitation for is 10 years, leading prosecutors to toss out dozen of cases. Statute of limitations laws have also come into play in the MeToo movement, with some claims against movie producer Harvey Weinstein and others falling outside the limit for filing criminal charges. |
US | Broward Sheriff Deputy Resigns After Video Shows He Avoided School Shooting | The Broward sheriff deputy assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School resigned on Thursday, about a week after a school shooting there that left 17 people dead. Scot Peterson, a school resource officer from the Broward County Sheriff's office, waited outside the school building without ever going inside, sheriff Scott Israel said during a news conference on Thursday. "What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of building 12, take up a position, and he never went in," Israel said Thursday, referring to the school building where the shooter went on his rampage. , He added the deputy "clearly" knew a shooter was inside the building, but stayed outside for four minutes while the killing continued. "Devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words," Israel said describing his feelings. "These families lost their children, we lost coaches. I've been to the funerals. I've been to the homes where they're sitting shiva. I've been to the vigils. There are no words.", , The sheriff's office opened an internal investigation into Peterson after seeing video of the school and after interviewing witnesses and Peterson himself. Israel suspended Peterson without pay on Thursday morning, he said, and Peterson then chose to resign. Because the deputy had enough time with the force to meet the requirements of retirement, Israel said he "resigned slash retired.", The investigation will continue, according to Israel. Two other Broward County officers have been put on administrative duties, but their names were not released. The investigation into those officers has to do with the tips reported about the shooter prior to last week's massacre. |
US | Why Americas Fracking Revolution Wont Be Hurt Much By Low Oil Prices | For U.S. consumers, there's plenty to like about plummeting oil prices. After all, the cost of gasoline and home heating oil is falling dramatically as well. Since June, the price of WTI crude has dropped from about 101 a barrel to a recent price of 65, or roughly a 35 decline. And the average price of a gallon of unleaded gasoline in the U.S. has plunged to 2.76 from 3.27 a year ago, according to AAA. But don't falling prices threaten America's fracking revolution? A lot is at stake. Since 2008, U.S oil production has risen from about 5 million barrels a day to more than 9 millionan 80 increase. As fracking boomed, the U.S. oil industry has helped the country become more energy independent and has created slews of high-paying jobsPresident Obama, in fact, once said fracking has the potential to create as many as 600,000 jobs. Conventional wisdom says the threat to fracking is real. "Tight" oil is the term the industry uses for petroleum produced through fracking because it comes from geological formations of low permeability, such as tight sandstone or shale. Tight oil has produced most of the growth in the global supply in recent years, and helped lead to the current glut. Experts have said that U.S. tight oil needs to sell at 85 or 90 a barrel to be profitable. With oil recently trading at 65, it looks like the industry is in peril. The experts are rightup to a point. That 90 figure applies only to less than 20 of all "tight" oil fields. Says Jim Burkhard, the head of oil market research at IHS, a highly-respected industry research firm "There's a spectrum of break-even costs. Wells can perform differently in the same field." A new study by IHS concludes that about 80 of the tight oil estimated to be pumped next year will still be profitable at between 50 and 69 a barrel. Producers, it turns out, have gotten more efficient in designing and operating their fracking wells. Burkhard points to two factors at play. One is an increase in productivity due to a new technology called "super fracking," where drillers pump a lot more sand into their wells when they fracture the oil shale. Productivity at some super-fracking wells has risen from 400 barrels a day to 600, lowering the break-even cost. The other factor is the oil service industries. Says Burkhard "They've built up capacity over the past years. If there's a decline in drilling due to low oil prices, we'll see excess oil-drilling capacity and that puts downward pressure on the cost of producing tight oil.", Lower oil prices, however, will slow the rate of growth of tight oil as energy companies grapple with market uncertainty and volatility. While today's 65 a barrel might seem low, remember that in early 1980s, new production from the North Sea, Alaska's North Slope, and Mexico drove prices down to 10 a barrel. And from the mid-1980s to September 2003, the inflation-adjusted price of a barrel of crude was less than 25. With oil prices dropping, IHS estimates the growth in U.S. tight oil production will slow next year to 700,000 barrels a day, down from million a day in 2014. That estimate is based on a 77 a barrel. If oil goes to 60 next year that 700,000 projection will be cut in half to 350,000. Even so, the U.S. will still be adding a significant amount of new oil to a global market where demand is weakening. That makes any price spike short of a blow-up in the Middle East or OPEC suddenly getting its act togetherunlikely. The fracking boom is maturing, but it's not likely to go away any time soon. This article originally appeared on Fortune.com |
US | Thousands Are Expected to Attend the Families Belong Together Marches Across the US Heres What to Kn | The Families Belong Together March was planned before President Donald Trump ended his administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. But organizers say the protests, which are scheduled to take place in cities all over the country on Saturday, June 30, are still just as important. A judge ordered authorities to reunite separated families within 30 days and the Administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration police remains in place. Jessica Morales, the political director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, says the country can't rely on the Trump Administration to keep its word to reunite families and end separation for good. "Our focus is to put and end to the zero-tolerance' immigration policies and reuniting every single one of these parents and children," she tells TIME. , She says Trump's reversal of the family separation policy is proof that activism, like the Families Belong Together March this weekend, is working. "We have to keep moving, the Trump Administration can't be trusted to follow through. We don't see this as a legislative problem, this is a Trump Administration problem," she says. , Organizers also said the family separation is just one part of a bigger problem with Trump's immigration policies. They argued the Trump Administration have been "systematically criminalizing immigration and immigrants, from revoking Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals DACA to ramping up intimidating ICE tactics.", Here's what we know about the Families Belong Together March, including when it starts, what cities are hosting marches and who is expected to attend. The Families Belong Together March will take place on Saturday, June 30 with marches planned for most major cities in the U.S. Organizers said they expect tens of thousands of people dressed in white, representing peace and unity to attend the Families Belong Together March. The march was organized to send Trump and Republicans in Congress a clear message about family separation, according to the organizers. , The main Families Belong Together March is scheduled for 11 a.m. at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 30. However, Anna Galland, executive director of nonprofit Move On, one of the march's organizers, said there are local protests scheduled in all 50 states. Major protests are planned in Minneapolis, Nashville, Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. A total of 628 rallies have been registered, including some outside the U.S. in cities like Berlin and London. Anyone interested in participating can visit the Families Belong Together site and search for rallies by zip code. , Dozens of organizations have come together to plan the marches on Saturday, including the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, ACLU, MoveOn. According to the Familes Belong Together March website, the protest is meant to send a message to the Trump Administration, which they fear will overturn the recent decision to reunite children with parents. "We have momentum and we cannot slow down now since the the court ruling along isn't enough and could be overturned. Our mobilization, in over 600 locations around the country and still growing, is critical to showing the widespread public demand for just immigration policiesbecause families belong together and free!" according to a message on the march's website. Galland tweeted that Saturday's marchers will also protest other big stories in the news including the Muslim ban, the Janus decision and the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, which could lead to an even more conservative Supreme Court. , Organizers do not know the exact numbers, but said they expect thousands to attend the over 600 marches. Several celebrities including Amy Schumer, Evan Rachel Wood, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Natalie Portman have shown support for the Families Belong Together March on social media, using the hashtag familiesbelongtogether. , On Thursday, the organizers of the Women's March and activists with the Center for Popular Democracy carried out a protest in Washington, D.C. that had called for "mass civil disobedience." Nearly 600 people were arrested. Women gathered in the Hart Office Building and chanted "Abolish ICE," draped in foil blankets similar to those given to migrants housed at U.S. detention facilities. The sit-in lasted more than two hours before Capitol Police charged the protestors with unlawfully demonstrating. Among those arrested was Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat. Jayapal tweeted a video of herself in which she said she was proud to be arrested to protest Trump's immigrations policy. "We're here to fight for our families to be free, to fight for the ability of our kids to be with their parents not in cages, not in prison, but able to live their lives free, safe and secure," Jayapal said. |
US | Inspired by MeToo McDonalds Employees Protest Workplace Sexual Harassment | McDonald's employees in cities across the U.S. launched MeToo-inspired protests on Tuesday against workplace sexual harassment at the fast-food company, Agence France-Presse reports. Organized by a union called Fight for 15, an advocacy union for fast-food workers, the one-day strike unfolded in 10 cities Chicago, Kansas City, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Orlando, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Saint Louis, and Durham with the goal of instituting stronger protections for workers at the chain's 14,000 stores across the U.S. "Today, thousands of workers across the country have stepped out of the shadows and onto the picket lines," said Chicago community organizer Karla Altmayer, according to AFP. "We can no longer accept that one out of two workers experience workplace sexual violence under their watch," she said in reference to McDonald's. Demonstrations ran the gamut from silent protests with mouths taped shut to women brandishing signs and chanting. Protestors are hoping to establish a committee that will take serious action in addressing incidents like groping and propositions for sex. Read more The Silence Breakers Are TIME's Person of the Year, "When you feel that your livelihood is threatened, and you feel like you can't bring home a paycheck, it can be really scary," restaurant worker Ali Baker told AFP in Chicago. McDonald's said in a statement that it had "strong policies, procedures and training in place" to prevent sexual harassment, and that it had engaged prevention and response experts "to evolve our policies so everyone who works at McDonald's does so in a secure environment every day.", The protests caught the attention of high-profile figures including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who voiced his support for the campaign in a tweet. , The strike marks a growing awareness of workplace sexual harassment among blue-collar workplaces, where employees can be more vulnerable than some of the higher-profile cases in Washington and Hollywood. Recently, female workers at Ford sued the auto-maker for harassment at two of its Chicago plants, which it apologized for in December. |
US | The Truth About Obamas HighSpeed Rail Program | The New York Times has declared President Barack Obama's high-speed rail program a failure. "Despite the administration spending nearly 11 billion since 2009 to develop faster passenger trains, the projects have gone mostly nowhere," America's paper of record reported Aug. 6in its news pages, not its opinion section. The story quickly rocketed into Republican talking points and conservative op-eds as fresh evidence of presidential haplessness. But it's wrong. The administration hasn't spent anywhere near 11 billion. The projects haven't gone mostly nowhere. There are legitimate questions about the high-speed rail initiativeand the administration's hype has outstripped its ability to deliver in an era of divided governmentbut the public debate over the program has been almost completely detached from the reality on the ground. Here's the real story. First of all, while Congress has appropriated 10.5 billion not 11 billion for high-speed rail, only 2.4 billion definitely not 11 billion of it has been spent to date, much of it on planning, design and other pre-construction work. The big construction spending has just started, and will continue through September 2017. Yet the Times and other critics are judging the program as if it had already blown through all its cash. The new meme on the right is that Obama has poured 11 billion into high-speed rail with nothing to show for it. In fact, less than one-fourth of the money has gone out the door. Just because funds have been appropriated and even "obligated" does not mean they've been spent, much less "poured.", That fundamental mistake alone is enough to refute the basic thesis of the Times gotcha story. But it also fuels other widespread public misperceptions about what the program has already achieved, what it's supposed to achieve, and why it's unlikely to achieve Obama's grand vision for high-speed rail. The first sentence of the Times article noted U.S. passenger rail "still lags far behind Europe and China," but that's an absurd and annoyingly common straw man to use to slag the program. Really, the initiative that Obama launched with his 2009 stimulus bill should have been called "higher-speed rail." As I wrote a few years ago in TIME, it was partly about creating new routes for 200-mile-per-hour bullet trains like the ones already zipping around Europe and Asia, but it was mostly about improving slower-speed Amtrak routes so they would be incrementally faster and more reliable. America's freight rail system is the envy of the world, but our passenger rail system is awful the goal of the program was to make it less awfula more realistic alternative to long drives and short flights. So where did the Administration send the money? The big winners in the initial state-by-state competition were Florida and California, which had ambitious plans for new bullet trains. But after Rick Scott, a Tea Party Republican, was elected governor of Florida in 2010, he killed the Sunshine State's Tampa-to-Orlando-to-Miami train and sent 2.4 billion back to Washington. That meant the far more daunting and less shovel-ready San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line would be America's only new bullet-train project. After years of legal and political warfare, California is just now preparing to start laying track in the Central Valley. The rest of the high-speed money is going to lower-speed projects where Amtrak trains share tracks with lumbering freight trains. But that doesn't mean they're bad projects. "They're not as sexy, and maybe they don't look like much, but they're providing tangible benefits," Federal Railroad Administrator Joe Szabo said in an interview. Bridge and tunnel repairs, projects to upgrade and straighten tracks, sidings and double-tracking to help passenger trains pass freight cars, and other incremental improvements can all make rail travel more attractive. And it's happening. By 2017, the program will reduce trip times from Chicago to St. Louis by nearly an hour through upgrades that will increase top speeds from 79 to 110 miles per hour Chicago to Detroit will get a similar boost. The Department of Transportation says it has already sliced off a half-hour between Springfield, Mass. and St. Albans, Vt. while completing projects to reduce delays around San Jose, San Diego, Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. It has extended Amtrak service for the first time to Brunswick, Maine, anchoring a thriving downtown revitalization program, and it's bringing trains to the Illinois towns of Geneseo and Moline for the first time since 1978. It has renovated stations in St. Paul, Minn. and Portland, Ore, and it's expanding service between Raleigh and Charlotte, where ridership has nearly tripled since 2005. You need a pretty crimped sense of "somewhere" to argue that the money is going "mostly nowhere.", One can certainly argue the money should have gone elsewhere. It's nice that a new bridge and other Missouri projects have improved on-time performance between Kansas City and St. Louis from about 20 percent to 80 percent, but that's still not a popular train route. Florida's Scott and Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott Walker, both scuttled solid projectsthe 45 million their states spent beforehand was the only inarguably wasted high-speed rail moneybut Ohio's Republican governor, John Kasich, had a strong case for scuttling an absurdly slow-speed project in his state. Many critics have suggested Obama should have focused on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, which is wildly popularand profitableeven though it's much slower than it should be. In fact, the Administration has steered about 850 million to the Northeast Corridor. Szabo was in Trenton last week to tout a massive upgrade to an 80-year-old electrical system that will reduce delays and increase top speeds to 160 m.p.h. on America's most traveled 23-mile stretch of track. The work will be a prototype for projects along the rest of the corridor, where rail has already replaced air as the dominant form of travel, even though logjams keep average speeds at 70 m.p.h. Still, it's true that the bullet-train rhetoric from Obama and the White House's main train buff, Vice President Joe Biden, has not lived up to the bullet-train reality. It's also true that the Administration's spread-it-thin strategy, featuring incremental improvements in 32 states, is hard to justify in a vacuum. You need to walk before you can run, but it doesn't make much sense to upgrade trains from slow speeds to semi-slow speeds if they're never going to be able to compete with cars or planes. That's why in 2011, Biden announced a new six-year, 53 billion plan to expand high-speed rail beyond the initial stimulus investments, a plan that would have built much more groundwork for a truly competitive national passenger rail network. That plan, however, really has gone nowhere. Once Republicans took over the House, Congress stopped appropriating money for high-speed rail. Period. There was never any chance that bullet trains would be whizzing all over America by now, but the reason there's no realistic prospect of that happening anytime soon has nothing to do with executive incompetence and everything to do with politics. And while I love the New York Timeseven when it publishes ludicrous essays slagging my hometownits validation of the "mostly nowhere" nonsense will help make sure America's passenger rail system remains a global joke. |
US | The Future of the Death Penalty Will Be Decided in These 3 States | The future of the death penalty will be on the ballot in three states Tuesday, potentially affecting more than one-quarter of the nation's death-row inmates. California, Nebraska and Oklahoma will vote on four capital-punishment ballot measures at a time when support for the death penalty nationwide is at all-time lows. Just 49 of Americans say they support capital punishment, the lowest figure in four decades, while 42 oppose it, according to the Pew Research Center. Support has fallen 7 percentage points in the last year and a half following a series of botched executions and a Supreme Court case challenging execution-drug combinations in Oklahoma. The number of executions, meanwhile, have hit their lowest levels in two decades thanks to drug shortages and lengthy death-row appeals processes. But in two states California and Nebraska the death-penalty measures may generate confusion for voters. California will vote on two separate referendums, one that would repeal capital punishment and another that would leave it intact but speed up the process, while in Nebraska, the measure's language has led to public-education campaigns to make sure voters understand what they're reading. California, The most watched vote will be in California, which houses roughly 25 of the country's death-row inmates. The California ballot will include Proposition 62, which would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life without parole, and Proposition 66, which would speed up the appeals process in part by hiring more attorneys to represent inmates. Read more Pennsylvania Stops Using the Death Penalty, California voters rejected a referendum in 2012 that would've repealed the death penalty. But in 2014, a federal judge ruled that the way California carried out capital punishment violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment because it was "plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay.", This year, it's possible that both measures could pass with majority votes, meaning the state would end up both repealing the death penalty and affirming it, potentially creating confusion for the entire system. But the more likely outcome is that neither will pass. A USC Dornlife/LA Times poll shows support for Proposition 62 to get rid of the death penalty at just 44, with 45 opposed. Proposition 66 to speed up the appeals process appears to have even less support at 35 in favor vs. 42 opposed along with 21 of people saying they either didn't know how to vote or refused to answer. Supporters of repealing the death penalty point to potential cost savings of hundreds of millions of dollars a year and routinely mention the 5 billion the state has spent on capital punishment since 1978. The state's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office calculated that the proposition could save the state 150 million a year. Supporters of the proposition to speed up appeals also claim millions in savings because it would cut down on the increased costs involved in housing death-row inmates for long periods. But the Legislative Analyst's Office says the savings are unknown, according to the Los Angeles Times. Oklahoma, Oklahoma, which has the highest execution rate per capita, has been at the heart of the nation's debate over the death penalty since the 2014 botched execution of Clayton Lockett. He was the first inmate executed with the controversial sedative midazolam, which critics say doesn't effectively sedate prisoners. State executioners also failed to properly inject Lockett, and he eventually died of a heart attack 45 minutes after the execution began. That led the state to impose a temporary moratorium on lethal injection and rewrite its drug protocol. Oklahoma's drug combination also survived a Supreme Court case brought by death-row inmates who said it violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Read more The Death of the Death Penalty, Oklahoma voters on Tuesday will consider State Question 776, which would create an entirely new section in the state's constitution affirming the death penalty's use while explicitly saying that it "shall not be deemed to be or constitute the infliction of cruel or unusual punishment." Supporters say it prevents state courts from deeming the practice unconstitutional, but opponents believe the measure challenges Oklahoma's checks and balances by pre-empting potential court decisions. Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that collects data on capital punishment, says it would be the "first time that any state constitution would seek to prevent the state courts from enforcing constitutional prohibitions in capital cases." He adds that he expects the referendum to pass but argues that it's a sign that the legislature may view the death penalty as in decline and at risk of being repealed. Nebraska, In Nebraska, the state's death-penalty wording is already leading to confusion because it's essentially written as a double negative. In 2015, state legislators passed Legislative Bill 268, which eliminated the death penalty and changed the state's maximum penalty to life imprisonment. Days later Governor Pete Ricketts vetoed the legislation, but state lawmakers overrode the governor. Ricketts, with help from his father Joe, a billionaire political activist, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to get the death penalty on the ballot this year, which would effectively restore his veto. A vote for "retain" means keeping the legislation and eliminating the death penalty, while a vote for "repeal" will do away with the bill and keep capital punishment. Read more U.S. Executions Have Hit Their Lowest Level in Two Decades, Brian Kruse, the election commissioner in Douglas County, home to Omaha, says he's spoken to a number of voters in the past couple of weeks who have appeared confused by the language. "If voters read the language on the ballot, I actually think it's very straightforward," Kruse says, adding that after he has read the language to voters, they appear to understand what they're voting for. "We believe the ballot language is confusing," says Chris Peterson, campaign manager for Nebraskans for the Death Penalty. "We've stressed the need to vote repeal' to keep the death penalty in our TV and radio advertising as well as social media.", Dan Parsons, a spokesperson for Retain a Just Nebraska, says his group has similarly urged voters to vote "retain" but says, "We are confident Nebraska voters are educating themselves on the issue.", There hasn't been any public polling on Nebraska's ballot measure, but Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center says there's a tendency to vote no on a ballot referendum when there's confusion, which could potentially benefit the "repeal" side looking to keep the death penalty. |
US | Bill Cosbys Accusers Have Not Lost Hope Despite Mistrial | Bill Cosbys sexual assault case ended in a mistrial on Saturday, when jurors said they could not reach a decision after six days of deliberations. For Cosby's accusers, the news brought neither the closure of a conviction nor the distress of an acquittal but something in between. "I was relieved when they said mistrial, because it means that it wasn't an acquittal," says Linda Kirkpatrick, who is not involved in the current case but is one of dozens of women who have accused the entertainer of sexual assault. Despite the many allegations, Cosby was on trial for the alleged assault of just one woman Andrea Constand, a former Temple University basketball coach who accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting her at his home in 2004. The judge allowed only one other alleged victim testify against Cosby to help establish a pattern of behavior, even though prosecutors had hoped to include testimony from 13 other alleged victims. Lawyers are hoping that the judge might reconsider when District Attorney Kevin R. Steele brings the case to trial again giving other accusers a chance to add their testimony against Cosby. "If the court allows more accusers to testify next time, it might make a difference," said Gloria Allred, who represents Kelly Johnson, the only other alleged victim allowed to testify at this trial. "We can never underestimate the blinding power of celebrity," Allred added. "But justice will come." , Kirkpatrick, who alleges that Cosby sexually assaulted her after she attended his show in 1981, said she would gladly testify against Cosby at the next trial if the judge allows it. "If I am called upon to do my civic duty, I will do it," she said. To her, the mistrial underscored how difficult it is for rape victims to get justice in the court system she was disappointed that the defense lawyers made their case by attacking Constand's credibility. "It isn't about Bill Cosby for me," she said. "It's about opening the eyes of the populace and the justice system, stop revictimizing the victims, and just look at the fact that a crime is being committed.", Cosby's lawyer said Saturday that the comedian "began this trial presumed innocent and he leaves it that way.", If more accusers are allowed to testify at a future trial, Kirkpatrick believes her story and others could puncture Cosby's celebrity, which Allred believes swayed the jury. "Who they think someone is does not trump my experience," Kirkpatrick said. , A future trial will likely have the same judge, so it's not clear whether he will amend his ruling that only one prior act witness be allowed to testify. But Allred, who represents Kirkpatrick and 32 other accusers, said she hopes he will reconsider. "It's important for the jury to be informed that there are more accusers, and if those accusers allege same or similar facts," she said. "The prosecution needed 12 for a verdict the defense only needed one for a mistrial." |
US | In the Age of Trump the World Needs the United Nations More Than Ever | Beyond poetic appeals for universal justice, global support for the United Nations is built atop the assumption that every nation can be more secure and prosperous only in a more peaceful world. The U.N. has a poor track record of preventing individual crises, but its investments in health and education promote international development in measurable ways, and its agencies continue to limit the human cost of conflict. President Donald Trump sees things a little differently. He may have paid tribute to the "beautiful vision" of the U.N. in his first address to the General Assembly on Tuesday, but there's little to suggest he has changed his views of an institution he once derided as "a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.", As he made clear in his speech, Trump doesn't accept that investment in international peace and development will make his country safer or wealthier. Noting that the U.S. pays the lion's share of the U.N. budget 22, he declared that "no nation should have to bear a disproportionate share of the burden, militarily or financially." As with NATO, he doesn't oppose the U.N.'s useful work. He just doesn't believe the U.S. is getting good value for its money, and he wants other governments to pay more. Yet on climate change, cybersecurity, public-health crises or other problems without borders, the world needs a convening power to bring decision-makers together. Trump doesn't believe in multilateralism, and has no interest in this responsibility. The E.U. can't do it alone, and China doesn't yet have the global standing. These and other governments need the U.N. to play this role. In Antnio Guterres, who has been Secretary-General since January, the U.N. has the right person for the job. He is the opposite of Trump. He is analytical rather than forceful. He avoids the political bombast that makes lasting friends and enemies. As the former socialist Prime Minister of Portugal, he embraces the European value of collective decisionmaking. As a former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, he understands the human cost of the world's conflicts. He has good relations with both the U.S. and China. He has brought a new much needed emphasis on transparency to the U.N. bureaucracy. That won't be enough to reform the dysfunctional U.N. Security Council, where veto-wielding members force watered-down solutions to intractable problems. Only Kim Jong Un, not Guterres, can force the U.S. and China to work together on North Korea. But on other important issues, the U.N. offers the best hope for managing global crises in the age of Trump. |
US | Saks Backtracks in Transgender Discrimination Case | Luxury retailer Saks Co. has dropped a controversial legal argument they put forward in December that there's no federal law prohibiting the company from discriminating against someone for being transgender. Leyth Jamal, a former employee who identifies as a transgender woman, is suing Saks for discrimination in Texas. She alleges that she was mistreated by the company and ultimately fired because she is transgender. In response, Saks claimed that Title VII, the portion of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination based on sex, doesn't cover transgender people. On Jan. 26, after public criticism and a legal rebuke from the Department of Justice, Saks withdrew the motion. The change was first reported by Buzzfeed. Saks will continue to contest Jamal's suit, but will now focus on the merits of her specific claims. MORE Does Saks Have the Right to Fire a Transgender Employee?, Saks' original position was contrary to recent federal court rulings and the views of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Justice. In December 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that all lawyers in the department would be taking the position that transgender discrimination is covered as a form of sex discrimination under Title VII. In the Justice Department's motion, officials assert a "strong interest" in the outcome of the case. And their response to Saks' initial argument is summed up concisely "Not so." |
US | Texas Church Shooters ExWife He Just Had a Lot of Demons | An ex-wife of Devin Kelley, who authorities have identified as the gunman responsible for the mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, earlier this month, described his alleged abuse in a television interview. "He just had a lot of demons or hatred inside of him," Tessa Brennaman, 25, said on CBS' Inside Edition. Kelley had a history of domestic violence TIME reported earlier this week that, in 2012, Tessa Kelley accused him of beating and choking her, breaking her infant son's skull and threatening her with a gun. A military court charged Kelley with domestic violence and sent him to a mental hospital in New Mexico, but he briefly escaped. Later that year he pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges, and a year after that was discharged for bad conduct after spending a year in military prison, according to CBS News. In her interview with CBS News, Brennaman describes how Kelley allegedly threatened her with a gun over a speeding ticket. "He took that gun out. and he told me do you want to die? do you want to die?'" she recalled. She also said he threatened to kill her and her whole family. Kelley, 26, who died after the shooting, killed more than 26 people including an 18-month-old baby and injured at least 20 others when he opened fire at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on the morning of November 5. Officials said they believe the attack was the result of a domestic dispute, citing threatening messages Kelley had sent his mother-in-law, who was a member of the church. According to the Associated Press, Kelley was able to obtain the weapons that he used because the Air Force did not relay his criminal past to the FBI. If they had, he wouldn't have been able to buy a gun. |
US | The Poverty Rate Just Declined for the First Time Since 2006 | The percentage of Americans living in poverty declined year-over-year for the first time since 2006 last year, according to a report released Tuesday by the United States Census Bureau. 45.3 million Americans, or 14.5 of the population, lived below the poverty line in 2013, down from 15 in 2012. The percentage of children under the age of 18 living in poverty declined to 19.9 in 2013, down from 21.8 the preceding year. It was the first recorded drop in childhood poverty since 2000. The officially defined poverty threshold for a family of four in 2013 was 23,834. Nonetheless, the report emphasized that the long-awaited declines in poverty were not quite large enough to be considered statistically significant improvements i.e. definitively greater than a measurement error. The general findings of the report, entitled Income and Poverty in the United States 2013, was that the measures of poverty had plateaued, with household income registering a statistically insignificant uptick to 51,939, an improvement of 180 over the previous year. |
US | How Uber and Lyft Are Trying to Solve Americas Carpooling Problem | First, the bad news carpooling has been on the decline in America for nearly four decades. That practice could be helping the environment and America's commuters, who are needlessly stuck for hours each day on packed highways. Multiple people sharing a single ride to a common destination is a simple act that has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions, ease traffic, lessen fossil fuel dependency, reduce stress on commuters, and even drive down rents in dense cities. Yet the practice fell out of favor after reaching a peak in the 1970s. Now, the good news popular tech companies Lyft and Uber are leading a wave of new services that have the potential to revive shared rides. "What fascinates me about these things is can they move us closer toward a vision of an integrated public transit system?" asks Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. "And can it move us closer to filling empty seats in vehicles?", Despite referring to themselves as "ride-sharing" companies, Lyft and Uber have largely been in the business of what transportation experts call "ride-sourcing," because they essentially provide the same service as taxis through their own platforms. "I've studied ride-sharing for a long time, and the definition of ride-sharing is really carpooling," Shaheen says. "And a carpool is an incidental trip." That is, it's a trip that a driver was going to take regardless of whether anyone else was with them in that car. The distinction isn't just academic. When the thousands of drivers working for Uber and Lyft in San Francisco are picking up a single fare and taking them from Point A to Point B, it's probable that they're adding to unnecessary congestion, pollution and fuel consumption. But last summer, within hours of each other, the companies announced that they were rolling out UberPOOL and Lyft Line in San Francisco, passenger-pooling options that would give riders cheaper fares if they'd be willing to share their vehicle with strangers traveling a similar route. The companies say customer interest has been high so far. Each company has since expanded the service to Austin, Los Angeles, and New York City, and Uber has launched POOL in Paris. Lyft says that 50 of rides in San Francisco are Lyft Line rides, and a little more than 20 of all Lyft rides in the city start or end within a quarter mile of commuter rail stops. "That's notable," says Shaheen. "It means people are taking this short trip in one of these vehicles and connecting it to a longer line-haul transit trip. It's basically enabling somebody to not take a single-occupant vehicle for this long commute trip and to rethink how they commute.", Uber crunched the numbers on their "matched trips" for one month in San Francisco, comparing them to the number of miles that vehicles would have traveled if all those rides had been taken individually. They estimated that UberPOOL rides taken between February and March amounted to 674,000 miles of saved driving. That's the equivalent of 240 people driving round trip from L.A. to New York. "UberPOOL is really about trying to reinvent cities from a transportation perspective," says product manager Brian Tolkin. "Part of that means making Uber so affordable that it's really available to anyone and a better alternative to, say, owning a car.", Of course, before these companies start patting themselves on the back for saving the environment, they have to offset the number of cars they've brought onto the road. They aren't releasing data about that, and there is other crucial information missing. The most important piece, Shaheen says, is knowing what the people using these services were doing beforehand. If someone is now using a combination of Lyft Line and public rail rather that driving alone in a car from San Francisco to Cupertino, that represents a greater environmental offset than if that person was previously taking public rail and a public bus. Carpooling took off in America during World War II, when the government asked people to start sharing rides to work so they could conserve rubber for the war effort. The practice gained popularity through the 1970s, spurred by volatile energy prices, employer-sponsored programs and the advent of HOV lanes. But as gas prices dropped, cars got cheaper and more people and companies decamped for far-out suburbs and exurbs, more workers began taking their own cars to the office. Carpooling became associated with the inconveniences of neighbors' inflexible schedules, awkward reimbursements and a lack of privacy. Nearly one in four people shared a ride to work in the 1970s. By the time census workers asked about that practice in 2010, the number had dropped to about 10. It's too early to tell if Lyft and Uber's early efforts will reverse that trend. But it is clear that they are benefiting from a changed landscape. Smartphone ownership has exploded, allowing people to connect and share useful information about where they are. Familiarity with social networks can encourage strangers to trust each other. The algorithms matching riders and driverswhile keeping routes convenientare constantly improving. And though car sales have continued to climb in recent years, younger urban residents say they're less interested in driving and owning their own vehicle. Perhaps the most promising trend line for these services is that Uber and Lyft are finally solving the problem that has derailed past attempts to solve America's carpooling problem with technology. "When you have a new system with a really small number of people in itwhich any system will when it's newthere's a very, very low probability that you'll have a match between all the potential origins and destinations of a driver and a passenger," says Emily Castor, Lyft's director of transportation policy. "So those systems that had tried to do that have been pretty uniformly unsuccessful, because they have a high failure rate.", That's what happened to Zimride, an early incarnation of Lyft. Among the key lessons for Zimride's founders when they rebranded as Lyft always have drivers available, lest you deter potential customers. "We've been able to build up a network that has enough density that it actually is getting to the point now where we do have a ton of people using it," says Castor. "So we've kind of overcome that chicken and egg problem and we now can start doing really interesting things.", Those experiments include "Driver Destination," which allows a driver to specify where they're headed and signal that they're available to pick someone up. The app will only link the driver to a passenger going the same way. This type of trip can help eliminate wasted space in cars and potentially keep superfluous cars off the roadan efficiency that experts like Shaheen call the holy grail. "The next phase for Lyft is to look at how we can increase that commuter carpooling activity and to expand on our vision to make it so any time any driver is on the road, they can be using the empty seats in their cars to give rides to other people," Castor says. The key to long-term success may be money. For these services to truly take hold, drivers will need to see the upside of bringing a few strangers along for the ride. Old-fashioned carpooling was set up for passengers to reimburse a driver for just gas and wear and tear, a piddling bit of change per mile. "That's just not enough to make people notice and think about doing that," Castor says. "But if you could earn 15 on your way to work and your way home, that would probably raise your eyebrows." |
US | Memorial Day Weekend Gas Prices at Lowest Point Since 2009 | Consumer gas prices are at a lower point heading into this Memorial Day weekend than any comparable weekend since 2009, according to a government report. The average retail gas price was 2.74 per gallon on May 18, nearly a dollar lower than on the same day last year, the U.S. Energy Information Agency EIA reported. Gas prices vary across the country, from highs of above 3.4o throughout California and in parts of Alaska to below 2.50 throughout much of the South and Midwest. Read More The Cost of Cheap Gas, Cheap consumer gas has been driven by low crude oil prices, though have prices have risen in the last few months. The EIA predicted that gas prices will fall in June as refineries across the country increase production. Retail gasoline prices is expected to average 2.51 per gallon during the third quarter of 2015. Memorial Day, when many Americans take road trips, marks the approximate start of the summer driving season when gas prices often increase. The increase is at least in part due to oil companies complying with requirements that they produce a more expensive summer-grade gasoline. |
US | Hawaii Becomes First State to Put Gun Owners in FBI Database | Hawaii passed a law making it the first state to put gun owners on a federal criminal record database and monitor them. Hawaii Governor David Ige signed the bill Thursday, which allows police to enroll firearms applicants and individuals who are registering their firearms into "Rap Back," a Federal Bureau of Investigation database that monitors criminal activities by people under investigation or in positions of trust, Reuters reported. The law takes effect immediately. "Rap Back" allows Hawaii police to be notified when a Hawaii firearm owner is arrested anywhere in the U.S. In addition, the law allows Hawaii police to evaluate whether a firearm owner should continue owning a gun after being arrested. This move comes after a sit-in by Democrats to support gun control measures that would keep people on the no-fly list from buying a gun. Previously, Ige had signed a law that disqualifies people convicted of stalking and sexual assault from owning a gun and a law that requires firearm owners diagnosed with a mental, behavioral or emotional disorder to surrender their firearms. Reuters |
US | The Government Shutdown Confusion Is Battering the Stock Market | Bloomberg Volatility gripped financial markets a day after the Federal Reserve sent shockwaves across assets, with the rising threat of a government shutdown adding to a litany of concerns buffeting equities. The dollar sank with crude oil. The SP 500 tumbled to a 15-month low, and the Nasdaq Composite index slumped to the brink of a bear market. The large-cap measure is down 10 percent in December, on track for its worst month of the record bull run. Equities whipsawed throughout the morning as investors debated whether the Fed set itself up for a policy error, before turning sharply lower after President Donald Trump hardened his demands in the showdown with Congress over funding the government. Selling eased as the session entered afternoon. Among the major stock moves, The broader FAANG cohort of shares plunged 4 percent and the group is now 25 percent below its record. Twitter tumbled 13 percent in the biggest rout since July. Tech high flyers GoPro and Snap skidded to all-time lows, each down at least 6 percent. Walgreens Boots Alliance lost 4.5 percent to lead 27 of 30 Dow components lower. The SP 500 has lost 15 percent this quarter, the most during the record bull run."The real issue is the three things markets have been focused on are coming to a head at one time an aggressive Fed raising rates, fears of a global growth slowdown, and the trade war with China," Cliff Hodge, director of investments at Cornerstone Wealth, said in an interview. "Compounding that is the political headlines regarding the government shutdown. It's all hitting us all at the same time and is causing a major shift in risk-off sentiment.", Currency traders took the Fed's lowering of expectations for future hikes as a somewhat dovish turn. The weak greenback spurred a rally in developing-nation assets, sending an ETF that tracks the emerging equities to its best gain in a week. Treasury investors remained on edge after the Fed said quantitative easing was on "autopilot." The front end of the yield curve rose, while longer-dated bonds saw rates holding steady near multimonth lows. Crude added to anxiety on financial markets, with the American benchmark sinking below 47 a barrel. And a renewed U.S. push against alleged intellectual property theft by Chinese nationals is contributing to uncertainty over the direction of the simmering trade conflict. The Stoxx Europe 600 recovered some losses but remained broadly lower, while Japanese shares slid into a bear market. The pound trimmed a gain after Britain's central bank said it now sees inflation slowing to below the 2 percent target as soon as January. Benchmark 10-year Treasuries retreated after steep gains on Wednesday. The greenback slid against almost every major counterpart, helping the yen climb to its strongest since mid-September. In Japan, 10-year bond yields fell to within three basis points of zero percent. Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said in a press conference Thursday that there was no problem if yields fell into negative territory, suggesting he has no plan to intensify the central bank's tapering of asset purchases. Here are some events investors will focus on in the coming days, U.S. personal income and spending data are due Friday, along with a gauge of inflation.And these are the main moves in markets, The SP 500 Index fell 1.1 percent as of 1233 p.m. New York time. The Nasdaq Composite lost 1.4 percent, paring a rout that topped 2 percent. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index declined 1.5 percent to the lowest in more than two years. MSCI's emerging market index slid 0.7 percent. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index sank 0.7 percent to the lowest in a month. The euro climbed 0.4 percent to 1.1418, the strongest in a month. The British pound advanced 0.3 percent to 1.265, the strongest in almost two weeks. The Japanese yen jumped 0.8 percent to 111.59 per dollar, the strongest in 14 weeks. The yield on 10-year Treasuries gained two basis points to 2.77 percent. Germany's 10-year yield fell less than basis point to 0.23 percent. Britain's 10-year yield dropped one basis points to 1.268 percent. West Texas Intermediate crude decreased 3.8 percent to 46.33 a barrel. Gold jumped 1.2 percent to 1,258.16 an ounce, the highest in six months. |
US | Officials Are Investigating Why 6 People Suddenly Became Ill During a New Years Day Flight | At least six unrelated passengers fell ill aboard Frontier Airlines Flight 1397 from Cleveland to Tampa on New Year's Day, prompting concerns that airport water fountains may have been to blame. "They were just coming out of nowhere," passenger Tiffany McKinney told WFLA. "Just throwing up, sick.", Early reports from Frontier suggested that the passengers may have each used a public water fountain before the flight, prompting officials at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport to shut down all drinking fountains in one area of the airport, according to a statement from the City of Cleveland released Wednesday. The statement says, however, that there were no known water safety issues near the airport, and that water-borne illnesses typically do not surface so quickly. The investigation remains ongoing. An airport spokesperson told CNN that officials were not sure if the fountains caused the sudden illnesses, but said they were taken offline for testing out of "an abundance of caution.", TIME could not immediately reach representatives from Hopkins Airport or Frontier Airlines for further comment. But in a statement, Frontier Airlines said that the cause of the illness is still under investigation, and stressed that "passenger safety is Frontier's number one priority.", The sick passengers were evaluated by health officials upon the flight's arrival in Tampa, WFLA reports, and the roughly 260 other passengers on board had to wait on the aircraft for about 90 minutes before they were cleared to leave. A Tampa International Airport spokesperson confirmed to CNN that the sick individuals were vomiting by the time they touched down in Florida. Benjamin Haynes, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC, said CDC officials advised the local emergency responders who evaluated the passengers, but called the situation a "routine illness response.", "Once the plane landed and Tampa officials realized what they were dealing with, the sick passengers were referred to their personal health care provider and CDC had no further involvement," Haynes told TIME. |
US | Trump Heads to HurricaneHit Texas to Survey Storm Response | HOUSTON U.S. President Donald Trump planned to visit Texas on Tuesday to survey the response to devastating Tropical Storm Harvey, the first major natural disaster of his White House tenure. The slow-moving storm has brought catastrophic flooding to Texas, killed at least nine people, led to mass evacuations and paralyzed Houston, the fourth most-populous U.S. city. It had also roiled energy markets and caused damage estimated to be in the billions of dollars, with rebuilding likely to last beyond Trump's current four-year term in office. "My administration is coordinating closely with state and local authorities in Texas and Louisiana to save lives, and we thank our first responders and all of those involved in their efforts," Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. Trump was scheduled to arrive on Tuesday morning in Corpus Christi, near where Harvey came ashore on Friday as the most powerful hurricane to hit Texas in more than 50 years. The president will later go to the Texas capital Austin to meet state officials, receive briefings and tour the emergency operation center, the White House said. Forecasters could only draw on a few comparisons to the storm, recalling Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and killed 1,800 people in 2005. The administration of then-President George W. Bush faced accusations that his response was slow and inadequate criticism that dealt a serious blow to his presidency. Flood damage in Texas from Hurricane Harvey may equal that from Katrina, one of the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, an insurance research group said on Sunday. In Texas, thousands of National Guard troops, police officers, rescue workers and civilians raced in helicopters, boats and high-water trucks to rescue the thousands stranded in the flooding, which turned streets into rivers and caused chest-high water build-ups in scores of neighborhoods. In Cypress, Texas, Kayla Harvey, 26, was monitoring Facebook, finding where people were stuck and organizing friends with boats to go out and help. "This is just what we do for our community. We don't wait for someone to come and help we just go out and do it," she said. The last Category 4 hurricane to make landfall in Texas since Harvey was Carla in 1961. It packed winds and rains that destroyed about 1,900 homes and nearly 1,000 businesses, the National Weather Service said. Among the most recent fatalities from Harvey was a family of two adults and four children who were believed to have drowned after the van they were in was swept away by floodwaters in Houston, authorities said on Monday. A man drowned on Monday night trying to swim across flooded Houston-area roads, the Houston Chronicle reported the Montgomery County Constable's Office as saying. Since coming ashore, Harvey has virtually stalled along the Texas coast, picking up warm water from the Gulf of Mexico and dumping torrential rain from San Antonio to Louisiana. The Houston metro area has suffered some of the worst precipitation with certain areas expected to receive more than 50 inches 127 cm of rain in a week, more than it typically receives for a year. Harvey is expected to produce another 10 to 20 inches of rain through Thursday over parts of the upper Texas coast into southwestern Louisiana, the National Weather Service said. "These stationary bands of tropical rain are very hard to time, very hard to place and are very unpredictable," said Alek Krautmann, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Louisiana. Schools and office buildings were closed throughout the Houston metropolitan area, where 6.8 million people live. The Federal Emergency Management Agency director, Brock Long, estimated that 30,000 people would eventually be housed temporarily in shelters. Houston and Dallas have set up shelters in convention centers and Austin was preparing to house as many as 7,000 evacuees. Hundreds of Houston-area roads were blocked by high water. The city's two main airports were shut as the floods turned runways into ponds and more than a quarter million customers were without power as of Tuesday morning. The Gulf of Mexico is home to half of U.S. refining capacity. The reduction in supply led gasoline futures to hit their highest level in two years this week as Harvey knocked out about 13 percent of total U.S. refining capacity, based on company reports and Reuters estimates. The floods could destroy as much as 20 billion in insured property, making the storm one of the costliest in history for U.S. insurers, Wall Street analysts say. The Brazos River, one of the longest in the country, was forecast to crest at record highs well above flood levels on Tuesday about 30 miles 49 km southwest of Houston, prompting authorities in Fort Bend County to order the evacuation of about 50,000 people. |
US | Why the Death of Malls Is About More Than Shopping | The Schuylkill Mall in Frackville, Pa. is open for business, but you have to look hard to know it. The stores that have shutteredSears, Kmart, Spencer Gifts, Hallmark Cardsfar outnumber the dozen businesses that remain. The customer-service office is cordoned off by a metal gate. The plants underneath the skylight droop toward a ring of yellow caution tape, and the piped-in music echoes off barren walls. The mall used to have a dance club. Now it's a dialysis center. A decade ago, the Schuylkill Mall and its 90 stores, restaurants and knickknack kiosks was a nexus of daily life in this part of Pennsylvania coal country, where teenagers met to flirt as warm-up-suited seniors walked laps around them. Crowds thronged to the annual Easter egg hunt and Lithuanian Days festival, a nod to the region's ancestral ties. "I had to say excuse me a million times to get to work," says Jane Krick, a waitress at Suglia's Pizzeria Restaurant, the last full-service restaurant standing. "It was full of people. Now we get a million phone calls a day asking, Are you still open?", It won't be for long. In early May, management gave the remaining tenants 60 to 90 days to close up shop. Tenants expect the property to be demolished. The wrecking ball will put the mall in good company around the nation. By 2022, analysts estimate that 1 out of every 4 malls in the U.S. could be out of business, victims of changing tastes, a widening wealth gap and the embrace of online shopping for everything from socks to swing sets. This year alone, more than 8,600 stores could close, according to industry estimates, many of them the brand-name anchor outlets that real estate developers once stumbled over themselves to court. Already there have been 5,300 retail closings this year, including Sears, Macy's, JCPenney and Kmart stores. Sears Holdingswhich owns Kmartsaid in March that there's "substantial doubt" it can stay in business altogether, and will close 300 stores this year. In April, Payless Inc. announced it would close 400 of its shoe stores as part of its bankruptcy planon top of a separate 400 it had already scheduled to close. The mall staple RadioShack has filed for Chapter 11 twice in two years. So far this year, nine national retail chains have filed for bankruptcy. Local jobs are a major casualty of what analysts are calling, with only a hint of hyperbole, the retail apocalypse. Since 2002, department stores have lost 448,000 jobs, a 25 decline, while the number of store closures this year is on pace to surpass the worst depths of the Great Recession. The growth of online retailers, meanwhile, has failed to offset those losses, with the e-commerce sector adding just 178,000 jobs over the past 15 years. Some of those jobs can be found in the massive distribution centers Amazon has opened across the country, often not too far from malls the company helped shutter. One of them is in Breinigsville, Pa. 45 miles from Schuylkill. But those are workplaces, not gathering places. The mall is both. And in the 61 years since the first enclosed one opened in suburban Minneapolis, the shopping mall has been where a huge swath of middle-class America went for far more than shopping. It was the home of first jobs and blind dates, the place for family photos and ear piercings, where goths and grandmothers could somehow walk through the same doors and find something they all liked. Sure, the food was lousy for you and the oceans of parking lots encouraged car-heavy development, something now scorned by contemporary planners. But for better or worse, the mall has been America's public square for the last 60 years. So what happens when it disappears?, Think of your mall. Or think of the one you went to as a kid. Think of the perfume clouds in the department stores. The floating Muzak. The fountains splashing below the skylights. The cinnamon wafting from the food court. As far back as ancient Greece, societies have congregated around a central marketplace. In medieval Europe, they were outside cathedrals. For half of the 20th century and almost 20 years into the new one, much of America has found their agora on the terrazzo between Orange Julius and Sbarro, Waldenbooks and the Gap, Sunglass Hut and Hot Topic. That mall was an ecosystem unto itself, a combination of community and commercialism peddling everything you needed and everything you didn't Magic Eye posters, wind catchers, Air Jordans, slap bracelets. The giant department stores that held its flanksSaks, the Bon-Ton, Bloomingdale's, Elder-Beermanwere miniature malls unto themselves, with their own escalators and sections and scents. This was an experience replicated around the country from a single archetype Southdale Center in Edina, Minn. Opened in 1956, it was the brainchild of Austrian architect Victor Gruen, a socialist appalled by American sprawl he described as "avenues of horror.", Gruen's response was America's first modern mall, something he envisioned as a hub for dense suburban developments that would include apartment buildings, hospitals and office space. The building was fully enclosed, the storefronts faced in, and large anchor stores were placed at separate ends to attract customers and promote foot traffic to the smaller shops in between. In the middle was a European-style central court with sculptures, an open-air caf and an aviary. "Southdale set the tone for most malls after that," says Thomas Fisher, a professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota. It didn't take long for thousands of acres of farmland to be converted into massive centers for buying stuff, surrounded by blacktop"pyramids to the boom years," the writer Joan Didion called them. Their construction was helped along by the Interstate Highway System and enormous commercial investments aided by changing tax laws. The white flight from cities during the 1960s and '70s assured a customer base and further isolated those left behind in city centers. By the 1980s and into the '90s, malls had vanquished Main Street and colonized pop culture. They became grist for board games Mall Madness, TV game shows Shop Til You Drop and concert tours. Tiffany's 1987 mall road show helped the teen star reach No. 1 on the pop charts Britney Spears replicated the strategy a decade later. Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the seminal 1982 film about high school life, set much of its angsty action inside Los Angeles' Sherman Oaks Galleria. Seven years later, the time-traveling slackers in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure brought Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan and other historical icons to hang out at their local mall. Because where else would you go in suburban California in 1989?, Malls had become "the new Main Streets of America," as William Kowinski wrote in his 1985 book The Malling of America. Indeed, legal cases throughout the decade tested the argument that malls should not be seen as private spaces because so much public life happened there. The courts didn't always agree., By 1992, the New York Times could count 48 malls within a 90-minute drive of Times Square. That same year, the Mall of America opened its doors in Bloomington, Minn. with an amusement park at the center of 5.6 million sq. ft. of retail that eventually grew into more than 500 stores. All told, 1,500 malls were built in the U.S. between 1956 and 2005, and their rate of growth often outpaced that of the population. Like all booms, this one couldn't last. The decline began slowly, in the mid-2000s. The rise of online shopping and the blow of the Great Recession led to a drop in sales and foot traffic at big-brand retailers like JCPenney and Macy's that anchored many of the country's malls. Between 2010 and '13, mall visits during the holiday season, the busiest shopping time of the year, dropped by 50. Some of the great mall die-off is what economists refer to as a market correction. "We are over-retailed," says Ronald Friedman, a partner at Marcum LLP, which researches consumer trends. There is an estimated 26 sq. ft. of retail for every person in the U.S. compared with about 2.5 sq. ft. per capita in Europe. Roughly 60 of Macy's stores slated to close are within 10 miles of another Macy's. A growing number of Americans, however, don't see the need to go to any Macy's at all. Our digital lives are frictionless and ruthlessly efficient, with retail and romance available at a click. Malls were designed for leisure, abundance, ambling. You parked and planned to spend some time. Today, much of that time has been given over to busier lives and second jobs and apps that let you swipe right instead of haunt the food court. Malls, says Harvard business professor Leonard Schlesinger, "were built for patterns of social interaction that increasingly don't exist.", Younger Americans "look at malls in an antiquated way," says Dan Bell, a filmmaker who produces the Dead Mall Series on YouTube, an eerie record of the nation's fading commercial temples. "They see it as, That was my parents' thing, and it's not my thing.'", Bell's videos of abandoned and dying malls have received millions of views online, eliciting hundreds of messages a week from the same kids and teenagers who wouldn't set foot inside a traditional mall. "When you go into a dead mall, it's like shock and awe at the same time," he says. "I think that's really appealing for a lot of young people. It's like watching the Titanic sink.", There are still about 1,100 malls in the U.S. today, but a quarter of them are at risk of closing over the next five years, according to estimates from Credit Suisse. Other analysts predict the number will be even higher. Some ailing malls have already moved on to a second life. Austin Community College in Texas purchased Highland Mall in 2012 and converted part of it into a tech-driven learning lab and library. In Nashville, Vanderbilt University Medical Center moved into the second floor of the 100 Oaks Mall a few miles from downtown. The Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Ky. bought their nearby mall and transformed part of it into an auditorium. Not all malls are failing, of course, and the ones that are thriving tend to share certain characteristics. Chief among them luxury. From the 375-store Galleria in Houston to the Shops at Crystals in Las Vegas to the Bal Harbour Shops near Miami, complexes filled with runway brands such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton are reporting healthy revenues. As a greater percentage of America's wealth is concentrated in a smaller share of its population, these elite malls partly avoid competition with Amazon by catering to those who don't need to scour for deals. Others have found success by updating what the best malls have always done give people a reason to come beyond filling shopping bags. The Grove in Los Angeles has a mini main street and trolley running down its center, meant to evoke an urban boulevard, and hosts a summer concert series. The Palisades Center in West Nyack, N.Y. has a bowling alley, a comedy club and an indoor rope-climbing course. And at a moment when Instagramming one's meal has become standard practice, malls in cities from Utah to Louisiana are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into upscaling their food courts. At Pennsylvania's King of Prussia Mall, the country's second largest, Auntie Anne's now vies with stands hawking avocado toast and sushi burritos. "Clearly there's a shake-up going on," Steven M. Lowy, co-CEO of Westfield, which operates dozens of malls around the world, told the Associated Press. "We understand the need to change and adapt.", It also turns out that not everyone wants to spend their leisure time inside. Many of the new, millennial-focused malls are indoor/outdoor complexes designed as one cog of a suburban town center that includes apartments and office spacenot unlike what Gruen envisioned more than a half-century ago. Easton Town Center outside of Columbus, Ohio, for example, includes 300 shops spread across a mix of enclosed mall and an open-air, car-free street grid. The development has become a magnet for millennials who are leaving downtowns for the suburbs but still want to live in a dense, walkable community. Still, analysts say that only about 150 of these malls have figured out how to make it work. "Everybody else," says Harvard's Schlesinger, "is figuring out how to play catch-up.", Two hours north of King of Prussia, "Up, Up and Away" is floating through the Schuylkill Mall as FYE, the CD and DVD retailer, prepares to close in five days. Everything on sale! 30 TO 90 OFF! Allen Reinert, an assistant manager, has 15 more minutes on his shift before he leaves the following day for Salem, Ore. where he's going to work at another, hopefully better-off FYE. "It's tough," says Reinert, 27, who's worked for FYE off and on since he was 16. "This used to be a safe space where young people weren't getting into trouble. But kids don't hang out here on the weekend. Because there's nothing here.", He's not joking. "It's like something out of a horror movie," says Maribeth Gantt, 37, a mother of four who visited the mall recently. "I got nervous when I walked in, like I'm waiting for a guy to jump out at me.", Gantt can recall going to Schuylkill with her grandparents in the 1980s, when the building was humming. "It's sad. I remember being a kid, and you go to the mall. My kids never say, Let's go to the mall.'", Neither does the man who invented it. Late in life, Victor Gruen, the Southdale architect, became disillusioned with his creation, which never lived up to his vision. "I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all," he said in 1978. "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments.", He had a point. Very few malls turned into engines of smart development, with people working, learning and living in addition to shopping. The locations tended to promote sprawl, not reduce it. And as a private space devoted to consumption, it placed disposable income at the center of things. But for all its flaws, the mall did manage to bring people together in ways that, in the era of personal devices, even Gruen might appreciate the grandmothers and goths, the flirting teens, the mall walkers and mall rats. They're all online now, face-to-screen, interacting in ways impersonal and impulsive. It's a different sort of marketplace, unsurpassed in its efficiency and with its own code and culture, but without the skylights, the sweet smells, the splashing fountains, the ethereal Muzakall of which are still around, but you have to look hard to know it. |
US | Elon Musk Calls a Diver That Rescued Thai Soccer Team a Pedo on Twitter | Elon Musk is causing controversy on Twitter again. This time, the Tesla CEO and billionaire attacked one of the divers who played an instrumental role in rescuing the Thai soccer team that was stuck in a cave last week. On Sunday, Musk called him a "pedo" on the social network. Musk's derogatory tweet appears to be a response to comments made by British diver Vern Unsworth, who helped extract the boys and their coach from the Tham Luang cave complex. In an interview with CNN on Friday, Unsworth, a cave explorer, said that the mini-submarine Musk sent to aid the rescue mission was just "a PR stunt.", The diver didn't stop there, however. He said Musk could "stick his submarine where it hurts," and that it had "absolutely no chance of working." Unsworth said the mini-sub was too long and rigid for the cave conditions and that Musk had "no conception" of what the cave passages were like. He also said that Musk was asked to leave the cave, saying that he shouldn't have been there. Musk fired back on Twitter over the weekend, taking his reply a step too far in calling Unsworth a pedophile, causing many on the social media platform to ask Musk to delete the tweet, which he later did. , Instead, the Silicon Valley mogul stuck to his original comment, tweeting "Bet ya a signed dollar it's true" to someone who called him out for the remark, while also saying he never saw Unsworth when he was at the cave. Musk did call the other cave divers and rescuers "unsung heroes" in a different tweet. He also defended himself, tweeting out emails between himself and another one of the divers, Richard Stanton, as proof that his plan to use the mini-sub to help the boys was in fact a viable solution. , The tech billionaire also took heat on Twitter after a Federal Election Commission filing released this week showed he was a large donor to the GOP, giving 38,900 to the PAC Protect The House. Despite the report being publicly available, Musk tweeted that the idea he is a top GOP donor is "categorically false," as well as tweeting that he is "not a conservative. Am registered independent politically moderate.", , , Musk caused more waves on Twitter in late May when he attacked the press for writing articles about Tesla that did not paint the company in an especially favorable light, saying he was going to create a website to rate journalists. |
US | John Dingell the LongestServing Member of Congress in US History Has Died at 92 | DETROIT Former U.S. Rep. John Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress in American history who mastered legislative deal-making and was fiercely protective of Detroit's auto industry, has died. The Michigan Democrat was 92. Dingell, who served in the U.S. House for 59 years before retiring in 2014, died Thursday at his home in Dearborn, said his wife, Congresswoman Debbie Dingell. Dubbed "Big John" for his imposing 6-foot-3 frame and sometimes intimidating manner, a reputation bolstered by the wild game heads decorating his Washington office, Dingell served with every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama. He was a longtime supporter of universal health care, a cause he adopted from his late father, whom he replaced in Congress in 1955. He also was known as a dogged pursuer of government waste and fraud, and even helped take down two top presidential aides while leading the investigative arm of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, which he chaired for 14 years. "I've gotten more death threats around here than I can remember," Dingell told The Associated Press in a 1995 interview. "It used to bother my wife, but oversight was something we did uniquely well.", Dingell had a front-row seat for the passage of landmark legislation he supported, including Medicare, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, but also for the Clean Air Act, which he was accused of stalling to help auto interests. His hometown, the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, was home to a Ford Motor Co. factory that was once the largest in the world. Yet one of his proudest moments came in 2010, when he sat next to Obama as the 938 billion health care overhaul was signed into law. Dingell had introduced a universal health care coverage bill in each of his terms. "Presidents come and presidents go," former President Bill Clinton said in 2005, when Dingell celebrated 50 years in Congress. "John Dingell goes on forever.", Dingell's investigations helped lead to the criminal conviction of one of President Ronald Reagan's top advisers, Michael Deaver, for lying under oath, and to the resignation of Reagan's first environmental protection chief and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford. She stepped down after refusing to share subpoenaed documents with a House subcommittee investigating a Superfund toxic waste program. Another probe led to the resignation of former Stanford University President Donald Kennedy after the school misused hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funds. Dingell often used his dry wit to amuse his friends and sting opponents. Even when hospitalized in 2003, following an operation to open a blocked artery, he maintained his humor "I'm happy to inform the Republican leadership that I fully intend to be present to vote against their harmful and shameless tax giveaway package," he said from the hospital. Critics called him overpowering and intimidating, a reputation boosted by the head of a 500-pound wild boar that looked at visitors to his Washington office. The story behind it? Dingell is said to have felled the animal with a pistol as it charged him during a hunting trip in Soviet Georgia. The avid hunter and sportsman also loved classical music and ballet. His first date with his wife, Debbie, a former prominent Democratic activist whom he affectionately introduced as "the lovely Deborah," was a performance of the American Ballet Theater. "He taught me how to shoot a rifle," former Ohio Rep. Dennis Eckhart told The Associated Press in 2009. "I remember he said shooting a rifle is a lot like legislating. You have to be very, very sure of your target, and then when you get your chance, don't miss.", Born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on July 8, 1926, John David Dingell Jr. grew up in Michigan, where his father was elected to Congress as a "New Deal" Democrat in 1932. After a brief stint in the Army near the end of World War II, the younger Dingell earned his bachelor's and law degrees from Georgetown University. Following the sudden death of his father in September 1955, Dingell then a 29-year-old attorney won a special election to succeed him. The newly elected politician was no stranger to the Capitol. Dingell was serving as a page on the House floor when President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan on Dec. 8, 1941. In college, he supervised the building's elevator operators. And when he became the longest-serving U.S. House member in history in 2009, Dingell recalled entering the chamber for the first time as a 6-year-old and being in awe of the East door. "I had never been in a place like this. I was a working-class kid from a Polish neighborhood in Detroit, and this was quite an event for me," Dingell told Time magazine at the time. "I've only begun in later years to appreciate what it all meant.", Dingell won more than two dozen elections during his career, at first representing a Detroit district but eventually shifting because of redistricting to various southeastern Michigan communities. He became the longest-serving member of Congress on June 7, 2013, when he surpassed the former record holder, the late West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd. "The length of time is really quite unimportant," Dingell told the AP in an interview in 2009. "It's what I have done with that time.", Dingell, at age 87, announced in early 2014 that he would not run for a 30th full term because he could not have lived up to his own standards. Continuing the family tradition, his wife, Debbie, successfully ran for her husband's seat in 2014. "I don't want people to be sorry for me. I don't want to be going out feet-first, and I don't want to do less than an adequate job," said Dingell, who by that time was using a cane or motorized cart to get around the Capitol. Dingell suffered a heart attack four years later, in September 2018 at age 92. He was hospitalized but was soon "cracking jokes as usual," his wife said at the time. An autobiography, "The Dean The Best Seat in the House," was written with David Bender and published in December. Forewords were written by former President George H.W. Bush, who died only a few days before its publication, and former Vice President Joe Biden. Dingell had 252,000 followers on Twitter, which was an outlet for the outspoken Democrat's wry takes and quick wit. In January, he noted the negative 7-degree temperature in Hell, Michigan, and retweeted a tweet from the Detroit Free Press that said the "Detroit Lions are going to win the Super Bowl" now that Hell had frozen over. Along with his wife, Dingell is survived by one daughter, two sons, one of whom served 15 years in the Michigan Legislature, and several grandchildren. Correction, Feb. 13, The original version of this story misstated Rep. John Dingell's survivors. John Dingell is survived by three children his daughter Jeanne Dingell died in 2015. |
US | How Well Do You Know Pope Francis | Pope Francis is making his first visit to the United States in September, a five-day trip that includes stops in Washington, D.C. New York City and Philadelphia. Whether you'll be complaining about the traffic his visit is costing your city or can't wait to see the popesee how well you actually know him with this quiz. |
US | Sarah Palins Son Arrested on Domestic Violence Charges | Track Palin, 29, the eldest son of former Alaska Governor and 2008 Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, was arrested for allegedly assaulting a female acquaintance in his home late Friday night. Police responded to a report of a "disturbance" at Palin's home in Wasilla, Alaska, around 1030 p.m. "When the acquaintance attempted to call authorities, he prevented her by taking away her phone," stated an Alaska Department of Public Safety dispatch report. "While being placed under arrest, Palin physically resisted troopers.", The Army veteran was charged with Assault in the Fourth Degree Domestic Violence, Interfering with Report of Domestic Violence, Resisting Arrest and Disorderly Conduct. In court on Saturday, Track Palin said he was "not guilty, for sure" on the four charges, reported local NBC affiliate KTUU. Palin is being held at the Mat-Su Pretrial facility in Palmer without bail, according to police. Friday's arrest is the latest in a string of incidents involving the former Governor's son. Palin was put on probation in January 2016 for allegedly assaulting his then-girlfriend Jordan Lowe and pointing a gun at her. He was also arrested in December 2017 for allegedly assaulting his father, Todd Palin. According to charging documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times, an intoxicated Palin allegedly hit his father over the head several times after breaking into his parents' home. Palin called the police who arrived on the scene "peasants" and told them to lay their guns on the ground, according to officers' statements. As part of a plea deal, Palin pled guilty to charges of first-degree criminal trespassing. After his January 2016 arrest, Sarah Palin suggested her son was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder PTSD during a rally for Donald Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma. |
US | Fox to Investigate Sexual Harassment Claim Against Bill OReilly | NEW YORK Fox News parent Twenty-First Century Fox said on Sunday it will investigate a sexual harassment claim against TV anchor Bill O'Reilly, who has seen several companies pull their ads from his top-rated news show in the past week. The investigation comes after a complaint was phoned in to the network's corporate hotline last week by Wendy Walsh, a former regular guest on Foxs The O'Reilly Factor TV show, and her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, which the two posted to YouTube. "21st Century Fox investigates all complaints and we have asked the law firm Paul Weiss to continue assisting the company in these serious matters," the company said in a statement. Walsh, a psychologist and radio host, said O'Reilly reneged on an offer to secure her a lucrative job on the network after she declined his invitation to join him in his hotel suite after a dinner in early 2013. "I'm told that they are taking it seriously, and they are going to do the investigation that's legally required of them," Bloom told CNN on Sunday. Fox and O'Reilly have paid 13 million to five women who accused him of sexual harassment, the New York Times reported last weekend. O'Reilly said in a statement then that he had been unfairly targeted because of his prominence and has not made further comment. Numerous companies have pulled ads from O'Reillys Fox News show since the report, including BMW of North America, Allstate Corp, French pharmaceuticals maker Sanofi SA , direct marketer Constant Contact, men's clothing company Untuckit and mutual fund operator T. Rowe Price. British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline Plc said it temporarily suspended its advertising. Fox News, the top-rated cable news network, has faced heightened scrutiny of its workplace climate after sexual harassment allegations led to the resignation of founding Chairman Roger Ailes last year. 21st Century Fox hired law firm Paul Weiss to investigate Ailes. On April 3, Democratic political consultant and Fox News contributor Julie Roginsky sued the network and Ailes, accusing them of denying her a permanent hosting job after she rebuffed Ailes'sexual advances. Roginsky said that a misogynistic culture at Fox News had not changed since Ailes left the network. |
US | Family Mourns LSU Freshman Who Died in Possible Frat Hazing I Will Be Grieving the Rest of My Life | The close-knit family of a Louisiana State University freshman who died in a possible fraternity hazing incident at the school is grieving the loss of a young man who they said had a big future ahead of him. Maxwell Gruver, 18, died Thursday in what university police are investigating as a possible hazing incident. The teenager from Roswell, Ga. was taken from Phi Delta Theta's fraternity house to the hospital, where he died before noon, East Baton Rouge Coroner Beau Clark said. The circumstances surrounding Gruver's death are unclear. Gruver's grieving family is now waiting for the final results of an autopsy, which will determine Gruver's cause of death. "I just wake up at night and say, Max is dead.' I can't believe it," the teen's grandfather, Eugene Gruver, told TIME on Friday, breaking down in tears. "You just wish it wouldn't be your own grandson, but it happened. Max was so handsome and talented. And he had a lot to look forward to. We all love him so much.", , Eugene Gruver, 88, said he was beaming while watching his grandson graduate this year from Blessed Trinity Catholic High School. He recalled how sad yet proud Max's mother was to drive her oldest child to Louisiana State this fall to help him move in. His mother posted a photo of her son on Facebook Thursday night. "When she took him to LSU, she had a lot of tears leaving him there. Now she will have a lot of tears bringing him home," Eugene Gruver said. Maxwell Gruver, an avid sports fan, aspired to be a sports writer and had his work published in newspapers in his hometown, his grandfather said. "He knew a lot about all the teams. All the football teams, all the baseball teams. More information than I ever knew," Eugene Gruver said. The teen's favorite team was the Clemson Tigers. Eugene Gruver recalled how "happy" his grandson was to be accepted to LSU and how he learned a week ago that a fraternity there had accepted Max. Eugene Gruver said he closely followed the hazing death of 19-year-old Tim Piazza at Penn State. But he never imagined he'd lose any loved ones in a similar way. "The whole thing with hazing at Penn State was in my mind and now it happened and hit home," he said. "I cannot understand why a fraternity can't have a sit-down dinner, maybe some alcohol, for a greeting. But why do they have to do the kind of hazing they do? I will never understand," he added. "Now I lost a grandson through it.", LSU President F. King Alexander said it's too early to say whether Max Gruver died from a hazing incident, but that the death was under investigation and all Greek life activities were temporarily suspended. "I want to emphasize that this is an evolving situation," he said in a statement, adding that the death was "tragic and untimely.", The coroner on Friday released preliminary autopsy results, which indicate Gruver had a "highly elevated" blood alcohol level and marijuana in his system when he died. There were no signs of internal or external trauma on the teen's body but the coroner said there was swelling in his brain and lungs. The incident left Max Gruver's two young siblings without a brother, Eugene Gruver said through tears. "We were close. The family was so close," he said. "I will be grieving the rest of my life." |
US | Here Are the Most Powerful Speeches From March For Our Lives in Washington | Hundreds of March For Our Lives rallies took place across the country and around the world Saturday as people called for action on gun violence. The rallies included hundreds of thousands of protesters and speeches from activists and survivors of shootings, including survivors of the Parkland, Fla. shooting David Hogg and Emma Gonzlez. The speeches, from Parkland students and others around the country, called on law makers to take action on gun control. Here are some of the best speeches from the March For Our Lives, Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg spoke at the Washington D.C. March For Our Lives rally. "We are going to make this the voting issue. We are going to take this to every election, to every state and every city. When politicians send their thoughts and prayers with no action, we say, No more.' And to those politicians supported by the NRA, that allow the continued slaughter of our children and our future, I say get your resumes ready," Hogg said. Naomi Wadler, at just 11, took the stage to address gun violence against African American women and girls that is under-reported. "I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don't make the front page of every national newspaper. These stories don't lead on the evening news," Wadler said at the Washington D.C. March for Our Lives rally. "In a little over six minutes, 17 of our friends were taken from us, 15 more were injured, and everyone absolutely everyone in the Douglas community was forever altered," Emma Gonzlez said during her speech. Gonzlez opened her speech by addressing the Parkland shooting before making her most impactful statement of the speech by remaining silent. She then did not speak while she remained on stage for just over four minutes before a timer went off. "Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and 20 seconds," she said after remaining silent. "The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job.", "My grandfather had a dream that his four little children will not be judged by the color of the skin, but the content of their character. I have a dream that enough is enough. And that this should be a gun-free world, period," Yolanda Renee King, 9, standing alongside Parkland shooting survivor Jaclyn Corin, referencing her grandfather Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. King made a surprise appearance at the Washington D.C. March For Our Lives Rally. Alex King and D'Angelo McDade, both students from North Lawndale College Prep in Chicago and members of the student non-violence group the Peace Warriors, walked out on stage with duct tape over their mouths. King and McDade had met with Parkland students in Florida last month as part of an outreach to groups that have not benefited from the attention of wall-to-wall news coverage that the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas had. "When will we as a nation understand that nonviolence is the way of a life for a courageous people? When will we as a nation understand that we are not here to fight against one another and we are here to fight for life and peace?" McDade said. "Dr. King once said, Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.' Which now leads me to say that violence cannot drive out violence, only peace can do that.", He added, "As I stand here before you, I stand as D'Angelo McDade, an 18-year-old from the West Side of Chicago. I, too, am a victim, a survivor and a victor of gun violence. I come from a place where minorities are controlled by both violence and poverty but today we say No more!' ", Cameron Kasky, who also attends Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and survived the Parkland shooting, spoke in Washington D.C. Kaksy read aloud the names of victims of the shooting, wishing one of the Nicholas Dworet a happy birthday. Dworet, who would have turned 18 next month, was killed in the shooting. "My generation having spent our entire lives seeing mass shooting after mass shooting has learned that our voices are powerful and our votes matter. We must educate ourselves and start conversations that keep our country moving forward and we will. We hereby promise to fix the broken system we've been forced into and create a better world for the generations to come. Don't worry, we've got this," Kasky said. |
US | Michigan Governor Sends Bottled Water to Flint | Four days after declaring a state of emergency over a water crisis in Flint, Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder is providing the city with bottled water and other supplies, Snyder's office announced Saturday. The news came as churches, local organizations and out-of-state donors worked to provide drinking water and as criticism mounted from residents who wondered how the governor could seemingly declare a state of emergency without backing it up. The crisis in Flint began nearly two years ago, when the city abandoned its old water source Lake Huron and opted for a cheaper one, Flint River. |
US | McDonalds Is Making a Big Change to the Beef in its Hamburgers | McDonald's announced on Tuesday that it has switched to fresh beef Quarter Pounders, rather than frozen, in 3,500 of the chain's restaurants in the U.S, with plans to expand to more locations by May. The fast food giant's announcement follows its pledge a year ago to roll out fresh beef in the majority of its 14,000 U.S. restaurants by mid-2018. McDonald's has made a series of high-profile efforts to improve the quality of its iconic menu items, such as removing artificial preservatives from McNuggets, and the introduction of the all-day breakfast in 2015. McDonald's is facing competition from brands like Chick-fil-A, In-N-Out and Shake Shack Inc, in addition to traditional rivals like Wendy's Co. "Our suppliers have invested about 60 million updating their supply chain to be able to make this conversion from frozen to fresh," McDonald's U.S President Chris Kempczinski said. "McDonald's is a burger company and there is no better place to start than with our burgers," he added, in remarks reported by CNBC. Kempczinski also told Reuters that there had initially been concerns about what fresh, made-to-order burgers would do to restaurants' service time. "If it slows down the drive-through, that's the critical part of our business. And so we just had to spend a lot of time really making sure that as we were cooking only when someone ordered, we'd figured out a way to do it that wasn't going to slow down service time," he said. |
US | University of Cincinnati Cop Indicted in Killing of Unarmed Black Man | University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing has been indicted on murder charges for the shooting of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed black man, during a routine traffic stop on July 19. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters announced the indictment in a press conference on Wednesday. Shortly afterward, Tensing voluntarily turned himself in and will be held overnight in the Hamilton County Justice Center before he is arraigned Thursday morning. "I'm treating him like a murderer," Deters, who is calling for life imprisonment for Tensing, said. After the indictment was announced, University of Cincinnati fired Tensing, according to university officials. The indictment marks the first of a Cincinnati police officer for killing a civilian, according to Deters. He called the shooting "senseless" and offered his condolences to DuBose's family. "This is the first time that we thought This is, without question, a murder,'" Deters said. Stuart Mathews, who is representing Tensing, said he was "stunned" by the murder charge. "I don't believe there was any criminal activity that occurred by Officer Tensing," he told TIME. "Murder is about as serious as it gets. In Ohio, murder is purposefully causing the death of another and there was no purposeful causing of death here.", Tensing stopped DuBose, 43, at an intersection near the University of Cincinnati campus for driving without a front license plate. According to UC Police Chief Jason Goodrich, Tensing asked for a driver's license, which DuBose did not provide. According to Tensing, he was dragged down the road when DuBose began driving away. Tensing then fatally shot DuBose once in the head, according to the police report. Deters says that according to the body-camera video footage, which was released during the same press conference on Wednesday and that Deters said was "invaluable" to the investigation, Tensing's account was false. Without the body camera evidence, Tensing could have continued to falsely assert that he had been dragged. "He was not dragged. If you slowed down this tape, you see what happened," he said. "People want to believe that Mr. DuBose had done something violent towards the officer. He did not.", Later in the conference, DuBose's mother, Audrey DuBose, similarly praised body cameras for proving what she already knew. "My son was a righteous man. Seeing that video let me know that my son did absolutely nothing," she said. "There are a lot of police murders that go unsolved. My son was killed by a cop. I'm so thankful that everything was uncovered. With this, I can rest.", Tensing was on paid administrative leave up until the indictment was announced, at which point he was fired by the university. When asked what Tensing should have done in the scenario, Deters articulated that the stakes were not high enough to justify the use of a weapon. "If he's starting to roll away, seriously, let him go," he said. Deters was quick to point out that Tensing is not a Cincinnati police officer and said this would never have happened with one of their officers. According to Deters, Tensing lost his temper when DuBose did not immediately step out of the car. He said it took Tensing "maybe a second" to shoot DuBose. "It's ridiculous that this would happen," Deters said. "I feel so sorry for his family and what they lost.", Deters also said the current Black Lives Matter movement against police violence towards people of color in urban communities did not play a role in the indictment. "I have paid attention to some of the protests about this," he said. "It didn't affect my decision in any fashion.", DuBose's funeral took place on Tuesday, with more than 500 people packing the pews to honor the memory of the former rapper and music producer. People have been demonstrating since DuBose's death and his family urged activists on Wednesday to continue the fight peacefully. "All the soldiers who were out there marching with me for justice for my son, I thank you," Audrey DuBose said "And I hope that you continue to do this. Not just for my son, but for many others. And I'm ready to join the battlefield because my heart goes out for so many." |
US | A Lava Chaser Explains the Thrill of Getting Dangerously Close to Hawaiis Kilauea Eruption | Demian Barrios has barely slept since Hawaii's Kilauea volcano started erupting on May 3. The lifelong volcano enthusiast, who describes himself as a "lava chaser," has been running after every open fissure along the erupting volcano every day for the last 11 days. As a new fissure broke open and spewed rocks into the air on Sunday, Barrios, a professional photographer, was live streaming the action from the ground including what he called "lava bombs" half the size of Volkswagen Beetle cars dropping to the ground around him. "It's really something that makes me feel alive," Barrios, 37, tells TIME about lava chasing. "There's an overwhelming sense of power and respect and love that you feel standing there being able to see that. It's almost addictive.", Barrios has been tracking volcanoes since moving to Hawaii's Big Island in 1999. The practice has turned into far more than a hobby in fact, Barrios says, his partner often jokes that he is having an affair with Pele, the volcanic fire goddess from Hawaiian mythology. The Kilauea eruptions mark a historic turn from what Barrios typically experiences in his journeys to volcanoes while most Hawaiians are accustomed to lava flows, they tend to be "repetitive," he says. This time, it's different. Current eruptions from the Kilauea volcano have lasted nearly two weeks, destroyed dozens of homes and forced thousands of residents to evacuate. The most comparable eruption occurred in 1955 when a volcano erupted in Puna for three months, covering nearly 4,000 acres with lava, officials say. It's unclear when the lava spewing will end. But Barrios says he has to get out there to document what's happening because a similar event may not happen again in his lifetime. "This is bigger than Hawaii. It's not something you can come back to later," he says. "Already so many people have been affected by doing this and having someone here on the ground, it becomes all of our experience.", Of course, chasing after erupting volcanoes can be dangerous, especially for amateurs. Officials have strongly warned against approaching the active volcanic area, as lava and rocks continue to emerge from fissures, saying the volcano is unlikely to be deadly unless people visit the areas near the fissures. Hawaii's Volcano National Park closed on Friday due to the risk of rock and ash fall at the volcano's summit. While eager onlookers might not encounter hot lava to the skin, the sulfur dioxide levels in the air near the volcano have grown deadly since Kilauea's major eruption. As of May 9, sulfur dioxide levels measured above 100 parts per million high enough that people living near the volcano had to evacuate, according to Elizabeth Tram, a professor of medicine and respiratory health at the University of Hawaii's John A. Burns School of Medicine. And while most volcanic eruptions yield strong sulfur smells, Barrios says, the Kilauea volcano has offered some of most extreme amounts of "obnoxious gases" he has ever encountered. "Some were the strongest and most noxious I've ever experienced," he says. The same goes for the reverberating sounds of rocks and lava exploding out of the volcano. "It makes your heart skip a beat.", "To be able to completely wrap your five senses around it as a kid growing up being super passionate about volcanoes, it's something I've dreamt of," he says. Barrios says he's received a great deal of criticism for his up close and personal live streams from the burning volcano. But it doesn't shake the "lava chaser," who introduced his 4-year-old son to the thrills of seeing volcanos two years ago. In fact, Barrios says he has a connection with volcanos that runs deeper than government warnings against them. Chasing lava may be dangerous, but he points out that driving a car can also be deadly. You just have to learn how to do it in a safe way. To stay safe, especially from the toxic gases, Barrios wears a respirator. He also wears a helmet, to protect himself from falling lava, and carries water and snacks in a backpack. "It's like anything that's dangerous in life if you practice it well, you should be there in a safe manner.", After nearly two decades of experience in tracking lava, he has honed an instinct for knowing when to exit a dangerous situation or press on for a great shot , "I feel really comfortable, but am always able to put myself close enough to where I want to be, but not in a dangerous spot," he says. "Everyone has a different threshold. I have a higher comfort level than most people." |
US | These Coders Are Fighting to Protect Abortion Rights Under President Trump | Hackathons usually aim to develop the next big app or fix a tricky tech problem but this weekend, coders will stay up all night to tackle a different issue how to provide women with access to safe abortions. More than 300 developers and activists will join forces for the Abortion Access Hackathon, a two-day coding marathon at GitHub's San Francisco headquarters that aims to find tech-based solutions for women's health care providers who fear an uncertain future under President Donald Trumps administration. Eighty percent of the participants are expected to be women a change of pace from the stereotypical hackathon in which a group of sleep-deprived male programmers compete to create a new product. The hackers at the Abortion Access Hackathon haven't settled on specific projects, but they could create an app to help people understand abortion access laws in their state, or they could build an Uber-like tool to connect volunteers with women who need a ride to an abortion clinic, organizers say. "We're so focused on the on-the-ground challenges of running a clinic that we don't have the resources or the time to focus on all of the digital capabilities that are out there that could be doing these things for us," said Shireen Whitaker, who came up with the idea for the hackathon and works at Women's Health Specialists, a group of self-described feminist clinics in California. The hackathon could also help clinics that don't have their own tech staff develop basic operational tools, including in data management and cybersecurity. Many abortion providers are already financially strapped thanks to restrictive state laws and federal policies, and some women's health clinics are concerned about additional challenges they could face under Trump and a Republican-majority Congress. One of the president's first executive orders blocked U.S. aid to international organizations that provide or discuss abortions, and Republicans in Congress have already taken steps toward defunding Planned Parenthood. "One of the prime directives of this administration is to continue to erode those rights and so we needed to respond tactically," said Kate Bertash, a startup manager who organized the hackathon with activist Emily Loen after talking to Whitaker. Bertash has participated in other socially focused hackathons such as Debug Politics, a series of events organized after the 2016 election in which developers created apps to help people identify fake news and contact their Congressional representatives. While most of the participants at the hackathon will be from California, organizers hope the ideas that come out of the event will be useful across the country, particularly in states with more restrictive abortion laws and less access to tech communities. "San Francisco has always led the charge for direct activism, and we are one of the leaders in innovative technology," said Somer Loen, a freelance visual designer and activist with San Francisco's chapter of the National Organization for Women. "So I think it's important for us to merge those two values and come together around this issue because we can have a really tangible impact." |
US | Watch John Lewis Describe the Violence of Bloody Sunday | The Civil Rights leader and Georgia Congressman spoke at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church Saturday, the building where Lewis, as a young Civil Rights leader, took refuge following the violence of "Bloody Sunday," 50 years ago this weekend. "We saw these men putting on their gas masks," Lewis said. "They came towards us, beating us with night sticks, trampling us with horses, releasing the tear gas. Several of us were hit by night sticks, trampled by horses, was hit in the head, right here, by the night stickI thought I was going to die on that bridge. I thought I saw death. I don't recall how we got back across that bridge, back to this churchBut I refused to die.", "I said in this church after the march I don't understand how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam but not to Alabama," Lewis said. Martin Luther King, Jr. who called Lewis "the boy from Troy" Lewis is from Troy, Ala. visited Lewis in the hospital after he was injured. "Don't worry, John," Lewis said King told him. "We will make it from Selma to Montgomery, and the Voting Rights Act will be passed.", Lewis was joined at Brown chapel by Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who at 8 was the youngest person to march on "Bloody Sunday," and by Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, daughter of a white marcher Viola Liuzzo who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan for her involvement in the march. The event was one of several hosted by the nonpartisan Faith Politics Institute over the course of the weekend. Liuzzo-Lilleboe said that she often gets asked why her mother, a white housewife from Detroit, came to Selma after King called for all "people of conscience" to come to Alabama to support the march. "My question is why didn't everyone come to Selma?" she said. |
US | WATCH Elliot Rodger Videotaped a Chilling Hate Manifesto | Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old suspected of killing seven people including himself near the UCSB campus, spoke in a YouTube video about his plans shortly before a shooting spree that occurred on Friday. According to authorities, Rodger was driven by a deep hatred for humanity, in particular for women who had rejected him. In the video that he created, Rodger described his hatred for the women of a local sorority who in his opinion had left him a virgin. "Tomorrow is the day of retribution for the last 8 years of my life, ever since I've hit puberty, I've been forced to endure and existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desiresI don't know why you girls are not attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it," Roger said in his video. YouTube has since removed the video, entitled "Elliot Rodger's Retribution." |
US | Drone Shows Incredible Extent of Flooding in Louisiana | Catastrophic flooding hit southern Louisiana this weekend, displacing thousands of residents and killing at least six people. Drone footage of flooding near Interstate 12 in Hammond, Louisiana, posted to YouTube on Saturday shows rainwater affecting entire neighborhoods, partially submerging cars, trucks and houses. The areas most affected by flooding include Tangipahoa, St. Helena, East Baton Rouge and Livingston, according to the Associated Press. Aerial views of the flood show multiple mostly waterlogged neighborhoods, while elsewhere, roadways are open and cars are able to travel. One shot appears to show a large group of people pulled over on the side of a road. A flood warning is still in effect in parts of Louisiana, according to the National Weather Service. |
US | Charleston Church Holds First Worship Service Since Massacre | The historic black church in Charleston, S.C. where a gunman killed nine people last week held its first postmassacre worship service Sunday, bringing a sense of unity to the shattered city as law-enforcement officials continued to probe the suspect's motives. A large crowd attended the service inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where parishioners honored the victims through song and prayer. The Associated Press reports uniformed police officers were stationed throughout the church for the service, which Governor Nikki Haley and her family were expected to attend, along with many newcomers. Among those killed in Wednesday night's shooting at a Bible study group was the church's pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. On Sunday, the Rev. Norvel Goff, who was picked to lead the church until a successor is named, said the aftermath of the massacre has "been tough" but that the community will continue to "pursue justice.", "We're going to be vigilant," he said, "and we are going to hold our elected officials accountable to do the right thing.", Authorities are continuing to investigate the motives of the suspected gunman, Dylann Roof. The 21-year-old was apprehended in North Carolina on Thursday and later transported back to South Carolina, where he was charged with nine counts of murder and one count of weapon possession. Sunday's service came one day after authorities announced they were investigating a hate site linked to Roof that held dozens of pictures and a racially charged manifesto. |
US | Oregons Kate Brown Becomes First Openly Bisexual US Governor | Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown was sworn in as the governor of Oregon Wednesday, after the resignation of Governor John Kitzhaber last week. Brown will be the first openly bisexual U.S. governor in history, the sixth woman currently to lead a state and the second woman to serve as governor of Oregon. The former Secretary of State was summoned to Oregon from Washington, D.C. last week as Kitzhaber contemplated his resignation amid an ethics investigation involving his fiance, Cylvia Hayes. Calling the situation "bizarre and unprecedented," Brown told the governor that she and her staff were ready to serve if he decides to resign. Kitzhaber announced his resignation Friday afternoon. By Oregon law, the secretary of state becomes governor in the case of the governor's resignation. She assumed office Wednesday. Brown becomes the highest-ranking openly bisexual elected official in the country Representative Kyrsten Sinema became the first openly bisexual member of Congress in 2013. But she isn't the first LGBT governor to serve the first was New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who resigned three months after he came out in 2004. Brown has been married to husband Dan Little for the past 15 years. Brown's political career in Oregon dates back to 1991, when she was appointed to a vacant House seat. The Oregonian describes her tenure as secretary of state as "relatively nondescript" but noted she has a reputation for collaboration. Listen to the most important stories of the day. |
US | Drones Banned From 2 US National Parks | Sick of seeing drones flying above the treetops, two U.S. national parks recently told visitors to leave their miniature remote-controlled aircraft at home. Zion National Park in Utah told visitors Monday to keep the buzzing unmanned vehicles out of the park, as they had been disturbing everyone from hikers to herds of bighorn sheep. Photographers often use drones to take aerial pictures. Yosemite National Park in northern California had earlier released a statement Friday complaining that drones had become a "daily sight" and sound in the park. , The parks have warned that visitors who continue to bring drones to the park would be in violation of a federal rule that bars unauthorized airplanes in the park. Violations could result in 6 months in jail or a 5,000 fine. Critics, however, are saying that the parks are misinterpreting the rule which they claim only applies to manned aircraft. |
US | Transgender Woman Charged With Voyeurism in Target Dressing Room | Police in Idaho charged a transgender woman this week with videotaping an 18-year-old woman in a Target dressing room. Authorities from the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office were called to Target on Monday after an 18-year-old woman saw someone taking photos or filming video with an iPhone over the top of a fitting room barrier, East Idaho News reported. The police arrested Shauna Smith, 43, on Tuesday on one felony count of voyeurism. She was booked as a male, under her legal name, Sean Patrick Smith. The 18-year-old told authorities she had been trying on swimwear at the Target when she noticed the iPhone, according to court documents obtained by East Idaho News. Smith later told police she had previously made other videos of women undressing for the "same reason men go online to look at pornography," the documents said. She then showed the detective a video she said was filmed in a Target fitting room. Target has been at the center of a nationwide controversy over transgender rights since it announced in April that it would allow customers to use the fitting room or restroom that corresponds with their gender identity. The decision prompted the conservative American Family Association to call for a boycott of the retail chain because the group claimed the transgender bathroom and fitting room policy would allow sexual predators to access victims. After the incident this week, Target said it was committed to "creating a safe and secure shopping environment" and that it cooperated with local law enforcement as soon as it learned of the complaint, according to local NBC affiliate KPVI-TV. |
US | Vermont Governor on Marijuana Legalization Its What Enlightened States Do | In the next few weeks, as Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin nears the end of his time in office, his state could make history. If he has his way, Vermont will become the first state in the union to legalize marijuana through its legislature. The four states that have already legalized recreational potColorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaskaall did so by taking the issue to voters through ballot initiatives. The Vermont Senate passed a marijuana legalization bill in February and it is currently being debated in the House. TIME spoke to Governor Shumlin, a Democrat, about the war on drugs "failed us miserably", what he's learned from other states "no edibles" and his personal experience with marijuana "we inhaled". The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. TIME You've called problems with heroin addiction in your state a "full-blown" crisis. Do you see any connection between legalizing marijuana and problems with that illegal drug? , Shumlin You can understand why someone would ask. And the answer is this, I do see them as separate. We have an opiate problem. Oxycontin has been handed out like candy, and that has led to the full-blown heroin crisis America is facing today. On marijuana, we have just the opposite challenge. The war on drugs has failed us miserably when it comes to marijuana policy, which is why so many states are by referendum legalizing marijuana. I'm hoping that Vermont will be the first state that does it legislatively because we have learned from the states that have made mistakes doing it by referendum. We are trying to pass the first cautious, sensible marijuana legalizing bill in the country. What makes it more cautious and sensible than others? , What I meant by that is No edibles. And you can only have a small amount of marijuana at one time, an ounce or less. Tax rates that are low enough to drive out the black market drug dealers. No smoking lounges. In other words, avoiding the pitfalls and embracing a more logical policy. About one in eight Vermonters admit to buying recreational pot on a monthly basis. We decriminalized an ounce or less, so you virtually get less of a criminal penalty for buying small amounts of pot than you do speeding on the highway. Although we wish you wouldn't smoke pot, just like we wish you wouldn't drink too much, we're going to let you do it without getting in trouble with the lawbut you still have to go buy it from a drug dealer? They don't care what they sell you from their cache, whether it's marijuana or other drugs. They don't care how young you are. That's why we moved to a regulated market for alcohol. So you feel that doing this legislatively rather than by referendum is giving you more control over the process? , Absolutely. Let's just take where we are right now in Vermont. Prime Minister Trudeau has said he's going to legalize it within two years in Canada, and that's our northern border. Our southern border is Massachusetts, and they're having a referendum this fall. Frankly, if theirs passes, it gives us all the negatives of a bad marijuana bill and none of the positives. They can have up to 10 ounces. They've got edibles that have led to problems in Colorado with kids getting access and adults not knowing how much of this candy to eat. We have other states in the Northeast that are talking about moving toward legalization by referendum, including Maine. So Vermont needs to be proactive. We need to pass a cautious thoughtful bill that puts drug dealers out of business, gets this stuff out of the hands of kids, and gets all the benefits of a regulated market. And use the revenue to fight addiction generally. Do you believe marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol, as reform advocates often claim? , This is what I know. I don't want Vermonters smoking pot. It makes you kind of goofy and unproductive. I have alcoholism in my family, and I gotta tell you, that's a really bad idea. It destroys lives, destroys families. I also don't think you should smoke cigarettes. I can guarantee you that will kill you early. But I'm always surprised that we talk about pot as if we don't have legal alcohol and legal tobacco sales. Government doesn't want you doing any of those things in excess but to continue to pretend that by outlawing marijuana, you're keeping it out of the hands of kids and adults is a level of denial that as governorI can't live in La La Land , When we had this debateto legalize, not to legalizethe reasons to not legalize are almost always as if you don't have a problem already. Like, what's it going to mean for our kids? Well, kids will tell you it's easier to get pot in Vermont than it is alcohol. Then they say, what about people who are drugged driving on the roads? Well, what about the one in eight Vermonters who are using recreational marijuana right now? So if you're willing to acknowledge that you have a problem, you're much better dealing with a regulated market than an unregulated market. Both heroin and marijuana are currently viewed as "Schedule I" drugs by the federal government. What do you think about those being put legally on par, and should the government reclassify marijuana as Sen. Bernie Sanders has advocated?, I agree with Sen. Sanders that we should make the federal change. I'm also a governor. Governors can actually get things done. And if I lived under the illusion that this congress would get anything done that was sensible, I wouldn't be trying to do it myself. On edibles, do you believe they should never be legal or just not be legal until problems with them have been better addressed? , I'm just saying go slow, be cautious, let's go about this very carefully. I'm not saying never. I'm just saying let the other states that are wrestling with edibles continue to wrestle with it. When you ask Colorado Gov. Hickenlooper, What are some of the problems you're having?' The first words out of his mouth are Don't do edibles.", At a recent conference Hickenlooper warned other states that "if you're trying to encourage businesses to move to your state think twice about legalizing marijuana." Do you worry about legalizing marijuana having a negative impact on the economy? , I think Colorado has found that it's been a positive for the economy, not a negative. When I suddenly find that my niece is going skiing with her college buddies in Colorado instead of Vermont, and they had never gone skiing in Colorado before on spring break, it doesn't entirely escape me that there might be some allures to Colorado today that they didn't have a few years ago for college-age kidsor young people who are looking for jobs. Denial has never been a good economic development strategy. And if I didn't believe that by regulating, you'd have a better shot getting it out of the hands of kidshaving a regulated product where you know what's in it and driving the criminal element out of the marketI wouldn't be proposing this. I think it's going to make our state better and stronger, not weaker. There's a lot of talk about California possibly legalizing by referendum in 2016. What effect would that have on other state legalization efforts?, There is no question that the war on drugs has failed when it comes to marijuana policy, that America is going to move to a more sensible policy state by state. And I think the more enlightened states are trying to get ahead of this one We're all spending huge amounts of energy focusing on the evils of pot smoking and we hardly talk about the fact that in 2010, we sold enough drugs legally through our pharmacies in the form of Oxycontin to keep every adult American high for a month. That has led to death, destruction, addiction to heroin that's affecting every state in America. And then we flip out about the possibility that we could move to a more sensible approach to marijuana. I want to drive the drug dealers out of the pot market. I'm also proposing that our physicians limit the number of Oxycontins that they can pass out for minor medical procedures. I'm trying to take both on, head on. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has also talked openly about using marijuana. Have you ever tried it? , Yes. I was in Vermont in the '70s We inhaled. |
US | Kushner Family Stands to Get 400 Million from a Chinese Firm in Unusually Favorable Deal | A company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law, stands to receive over 400 million from China's Anbang Insurance Group, that is investing in a Manhattan building owned by the Kushners, Bloomberg reported. Details of the agreement are being circulated to attract additional investors, Bloomberg reported on Monday. , The building, a 41-floor tower located at 666 Fifth Avenue, was purchased by Kushner Companies in 2006 for 1.8 billion, which at the time was the highest sales price for a single building in Manhattan. The planned 4 billion transaction includes terms that some real estate experts consider unusually favorable for the Kushners, the Bloomberg report said. "Kushner Companies is in active discussions around 666 5th Avenue, and nothing has been finalized," spokesman James Yolles told Reuters via email. Anbang could not immediately be reached for comment. Reuters reported in January that the Chinese group was in talks to invest in a project to redevelop the New York City building. Anbang, established in 2004 as an auto insurer, has emerged as one of China's most aggressive buyers of overseas assets in the past two years, spending more than 30 billion buying luxury hotels, insurers and other property assets. |
US | Maya Angelou A Hymn to Human Endurance | When Maya Angelou was 16 she became not only the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco but the first woman conductor. By the time she was 40 she had also been, in no particular order, a cook, a waitress, a madam, a prostitute, a dancer, an actress, a playwright, an editor at an English-language newspaper in Egypt, and a Calypso singer her one album is entitled "Miss Calypso." It wasn't until 1970, when she was 41, that she became an author her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, told the story of her life up to the age of 17. That remarkable life story ended today at the age of 86. In her last years Angelou's work became associated with a certain easy, commercial sentimentalityshe loaned her name to a line of Hallmark cards, for examplebut there was nothing easy about her beginnings. She was born Marguerite Johnson in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was 3. When she was 7 her mother's boyfriend raped her. She testified against him in court, but before he could be sentenced he was found beaten to death in an alley. Angelou's response to the trauma was to become virtually mute she couldn't, or wouldn't, speak in public for the next 5 years. She often cited this silent period as a time when she became intimately aware of the written word. Angelou eventually regained her voice, but her life remained chaotic. She became a mother at 17, immediately after graduating high school. She bounced from city to city, job to job and spouse to spouse she picked up the name Angelou from one of her husbands "Maya" was her brother's nickname for her. She spent years living in Egypt and then in Ghana. By the time she was 40 her life story and her distinctive, charismatic way with words had her friendsamong them James Baldwinbegging her to write it all down. She finally did. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Angelou describes herself as "a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil." Although generations of high school students have been assigned it, the book's unsparing account of black life in the South during the Depression, and of her sexual abuse, is not easy reading. It is Angelou's tough, funny, lyrical voice that transforms her story from a litany of isolation and suffering into a hymn of glorious human endurance. That extraordinary voicedense, idiosyncratic, hilarious, alivebrought novelistic techniques to the task of telling a life story, and its influence on later generations of memoirists, from Maxine Hong Kingston to Elizabeth Gilbert, is incalculable. Angelou also mixed fact and fiction, unapologetically, long before James Frey. The themes she expounded in Caged Bird, of suffering and self-reliance, would be braided through the rest of her long life's work. "All my work, my life, everything is about survival," Angelou said. "All my work is meant to say, You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.' In fact, the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure.", I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was nominated for a National Book Award, and it was followed by a torrent of creative output in every possible medium. Angelou wrote five more volumes of autobiography and six books of poetry. She was nominated for an Emmy for playing Kunta Kinte's grandmother in Roots. She wrote children's books and essays and the lyrics to a musical, King. She acted in movies and even directed one, Down in the Delta. She took to the national stage in 1993 when she read a poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," at President Clinton's inauguration. Angelou's energy was enormous and her activity incessant. Though her education stopped after high school, she held a lifetime professorship at Wake Forest and collected honorary degrees from 50 more colleges and universities. She lectured 80 times a year. From 1981 on she lived in a brick house in Winston-Salem despite her various marriages she lived alone, and her first child was also her last. A commanding figure at 6 ft. tall, she rose at 4 or 5 every morning and went to a bare room at a nearby motel to work, alone with a stack of legal pads, a Bible, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a bottle of sherry. Her relentless creativity didn't balk at her own obituary, and as usual she put it better than anyone else could have. "What I would really like said about me is that I dared to love," Angelou told an interviewer in 1985. "By love I mean that condition in the human spirit so profound it encourages us to develop courage and build bridges, and then to trust those bridges and cross the bridges in attempts to reach other human beings." |
US | Virginia Governor Ralph Northam Denies Being in Racist Yearbook Photo and Will Not Step Down | Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam told reporters on Saturday that he does not believe he is one of the two people in a racist photo featured in his school yearbook. Standing by his wife, Pam, the Democratic governor admitted to "darkening his face" in a Michael Jackson dance contest in San Antonio, Texas, around the same time. But he said he is sure he is not one of the two people pictured in blackface and in a Ku Klux Klan hood in his 1984 medical school yearbook page. "I believe now and then that I am not either of the people in this photo," Northam said. When asked about political leaders who are asking for his resignation, Northam said if he can communicate that he is not the person in the photograph, he can continue to lead. If not, he said he will make a decision on resigning at a later date. "I plan to continue to lead," he said. "If we get to the point where we feel that we're not effective, that we're not efficient, not only for our caucuses but for the commonwealth of Virginia, then we will revisit this and make decisions.", Northam said yesterday was the first time he ever saw the picture and that he never purchased the yearbook. Northam initially apologized for the photo, although he never confirmed which costume he was wearing in the photograph. Northam has faced after multiple calls for him to resign after the yearbook image was wide spread on Friday. On Saturday, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, President of the Democratic Governors Association, said Northam could "no longer serve the best interests of Virginians" and said he should resign and allow Lt. Gov. Fairfax to take over. , Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called the photo "racist and contrary to fundamental American values" and called for him to "do the right thing.", |
US | What to Know About the Nationwide Avocado Shortage | It's official there's a national shortage of avocados. But before you go running to your nearest Chipotle in protest, here's what you need to know, A grower's strike in Mexico has contributed to the problem, Mexican growers and pickers have been striking to raise the price of avocados in the U.S. unhappy with the low payment they have been receiving for their work with the fatty fruit not a vegetable. These strikes have been described as the biggest disruption to avocado imports in history. Ordinarily, about 40 million pounds of avocados are transported from Mexico to the U.S. per week, but just two weeks ago only about 13 million pounds of the fruit arrived, NBC 7 reports. A spokesperson for Henry Avocado Corporation told the station that the issue will have a lasting impact on the prices and number of avocados imported to the U.S. As did a drought in California, Avocados are "particularly ill-suited to withstanding the sorts of changes that are expected in coming decades, such as higher temperatures, more water shortages," The Atlantic reports. Certainly, recent drought in California where 80 of American avocados are grown although only around 7 of the avocados consumed on U.S. soil are actually grown there have contributed to the fruit's decline. California's issues with growing may have contributed to the Mexican strikes produce buyer Cruz Sandoval told the Orange County Register that he heard Mexican growers are "holding out for more money because the California season is running dry, and there's no other sources.", So avocado prices are on the rise, Due to the shortages, avocado prices have been dramatically rising. Umina Brother, an L.A.-based produce distributor, told ABC that its prices have doubled since 2015 and Alan Arzoian, owner of Handy Market in Burbank, California, told CNBC that he's seen a carton of avocados sell for up to 120 they typically sell for around 40. Quartz reports that the average price of 1.65 per avocado is the highest ever recorded in the southwest and twice as much as it was six months ago. The problem is real for local suppliers and restaurant owners, who are having to choose between cutting their profits or pushing prices up. But relax Chipotle isn't going to raise its prices, Despite the shortage, the popular Mexican chain Chipotle says its avocado supply remains strong. "We do not plan to raise prices for guacamole we don't typically raise prices in response to short-term cyclical changes in food costs and have not incurred any supply disruptions," a spokesperson from Chipotle told Business Insider. |
US | Justice for Jaelynn Students Join March For Our Lives to Honor Maryland School Shooting Victim | When the week began, Kayla Wells, a senior at Great Mills High School in Maryland, had no plans to participate in the March for Our Lives on Saturday. But on Tuesday morning, her classmate, 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey, was shot in the head in the hallway of their high school just before class began. Wells went home restless, unable to sleep or make sense of what had happened, and she changed her weekend plans. "That night, I went out and got posters because I knew that I had to be there," Wells, 17, told TIME. Willey a swimmer and a sister to eight siblings was critically wounded in the shooting by 17-year-old Austin Wyatt Rollins, with whom she had a "prior relationship" that recently ended, authorities said. She died Thursday night after being taken off life support. Wells did not know Jaelynn personally, but she said she broke down when she heard the news. "It shouldn't happen again. It shouldn't happen to anyone," Wells said. "How did we become so desensitized to shootings happening?", She organized a poster-making session on Friday night. And on Saturday morning, she was among dozens of Great Mills students and alumni who drove to Washington, D.C. to march for Willey, carrying posters that said, "It happened at my school" and "Justice for Jaelynn.", Jillian Carty, 18, graduated from Great Mills High School last year and is now a student at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire. But when the shooting happened on Tuesday, she thought immediately of her younger sister at the school, and she decided to drive back home and march, calling for a comprehensive solution to stop gun violence. "I see a lot of good points that are made with people who are pushing for gun reform, I see good points that are made by people who are pushing for mental health reform," Carty told TIME. "I don't see why there is any reason why they can't combine.", Hundreds of thousands of students are expected to participate in the march in Washington, D.C. and in sibling rallies around the country on Saturday. The movement was organized by student survivors of last month's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, many of whom spoke out for Willey this week. "We will march for you, Jaelynn Willey," Marjory Stoneman Douglas junior Jaclyn Corin said in a tweet on Thursday. "We will march for all the students of Great Mills who will forever be traumatized because of what happened on Tuesday." |
US | Chelsea Manning Will Remain on Active Duty in Army After Prison Release | Private Chelsea Manning will remain on active duty in the U.S. Army following her release from military prison on May 17. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking national security secrets, but her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama before he left office. Because Manning's conviction is being appealed, an Army spokesperson told USA Today she will remain an Army private and therefore eligible for health coverage upon her release, though she will not be paid. If the appeal is denied, Manning will face a dishonorable discharge and lose all benefits. Manning, a transgender soldier, fought for hormone treatment while imprisoned and became an outspoken advocate within the LGBT community. President Donald Trump blasted his predecessor's decision to shorten Manning's sentence, calling her an "ungrateful traitor" who "never should have been released from prison." The details of Manning's assigned post and other terms of her release have not been publicized. A Twitter account run by Manning's supporters has posted exuberant messages in the days leading up to her release. |
US | How Millennials Are Reinventing the Priesthood | 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. Millennial priests are products of the Church, and 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 importantly, there are more 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. This June the next wave of graduates packs 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 across the world. His 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 next 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.", Read the rest of the story "The God Squad The Next Generation of Catholic Priests" in this week's TIME magazine. |
US | Sick Passengers and Crew Aboard Emirates Flight Test Positive for Influenza | The patients hospitalized after arriving at John F. Kennedy Airport in a plane carrying sick passengers and crew tested positive for influenza, according to a New York City official. Ten patients were initially taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens after the incident. An eleventh patient sought treatment for unrelated symptoms later in the day, a Jamaica Hospital representative told TIME. Ten patients had been discharged by Thursday afternoon, according to hospital representatives, while one was admitted for influenza treatment. About 100 people aboard Emirates Flight 203 from Dubai complained of illness, citing symptoms like cough and fever. Emirates said Wednesday that 10 passengers "were taken ill.", Eric Phillips, press secretary for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, said test results on the 10 patients initially taken to the hospital found influenza. Some test results came back inconclusive on other viruses, which is a common occurrence, he said. Those tests will be re-administered Thursday. "All 10 patients will be kept in the hospital as a precaution until we know those final results," Phillips said. , |
US | Man Seeking Soulmate Threw 2000 Messages in Bottles Into the Sea | A widower began casting messages in bottles seeking a soulmate after his wife died of cancer. What he didn't expect was to be criticized for littering. Craig Sullivan, inspired by the Police song "Message in a Bottle," threw 2,000 bottles into the sea along the British coastline, the Telegraph reported. The romantic act hit a bump after beachgoers came across the bottles along Rhossili Bay, near Swansea. "I went for a beach walk and we came across about 30 glass bottles with lids. They had lots of messages inside about finding love. It may be romantic, but what is it doing to the environment?" Helen Gill, who saw the bottles on at the beach, told the Telegraph. Gill ended up writing her own message to Sullivan asking him to stop sending out his messages in bottles, according to the report. "I would ask you to think of another more environmentally friendly way of carrying on with your campaign," Gill wrote. "When visiting our beaches you should leave only footprints." |
US | Health Care Spending On The Rise Study Says | Health care spending is expected to increase in 2015, and it may not be for the reason you think. Thanks in part to the burgeoning American economy, the cost of healthcare services is projected to grow by 6.8 in 2015, compared to 6.5 in 2014, according to a new report from PriceWaterHouse Coopers. Medical cost inflation has been driven by the improving economy. Because American families have seen their budgets grow, individuals are willing to spend more on health procedures that they may have delayed during the recession. |
US | DC Council Approves Death With Dignity Bill for Terminally Ill Patients | The D.C. Council overwhelmingly approved a "Death With Dignity" bill Tuesday that allows terminally ill patients the ability to obtain medication to end their own lives. The council passed the measure 11-2 after approving the bill by the same margin in an initial vote two weeks ago. The bill will now go to Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has pledged not to veto the legislation, which would make D.C. the first jurisdiction with a predominantly African-American population to approve a so-called right to die. Read more Why One Doctor is Fighting for the Right to Die, The bill is modeled after the nation's first "Death With Dignity Act" in Oregon and would let terminally ill patients 18 years or older and with six months or less to live the ability to obtain life-ending, physician-prescribed medicine. Two witnesses have to verify that the patient's decision is voluntary, and the medication must be self-administered. Some African-Americans in D.C. opposed the bill claiming it could be used to target elderly black residents. Other groups like disability rights advocates and medical associations have historically opposed a so-called right-to-die, saying it unnecessarily devalues life and violates doctors' Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. Read more Here's What Albert Einstein Thought About the Right to Die', The vote makes D.C. the seventh jurisdiction to allow aid in dying and comes after Colorado approved a ballot referendum last week legalizing the practice. Five other statesOregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana and Californiahave also authorized it. |
US | Michelle Obama Unveiled in Saudi A Style Statement Not a Political Statement | Correction appended Jan. 29, There is nothing quite as contentious as the headscarf issue when it comes to women's rights in Saudi Arabia, at least where western observers are concerned. So when U.S. first lady Michelle Obama went to pay her respects after the death of Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh with her hair uncovered, social media lit up with both praise and opprobrium. "Michelle Obama shouldve stayed in Airforce One as a sign of boycott rather than flouting rules of another country Michelle_Obama_NotVeiled" tweeted @Random_Arora. "She was a guest in another country culture. She should make no judgements, but show proper respect at a funeral.2 Michelle_Obama_NotVeiled," wrote @MonaBadah. The thing is, Obama wasn't really flouting any rules when she chose not to wear a headscarf. While foreign female visitors to the Kingdom are expected to wear long, loose fitting garments as a sign of respect Obama obliged with a long coat over dark trousers the headscarf is optional. The muttawa, or religious police, might growl menacingly, but there is nothing legally wrong with going uncovered for non-Muslims. Doing so may draw unwanted attention, and the ire of conservatives, but most Saudis treat the headscarf as a sign of piety, or at least feigned piety for public consumption. When it comes to women's rights in the kingdom, the headscarf is the least of any Saudi activist's worries. She is more likely to be concerned about the right to drive, the right to vote, the right to keep her children after asking for divorce and the right to travel, marry and work without express permission from a male guardian. So maybe if Obama had driven to the funeral herself, it would have been worth a stir. Instead, she did as several other notable female visitors to the Kingdom, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice among them, have done before dressing respectfully without compromising their own personal sense of style. It's not like Mr. Obama decided to don a thobe and shemagh for the occasion. Correction The original version of this story mischaracterised Obama's visit to Riyadh. It was to offer condolences for the Saudi King. |
US | Jindal Blurs the Lines With Prayer Rally This Weekend | It is no secret that Bobby Jindal is praying very seriously about a run for the White House. This weekend, his prayer will look a lot like a giant evangelical rally in Baton Rouge. The governor of Louisiana is keynoting a six-hour worship gathering on Saturday called "The Response A Call To Prayer For a Nation In Crisis" at Louisiana State University. The event, sponsored by the conservative and controversial American Family Association, aims to spiritually reawaken America in light of "unprecedented struggles" the country is facing "financial debt, terrorism, and a multitude of natural disasters fatherless homes, an epidemic of drugs and crime in our inner cities, a saturation of pornography in our homes, abortion, and racism." The American Renewal Project, a non-profit spearheaded by conservative political operative David Lane that aims to get more Christians involved in politics, is also behind the event. Lane hopes to recruit 1,000 pastors to run for political office this campaign cycle. The Response coincides with the state's Right to Life March, which is also happening Saturday on LSU's campus and which Jindal is also keynoting. Together, the events are poised to draw thousands. Organizers say the Response is purely about spiritual renewal, not politics. But from the get-go, those lines are blurred. Jindal invited 49 other governors to attend the Response. "This gathering will be apolitical in nature and open to all who would like to join us in humble posture before our Creator to intervene on behalf of our people and nation," Jindal explained to the governors, in a letter obtained by the Christian Broadcasting Network. "There will only be one name lifted up that dayJesus!", The irony in the event has several layers. To begin, Jindal's invitation to the governors, like most of the Response's promotional materials, draws inspiration only from passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, to support an event aimed at lifting up Jesus Christ. His letter primarily cites the Hebrew prophet Joel, who likely lived in Judah during the Persian period of Jewish history 539-331 BC. Joel tells the Hebrew people to "declare a holy fast," "call a solemn assembly," and "summon the elders," to "cry out to the Lord." The Response organizers are trying to imitate those instructions with this event, but conflating Joel's call to return to the Hebrew God with a contemporary evangelical call to return to Jesus changes the prophet's original context and the significance of the words for today's Jewish community. Next, for the Hebrew prophet Joel, to call the elders is actually a political move, not just a spiritual one. The prophet goes on to lament a plague of locusts, that like an invading army that has destroyed his own nation's fields and farming prospects. His call to God for aid is a political plea on behalf of his people. Jindal and fellow organizers are using a political Bible passage to promote an event that they say has a solely spiritual ambition. And yet, even as Jindal says the event is apolitical, he wrote an open invitation to the event on official state letterhead, and hosted 72 organizers for the event at the Governor's mansion in December. Perhaps most importantly, the Response in the United States is becoming more than a spiritual institution It is a prelude to a presidential run. Five days after Rick Perry held a Response rally in August of 2011, he declared his candidacy for president. Neither Perry nor Jindal are evangelicalsPerry is a life-long Methodist and Jindal is Catholicbut for both, the Response event is a way to harness the spirituality of the conservative evangelical base for their own political ambitions. It is no small reward, either. Perry's event drew some 30,000 people in Houston. The Response may be the largest religious base Jindal is courting, but it is not the only one. After the Response, Jindal is headed to Naples to speak at the Legatus Summit, a annual conference for Catholic business leaders. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is speaking at the event, but Fox News' Bret Baier and actor Gary Sinise withdrew their participation earlier this month due to controversy over the group's opposition to gay marriage. It is not surprising that Jindal would appeal to this conservative religious base. He is a Hindu convert and a Rhodes scholar biology major who supports creationism. He's continually fought the courts and the Obama administration for his signature school voucher program that uses public dollars to pay for private and religious schooling. This week, he went after the U.S. House of Representatives for failing to pass an anti-abortion measure on the eve of the national March for Life. "It shouldn't take a lot of political courage to stand up and say we are going to end late-term abortions in America," Jindal told Fox News Thursday night. Jindal has also been hammering radical Islam. During a 10-day economic and foreign policy trip to Europe, Jindal blasted so-called "no-go" zones, supposed communities in Europe where non-Muslims are not allowed and where sharia law runs rampant. Fox News later issued an apology for promoting the term, clarifying that no such zones exist. Jindal didn't slow down. "Radical Islamists do not believe in freedom or common decency nor are they willing to accommodate them in any way and anywhere," he said in a speech to the Henry Jackson Society in London. "We are fools to pretend otherwise. How many Muslims in this world agree with these radicals? I have no idea, I hope it is a small minority." He added "Let's be honest here, Islam has a problem. If Islam does not support what is happening in the name of Islam, then they need to stand up and stop it.", Jindal's past history of blending of religious and political themes only makes it even more clear that the Response will not be strictly spiritual, despite what organizers say. |
US | It May Be Ugly Aly Raisman Demands Broader Investigation Into USA Gymnastics Abuse Scandal | Aly Raisman, who has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the USA Gymnastics abuse scandal, on Saturday tweeted a statement demanding a thorough investigation into the roots of misconduct at the organization. Raisman's statement came in response to the U.S. Olympic Committee USOC choosing Boston law firm Ropes Gray to handle its independent investigation into circumstances that allowed team doctor Larry Nassar to systematically sexually abuse athletes for years. The investigation will seek to "determine when individuals affiliated with USA Gymnastics first became aware of any evidence of Nassar's abuse of athletes, what the evidence was and what they did with it," according to a statement released by the USOC. In her response, Raisman said that goal is not enough, and demanded that all documents and findings be released publicly. "Will the investigation also include those who knew about it, should have known about it, enabled it to happen or continue Including those who have resigned?" Rasiman wrote. "And will it include allegations, suspicions, and knowledge of abuse? And before you get started, can you let us know how you define abuse'?", , Raisman also demanded that the investigation extend beyond Nassar, noting that USA Gymnastics has been accused of mishandling abuse from other sources. "We simply need to pull back the curtain and take a hard look at any and all factors that contributed to all this horrific abuse," Raisman wrote. "It may be ugly, but it's nothing compared to the suffering all survivors, and our families have gone through.", Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison after more than 150 of his former patients, including Raisman, shared their stories of mistreatment in court. The entire USA Gymnastics board resigned in the wake of the scandal, and the organization cut ties with Karolyi Ranch, where much of the abuse reportedly occurred. |
US | Support for the Death Penalty in America Has Hit a 40year Low | Public backing for capital punishment in the U.S. has dipped to its lowest in 40 years, according to a new report, although a small majority of Americans still believe in it. According to a study released by the Pew Research Center, just 56 of U.S. citizens support the death penalty a decline of 6 since 2011. During the 1980s and 1990s, in comparison, that number often crossed 70. The study, which surveyed 1,500 adults across the U.S. found that the decline has come mainly among Democrats 40 of Democrats support the death penalty while 56 oppose it, a sharp contrast from the 1996 survey that showed 71 of them for and just 25 against. Overall, 71 of Americans say the risk of an innocent person being put to death is high, and 61 say the death penalty does not deter individuals from committing serious crimes. |
US | Donald Trump Says Hell Bring Back Coal Heres Why He Cant | President-elect Donald Trump promised repeatedly throughout his campaign that he would revive the coal industry, billing himself as the "last shot for the miners." And in traditional mining areasthink parts of West Virginia, Kentucky and PennsylvaniaTrump defeated rival Hillary Clinton by large margins. But policymakers on both sides of the aisle say they cannot envision any way for Trump to save the coal industry, whose decline they attribute as much to market forces as Obama-era regulation. Just a decade ago coal provided half of the energy used for power generation in the U.S. but fracking has driven a boom in the country's supply of natural gas and made it a cheaper alternative in most cases. And, with cost in mind, utility companies have made the switch even in places without regulation pushing them to do so. Last year, natural gas and coal-fired power plants each provided about a third of the country's power supply, according to an Energy Information Administration EIA report. Total coal production in U.S. mines declined to about 900 millions last year, only three-quarters of production in 2008, according to EIA data. Coal also struggles to compete with renewable energy sources like wind and solar in locations where those resources are abundant. The cost of solar panels in particular has declined precipitously thanks to technology advances in recent years. Even conservative states like Texas and Oklahoma have become fast adopters of widely available wind energy. Read More Donald Trump's Victory Could Mean Disaster for the Planet, "Trump is not going to bring all the coal jobs back," says Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. "There isn't a lot of investment activity because in some cases it looks more economically attractive for firms to invest in cleaner technologies.", Beyond the competition jobs in the coal industry have also disappeared in recent decades as a result of mechanization that began in the 1980s. Approximately 50,000 coal-related jobs have been lost between 2008 and 2012, according to a study from last year. Even if coal production increased, those jobs would not return. Trump has offered few clues to how he might meet his promise revive coal, but his plan seems to rest largely on gutting environmental regulations, particularly President Obama's Clean Power Plan. That regulationissued through the Environmental Protection Agency EPArequires states to come up with plans to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector. Scrapping the plan will definitely slow the decline of coal but it will not be enough to stop it entirely and it certainly cannot bring back the jobs that have already disappeared, experts say. Read More Power from Natural Gas Expected to Reach a Record High Despite Climate Concerns, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the GOP-led Congress would draft new laws to end what he described as the "war on coal," but acknowledged that Trump's promises may be difficult to meet. "We are going to be presenting to the new president a variety of options that could end this assault," he said, according to comments reported by the Lexington Morning Herald. "Whether that immediately brings business back is hard to tell because it's a private sector activity.", Many supporters of environmental regulations say that the federal government should spend to help coal-producing areas transition to jobs in clean technology, but Republicans have thus far remained skeptical of such proposals. "If we're concerned about coal country, and I am, we have to do a lot more than just yell," Van Jones, an environmental activist who served as President Obama's first-term green jobs czar, said during the campaign. "At some point we have to accept the fact that the clean energy companies are growing faster than everything else." |
US | Gun Deaths in the US Are at Their Highest Rates in Decades CDC Says | Gun deaths in the U.S. have reached a record high, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC. According to the research, 39,773 people were fatally shot in 2017, a figure that has grown by more than 10,000 people since 1999. CDC data going back to 1979 shows that last year had the highest rates of gun deaths in nearly 40 years. The new data comes as a community in Newtown, Conn. reckons with the sixth anniversary of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, during which 20 children and six adults died. Tim Makris, co-founder and managing director of Sandy Hook Promise, a group that formed in the wake of the shooting to prevent gun-related deaths, issued a statement calling the CDC results "heartbreaking and beyond unacceptable.", Makris noted that the number of school shootings and minors who have been fatally shot continued to rise in 2018, citing research from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, which said there were about 96 school shootings this year. That number can fluctuate depending on how it's counted., "After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary six years ago today, so many people overwhelmingly said not one more,' yet over 3,200 youth and teens have been killed or injured by gun violence this year alone including more than 90 incidents at schools," he said. "This is the biggest spike that we have seen in a decade.", But while mass shootings get headlines and result in calls for action, they are not the sole, or even primary, cause of the uptick in gun deaths. Instead, suicide is driving the increase of overall gun deaths in the U.S. according to the CDC's statistics. That's leading doctors and researchers to increasingly view gun violence as a public health issue. Of the nearly 40,000 who died by firearms in 2017, 23,854 people, or 60, committed suicide using a gun. According to CNN, the age-adjusted rate of suicide by gun was highest among white men, at 14 per every 100,000. Overall life expectancy in the U.S. also dropped for the third year in a row in 2017, driven in part by an increase in suicides, which as a whole grew 3.7 between 2016 and 2017. The findings show that common perceptions about gun violence are at odds with its actual impact. For example, many people mistakenly assume that gun violence is predominantly an issue facing young men and men of color, says Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency medicine specialist at UC Davis Health. While homicide deaths by guns were the highest among black men in 2017 compared with other demographics, that number does not take into account that, overall, most firearm deaths are suicideswhich by and large affect middle-aged and elderly white men. "The general perception is that it's not an old white guy problem, but that it's more of a crime issue," says Wintemute. "It has made it hard to attack the problem. Much of society thinks, it's not my problem.' But we all have a stake in this.", Firearms are exacerbating the suicide rate because of their wide availability in the U.S. and their relative efficacy compared to other methods, says David M. Studdert, a health law policy expert and professor at Stanford University. "The chances of dying of suicide by gun are very high," he says. "Women attempt suicide more than men, but they have far lower rates because they employ less lethal means.", Suicide itself is often misunderstood by the general population, Studdert contends. People often assume that a suicidal person will do anything to kill themselves, but the reality is that many people attempt suicide without success and go on to live their normal lives. "It's often a very impulsive act," he says. "Whatever is on hand in that moment is going to have an important role." Wintemute agrees. "Guns are unique in the combination of lethality and ease of use," he says. That knowledge can give doctors, researchers, and advocates a chance to reduce both gun violence and suicides. Wintemute, who has worked in emergency rooms for decades, says he works to persuade doctors to talk about guns with patients who seem at risk for carrying out violence, whether the target is themselves or others. He also recommends that in these situations, patients find ways to separate themselves from their weapons. In his statement, Makris noted that gun violence can be prevented if people try to spot risky behaviors in individuals and intervene on time. "It's time we turn these alarming statistics around so that no other parent has to feel the unimaginable pain of losing a child to gun violence," he said. The National Rifle Association, which came under harsh criticism in November for telling doctors who spoke out against gun violence to "stay in their lane," did not immediately comment on the CDC's findings. The organization on Wednesday tweeted that "gun control laws are not the answer.", , "If we want to prevent more horrific acts of violence our leaders need to stop demonizing the mend and women of the NRA and find solutions that will save lives," the group said. |
US | Why the Government Has Legal Authority to Quarantine | Texas officials placed at least four people under quarantine Wednesday night after they had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the Texas hospital patient with Ebola. About 100 others are being monitored for the disease. Reports Thursday morning also say a man is being held in isolation in Hawaii for a potential case of Ebola. But where does the government get its legal authority to restrict the liberty of citizens by quarantining them, restricting their movement and supervising their contact?, The answer, when it comes to the federal government the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act 42 U.S. Code 264, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the spread of communicable diseases into the United States and between states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC, which holds the authority for carrying out these functions. Measures may include isolation, which divides people with communicable diseases from those who are healthy, or quarantine, which segregates people who may have been exposed to a communicable disease to see if they become ill. The most infamous example of isolation is Typhoid Mary, a cook in New York in the early 1900s who was exiled for life against her will for carrying a pathogen associated with typhoid fever. Isolation and quarantine can be imposed by states under their police power functions, which give them the right to protect the health and safety of people within their borders. The four people currently quarantined in Texas are Duncan's close family members. They received orders Wednesday from Texas and Dallas County officials "not to leave the apartment or to receive visitors without approval" until October 19, TIME's Alex Altman reports. But if states' powers are not enough to stem the spread of a disease, the federal government can also institute isolation and quarantine. The last time this was used on a large scale was during the "Spanish Flu" pandemic in 1918-1919, according to the CDC. |
US | 6 Children 2 Adults Dead in Florida Shooting | Two adults and six children died in a small town shooting in Florida on Thursday. Police say the victims were the perpetrator's daughter and six grandchildren, according to local TV station WFTV and the Gainesville Sun. The shooter was identified as 51-year-old Don Spirit in a press conference addressed by Gilchrist County Sheriff Robert Schultz. Schultz said Spirit called 911 and said he might harm himself and others, and a deputy was dispatched to his home in the north Florida town of Bell. Spirit spoke to the deputy and then killed himself, following which authorities found the other seven bodies inside the home. The youngest of the children killed was a mere three months old, and the others were aged 4 to 11. Authorities did not specify whether his daughter, 28, was mother to of any of them, or if she was his only daughter. However, the Sun reported that his neighbor Maryann Vincent said Spirit has other children including a son. According to the police, Spirit is the only suspect and some people were left alive in the home. Spirit has a criminal history, and spent three years in prison about a decade ago after accidentally killing his eight year-old son Kyle in a 2001 hunting accident, according to the Associated Press. "Keep this community in your prayers," Schultz said. "Tomorrow's going to be a hard day in Gilchrist County.", Bell, which is just 30 miles outside of Gainsville, has a population of only 350. |
US | Jane Goodall Slain Zoo Gorilla Was Putting an Arm Round the Child | Jane Goodall, one of the world's most renowned primatologists, wrote an email on Tuesday to the director of the Cincinnati Zoo, saying she thought the slain gorilla may have been protecting the boy who fell into the animal's exhibit. The scientist and animal rights activist extended her sympathies to the zoo's director, Thane Maynard, amid national backlash over the shooting death of a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla named Harambe. "I tried to see exactly what was happeningit looked as though the gorilla was putting an arm round the childlike the female who rescued and returned the child from the Chicago exhibit," she wrote, according to the correspondence the Jane Goodall Institute made public. Goodall may have been referring to the 1996 incident at the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois in which a female gorilla carried a boy to safety after he fell into her pit. "Anyway, whatever, it is a devastating loss to the zoo, and to the gorillas," Goodall wrote. Harambe was shot dead after officials said he dragged around a three-year-old boy who fell into its enclosure on Saturday. Authorities are considering possible criminal charges, a prosecutor said Tuesday. Goodall also asked how the two other female gorillas living with Harambe reacted to the death. "Are they allowed to see, and express grief, which seems to be so important?" she wrote. "I feel so sorry for you, having to try to defend something which you may well disapprove of," she added. Goodall declined to comment further, a spokesman for the Jane Goodall Institute told TIME on Tuesday. |
US | San Francisco Police Under Fire for More Racist Homophobic Texts | More San Francisco police officers have sent racist and homophobic text messages, prosecutors said, following another case involving different officers sending similar messages. The latest texts disparaged black, Asian, gay, lesbian and transgender people. Prosecutors in San Francisco say the messages could be a sign that the department has deeper issues with prejudiced and anti-gay sentiments than previously believed. "This conduct is clearly a danger to the administration of justice and makes the work of San Francisco police more difficult," said city district attorney George Gascn. Gascn told the New York Times there were likely hundreds of criminal cases that needed to be reviewed for signs of bias given the new messages. The messages were turned over as a part of a sexual assault investigation involving an officer. Several of the officers have already been punished for the messages two have left the department. This episode adds to the difficulties facing the already embattled San Francisco Police Department. The department is under federal investigation for the shooting of an unarmed black man in December. Local prosecutors are also reviewing several cases because of a string of similarly racist, homophobic messages that were exchanged among some officers. NYT |
US | Florida Officials Investigate Disturbing Video of Shark Being Dragged by a Speed Boat | Florida wildlife officials are investigating a "disturbing" video shared on social media that appears to show a shark being dragged by a rope behind a speed boat. "The FWC takes this very seriously and is currently investigating this incident. We are also attempting to identify the individuals in the video and where it took place," Rob Klepper, public information coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, told the Bradenton Herald on Tuesday. The video which shows the shark being dragged above the water and bouncing off waves into the air several times was shared on Instagram by Mark Quartiano, a self-proclaimed shark hunter who runs deep-sea fishing expeditions. He told ABC News that he was sent the video via direct message on Instagram, but called the behavior "not sportsmanlike.", "It was quite disturbing on my end," he said. "I'd never seen something like that before." |
US | House Launches New Investigation Into President Trumps Foreign Financial Interests and Russia Ties | WASHINGTON The House intelligence committee will launch a broad new investigation looking at Russian interference in the 2016 election and President Donald Trump's foreign financial interests, Chairman Adam Schiff announced Wednesday, moving ahead with the aggressive oversight that Democrats have promised now that they are in the majority. Schiff said the investigation will include "the scope and scale" of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, the "extent of any links and/or coordination" between Russians and Trump's associates, whether foreign actors have sought to hold leverage over Trump or his family and associates, and whether anyone has sought to obstruct any of the relevant investigations. The announcement came one day after Trump criticized "ridiculous partisan investigations" in his State of the Union speech. Schiff dismissed those comments Wednesday. "We're going to do our jobs and the president needs to do his," Schiff said. "Our job involves making sure that the policy of the United States is being driven by the national interest, not by any financial entanglement, financial leverage or other form of compromise.", The California Democrat also announced a delay in an upcoming closed-door interview with Trump's former fixer and personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, "in the interests of the investigation." The interview was originally scheduled for Friday. It will now be held on Feb. 28, Schiff said. Schiff said he could not speak about the reason for the delay. Hours after the meeting was pushed back, a document was filed under seal in the criminal case against Cohen brought by special counsel Robert Mueller's office. The court's docket did not contain any details about the nature of the document. Special counsel spokesman Peter Carr declined comment, as did Lanny Davis, an attorney for Cohen. The intelligence committee also voted Wednesday to send Mueller the transcripts from the panel's earlier Russia investigation. Republicans ended that probe in March, concluding there was no evidence of conspiracy or collusion between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign. Democrats strongly objected at the time, saying the move was premature. Since then, both Cohen and Trump's longtime adviser Roger Stone have been charged with lying to the panel. Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to the House and Senate intelligence committees about his role in a Trump business proposal in Moscow. He acknowledged that he misled lawmakers by saying he had abandoned the project in January 2016 when he actually continued pursuing it for months after that. Stone pleaded not guilty to charges last month that he lied to the House panel about his discussions during the 2016 election about WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that released thousands of emails stolen from Democrats. Stone is also charged with obstructing the House probe by encouraging one of his associates, New York radio host Randy Credico, to refuse to testify before the House panel in an effort to conceal Stone's false statements. Schiff has said Mueller should consider whether additional perjury charges are warranted. The committee had already voted to release most of the transcripts to the public, but they are still being reviewed by the intelligence community for classified information. Mueller requested Stone's interview transcript last year and the panel voted to release it in December. Schiff wouldn't say whether Mueller had requested other transcripts, but noted that the committee had voted to withhold a small number of transcripts from the public and also that some witnesses had been interviewed since then. The transmission of the transcripts to Mueller, expected immediately, will give him full access to all of the committee's interviews. Among the transcripts are interviews with Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. his son-in-law, Jared Kushner his longtime spokeswoman, Hope Hicks and his former bodyguard Keith Schiller. There are dozens of other transcripts of interviews with former Obama administration officials and Trump associates. Democrats also opposed a Republican motion at the meeting Wednesday to subpoena several witnesses. Republicans said they were witnesses who Democrats had previously wanted to come before the panel. A Republican aide said that witness list included FBI and Justice Department officials involved in the Russia investigation and others who could shed more light on research by former British spy Christopher Steele. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the committee's business is confidential. Steele's research was funded by Democrats and later compiled into an anti-Trump dossier that became public. |
US | US Forces Kill Top ISIS Leader | American forces killed a top deputy and finance minister for the militant group ISIS in a raid earlier this month, top U.S. officials revealed. U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford announced the killing of ISIS leader Haji Imam at a news conference Friday morning. "We believe these actions have been successful and have done damage," Carter said. "The momentum of this campaign is now clearly on our side." He said Imam, whose full name is Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, had a role plotting terrorist attacks in addition to overseeing financing of ISIS operations. The announcement, which come days just after a terrorist attack in Brussels that left more than 30 dead, comes as anti-ISIS forces are gaining traction in the fight against the terrorist group. U.S. forces killed another top commander, Omar al-Shishani, last week, and a number of other initiatives have weakened ISIS's control over territory in Iraq and Syria. Iraqi trips supported by the U.S. military took back the key city of Ramadi in December and Syrian troops look poised to take back the ISIS-held city of Palmyra in Syria, which the group has held since May. In all, ISIS lost 14 of its territory in 2015, according to conflict-monitoring firm IHS. Secretary of State John Kerry said this week that ISIS efforts are "collapsing before their eyes.", The challenges ISIS faces in the Middle East may be in part what's driving a push for terrorist attacks and guerrilla operations, Dunford suggested. The militant group has built a vast international network and attacks in Europe act as a show of strength despite land losses. ISIS's growing struggles in the Middle East may be in part what's driving a push for terrorist attacks in the West, Dunford suggested. The terrorist group has built a vast international network and attacks in Europe serve as a show of strength in the face of losses on the ground. Carter stressed the "law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security ingredient" to protecting against potential terrorist attacks and said the Pentagon would continue collaborating with partners around the world in those areas. "Like Paris, Brussels is a strong reminder why we need to hasten the defeat of ISIL, wherever it is in the world," said Carter, using an alternate acronym for ISIS. |
US | US Airstrike Kills 24 AlShabab Militants in Somalia African Command Says | JOHANNESBURG The United States military says it has killed 24 al-Shabab extremists with an airstrike in Somalia. The U.S. Africa Command says the airstrike was carried out on Wednesday near an extremist camp near Shebeeley in the central Hiran region north of the capital, Mogadishu. The U.S. carried out nearly 50 such airstrikes last year in Somalia against the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab. The extremist group claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on a hotel complex in Kenya's capital earlier this month. It often targets high-profile areas of Mogadishu with suicide bombings. The U.S. statement says the airstrikes are meant to support Somali forces as they increase pressure on al-Shabab and its recruiting efforts in the region, especially in southern and central Somalia. The statement says no civilians were killed or injured. |
US | Former Navy SEAL Who Wrote Bin Laden Raid Book Under Investigation | A former Navy SEAL is being investigated by the Justice Department for potentially outing classified material in his best-selling book about the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, according to a new report. An attorney for Matt Bissonnette told The New York Times that his client, who wrote No Easy Day under the name Mark Owen, had apologized for not allowing the Pentagon to sign off on his book and offered to relinquish a portion of the millions in royalties he earned from it. Others familiar with the probe said investigators are also interested in Bissonnette's paid speeches at corporate events. The report of an investigation comes as Bissonnette readies to release a second book called No Hero The Evolution of a Navy SEAL. NYT |
US | California Governor to Take On President Trump in First State of the State Address | SACRAMENTO, Calif. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is preparing to deliver his first State of the State address a day after declaring he wouldn't participate in the Trump administration's "political theater" over border security. The Democratic governor is likely to ratchet up his rhetoric against President Donald Trump in Tuesday's address, a month into Newsom's governorship. "We've been sucked into this vortex of the absurd," Newsom told reporters Monday. "I want to get out of it that's what I was elected to do.", His address will offer yet another opportunity for Newsom to outline his vision for California, a state dominated by Democrats, and contrast it with stalemates in Washington. Newsom, 51, has sparred repeatedly with Trump and excerpts of his speech indicate he'll rebut pieces of the State of the Union address delivered by Trump. "Last week, we heard Trump stand up at the State of the Union and offer a vision of an America fundamentally at odds with California values," the excerpts read. "He described a country where inequality didn't seem to be a problem, where climate change doesn't exist, and where the greatest threat we face comes from families at the border, seeking asylum from violence-stricken countries.", Newsom announced Monday he'll withdraw most of California's 360 National Guard troops working with the federal government at the Mexico border. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown agreed to deploy troops at the Trump administration's request last year, although he said they couldn't participate in immigration enforcement. Newsom, though, said there's been a "gray area" in the troops duties that may have allowed some to inadvertently participate in immigration activities, although a Guard official said the state's troops have not helped detain anyone. Newsom disputed Trump's claim there is a crisis on the border and any need for National Guard troops was eliminated when Trump chose earlier this month to add 3,750 more U.S. troops at the border. "I don't know what the right adjective is without coming off as hyperbolic the whole thing is ridiculous," Newsom said. Newsom does want to leave 100 California troops working with the federal government to focus on combating transnational drug and gun smuggling. But his speech will surely go beyond immigration to other disagreements with the White House as well as his own ambitious policy goals for the state. He's also fought with Trump on money for wildfire prevention efforts and the ban on transgender Americans in the U.S. military. One of his first policy announcements was to reinstate the individual mandate that people buy health insurance, which Republicans in Congress have eliminated. Newsom has laid out his vision for California twice already, in his inaugural address and through his first crack at the state budget. He spent his first month in office traveling to different parts of the state promoting his ideas on housing, juvenile justice and the environment. "This is our answer to the White House No more division, xenophobia or nativism," the excerpts say. "We're more united than ever, and we're not going back." |
US | Baltimore Police Union Chief Says Criminals Empowered By Riots | Murders in Baltimore have reached the highest levels in 15 years, and the president of the city's police union says it's due to criminals feeling emboldened following the riots that broke out over the death of Freddie Gray last month. "We've accomplished a lot of things over the last 10, 15 years and now we're going backwards because the criminals are empowered," says Lt. Gene Ryan, president of Baltimore city's Fraternal Order of Police. "The criminal element is taking advantage of the crisis. They don't believe there's any recourse.", On Thursday, two more people were found shot and killed in the city, the 37th and 38th homicides in May, the highest mark for Baltimore since November 1999. That spike in murders has coincided with a drastic decrease in arrests, which are down 56 compared with last year, according to the Associated Press. The decline in arrests comes weeks after six police officers were indicted last month in the death of Freddie Gray, who died April 19 in police custody from a severe spinal injury. Gray's death sparked riots in late April that damaged businesses and injured dozens of police officers. Ryan says that many officers are concerned that mistakes on the force could get them indicted too. "Officers are afraid of doing their job," he says. "They're more afraid of going to jail than getting shot and killed right now.", He added that he's currently putting together a report based on officer interviews focusing on how the protests turned violent. |
US | Environmental Activists Prepare for Next Fight After Keystone Victory | President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline marks the end of seven years of activism by environmentalists across the country. But, between celebrations on Friday, activists painted the decision as just the beginning of a new era of activism where any additional fossil fuel projects will not be tolerated. "It's good, and at the same time it cannot be the extent of Obama's work on climate," said Lindsey Allen, Rainforest Action Network executive director, of Obama's Keystone decision. "This is an opportunity to build on momentum and work to stop other projects like this.", The next frontiera campaign known as "keep it in the ground"has been in the works since long before Obama reached his final decision about Keystone. Activists have used the phrase, which refers to stopping new and continued drilling of fossil fuels, in protest since at least the summer. The hope is that Obama will use his executive authority to stop issuing new permits for coal, oil and natural gas operations on federal lands. The federal government currently leases 67 million acres of land for fossil fuel extraction. Such a radical switch in positions would be a surprising move for Obama, who has insisted that the U.S. exploit some fossil fuel sources like drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic. But activists say that stopping Keystone seemed equally far-fetched when the campaign began years ago. Activists also point to Obama's use of language reminiscent of their own as evidence that their message had taken hold. "We're going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky," Obama said Friday. Still, other parts of Obama's remarks acknowledge that the U.S. will continue to rely on fossil fuels to some degree for the foreseeable future. Most of the "keep it in the ground" activism thus far has focused on attracting the support of elected officials and has been met with some success. Just this week Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders introduced legislation to prohibit new leases of federal land for extraction. With the Keystone victory under their belt, environmentalists say they will begin to highlight a slew of other fossil fuel projects that require government approval. "Moving forward it's going to be very difficult for any fossil fuel project to move forward without opposition," said Benjamin Schreiber, a director at Friends of the Earth. "We have new metric if a project worsens climate change, we shouldn't be approving it.", In the more immediate future, activists say Obama's Keystone announcement provides momentum ahead of international climate change negotiations to be held in Paris beginning later this month. Rejecting Keystone gives Obama a credibility he wouldn't have had otherwise, they said. "We have an opportunity to get a global agreement to dramatically cut those emissions," Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director. "This shows that the U.S. is serious about its commitment." |
US | How Evangelicals Are Changing Their Minds on Gay Marriage | If evangelical Christianity is famous for anything in contemporary American politics, it is for its complete opposition to gay marriage. Now, slowly yet undeniably, evangelicals are changing their minds. Every day, evangelical communities across the country are arriving at new crossroads over marriage. My magazine story for TIME this week, "A Change of Heart," is a deep dive into the changing allegiances and divides in evangelical churches and communities over homosexuality. In public, so many churches and pastors are afraid to talk about the generational and societal shifts happening. But behind the scenes, it's a whole different game. Support for gay marriage across all age groups of white evangelicals has increased by double digits over the past decade, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, and the fastest change can be found among younger evangelicalstheir support for gay marriage jumped from 20 in 2003 to 42 in 2014. Here are few of the topline findings of my reporting. To read the full story, click here., This winter, EastLake Community Church outside Seattle is quietly coming out as one of the first evangelical megachurches in the country to support full inclusion and affirmation of LGBTQ people. It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of this move. EastLake is in many ways the quintessential evangelical megachurchthousands-strong attendance, rock-music worship, Bible-preaching sermons. But pastor Ryan Meeks, 36, is on the front wave of a new choice. "I refuse to go to a church where my friends who are gay are excluded from Communion or a marriage covenant or the beauty of Christian community," Meeks tells me. "It is a move of integrity for methe message of Jesus was a message of wide inclusivity.", Conversation about gay marriage is no longer seen as an automatic compromise on Biblical authority. Other big-time evangelical pastors like Andy Stanley of North Point Community Church in Atlanta and Bill Hybels of Willow Creek do not go as far as Meeks, but they are talking with congregants and other evangelical leaders about how to navigate the changes they are seeing in their pews. Hybels has been meeting privately for the past year with LGBTQ congregants to learn to better understand their stories. At the Southern Baptist Convention's three-day, October bootcamp to train more than 1,300 evangelicals to double down against gay marriage, Stanley met together with both LGBT evangelical advocates and SBC leaders for a closed-door conversation about whether their different views on gay marriage put them outside the faith. Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, has developed a friendship with LGBT activist Ted Trimpa and the Gill Foundation, and they are working together on topics like passing anti-human-trafficking legislation. Evangelical colleges are both taking half-steps toward inclusion and then doubling-back to avoid appearance of change. Wheaton College for example, Billy Graham's alma mater outside Chicago, hired a celibate lesbian in its chaplain's office to help guide an official student group for students questioning their sexual identity, and yet also invited a former lesbian now married to male pastor to address the student body. Elsewhere, evangelical leaders like Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission deny a generational shift is underway. New activists, leaders like Moore and others believe, often are not actually still evangelicals but revisionists who do not support traditional Biblical authority. Plus, Moore says, for evangelicals to keep views that are out-of-step with societal changes is par for the course. "We believe even stranger things than that," he says. "We believe a previously dead man is going to arrive in the sky on a horse.", Then there's the growing slew of evangelical LGBTQ activists pushing for change. Matthew Vines, 24 and founder of the Reformation Project, represents new momentum to change the evangelical tide. He hopes to raise up affirming evangelicals in every evangelical church in the country. He holds conferences and training sessions for evangelicals, has staff in three states and representatives in 25, and has raised a projected 1.2 million for 2015 to press ahead. Brandan Robertson, 22, is the national spokesperson for Evangelicals for Marriage Equality, an effort started by millennials to help evangelicals support civil gay marriages, if not marriages in churches. Justin Lee, 37, of the Gay Christian Network hosted his 11th annual conference last week in Portland, Ore. and 1,400 people attended, double the number who came last year. Lee's friendship with Alan Chambers, the former head of the ex-gay organization Exodus International, was one of the key factors that led Chambers to apologize for the hurt his organization caused, and the organization shut down. For everyone on all sides, the Bible itself is at stake. And, religious change takes decades, centuries even, when it happens at all. But with each passing day it is becoming harder and harder to deny that change is indeed coming. Meeks put it this way "Every positive reforming movement in church history is first labeled heresy. Evangelicalism is way behind on this. We have a debt to pay." |
US | Harvard to Penalize Students in Groups Like Frats and Sororities | Harvard University students who participate in single-sex social organizations like fraternities and sororities will soon be ineligible for leadership positions on officially recognized clubs and sports teams, the university's president announced Friday. Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said those students will also not received a Dean's letter of recommendation for fellowships like the Rhodes Scholarship or Marshall Scholarship. The organizations covered include so-called "final clubs," the prominent private Harvard social clubs that are generally single-sex. The announcement comes just two months after a college-wide report found that 47 of female seniors who had participated in such groups had experienced some form of non-consensual sexual contact. Among total seniors, that number was 31, suggesting that students who participated in the what's known as the final club scene including going to related parties were significantly more likely to be the victims of sexual assault. The new guidelines will not apply to current students, but the rule will be implemented starting with the new freshman class in 2017 the graduating class of 2021. The guidelines are intended to push single-sex social groups toward gender integration. While there are both male and female final clubs at Harvard, the male final clubs are significantly older, richer, and more powerful, and students have long said that the male clubs create an imbalance of social power among Harvard undergraduates. While some of the historically male clubs have voted to allow women this year under pressure from university administrators, many have dug in their heels. The 225-year-old Porcellian club made headlines last month when a graduate suggested that allowing women in the club would increase the likelihood of sexual assault, a comment for which he later apologized. Harvard does not officially recognize single-sex social organizations like Greek organizations or final clubs, but they are a major presence in the undergraduate social life. |
US | Baltimore Sees Worst Month for Homicides in 15 Years | Thirty-eight people have been killed in Baltimore so far this month, making it the deadliest in 15 years for a city still recovering from the protests surrounding the death of Freddie Gray. On Thursday, a woman and a young boy were shot and killed, becoming the 37th and 38th homicide victims this month, surpassing a record set in November 1999 when 36 people were killed. While homicides tend to spike during the summer months, the increase in murders has coincided with an overall decrease in arrests made by the Baltimore Police Department. According to the Associated Press, arrests in May are down 56 compared with last year, and it appears that officers are increasingly reluctant to detain suspects after six officers were indicted in the case of Freddie Gray, a black Baltimore man who died on April 19 in police custody. |
US | 10 Crazy Things More Likely to Happen to You Than Winning the Powerball Jackpot | Millions of Americans on Wednesday will try their luck at winning a 700 million Powerball jackpot. The odds of taking home the second largest U.S. lottery jackpot in history are one in 292.2 million, officials said. "You're far more likely to die at a trip to the Grand Canyon than win the Powerball," Amram Shapiro, a strategic statistician and author of The Book of Odds, told TIME in January 2016, when the jackpot hit 1.5 billion. "That's the scale of all of this. It's fascinating. They're buying a dream." Shapiro, of Massachusetts, drew from a research trove of more than 400,000 statements of probability to write the 2014 reference source of statistics on everyday life. "There's a point of view that says people who buy lottery tickets are being foolish because the expected return on their investment is so poor," Shapiro said. "But at the same time there is a kind of mass phenomenon that attracts people. What you're really paying for is the right to dream about what it would be like to have your life utterly transformed by money.", Here are 10 things that are more likely to occur than winning the lottery, 1. Dying from an asteroid strike 1 in 74,817,414, 2. Getting killed by a terrorist act in the United States 1 in 10,000,000, 3. Getting murdered during a trip to the Grand Canyon 1 in 8,156,000, 4. Dying from chronic constipation 1 in 2,215,900, 5. Becoming a movie star 1 in 1,505,000, 6. Getting struck by lightning 1 in 1,101,000, 7. Dying from a hornet, wasp or bee sting 1 in 79,842, 8. Bowling a 300 game 1 in 11,500, 9. Being the same height actor Hugh Jackman, who is 6-foot-2 1 in 23.3, 10. Becoming disabled, disfigured or killed by a parasite 1 in 7.2, |
US | Debate Over Airbnb Rages in San Francisco Ahead of November Vote | On a rare rainy Wednesday in San Francisco, a local woman named Theresa Flandrich took her turn at the microphone set up on the steps of city hall. She said she had been evicted from her home of 32 years in the historic North Beach neighborhood and placed blame on Airbnb for her trouble in finding another apartment to rent in the area, saying that too many units were being taken off the market so they could be rented to tourists on such home-sharing platforms. "There are now tourists that are coming in and out all the time," she said. "These used to be neighbors who lived here." Airbnb, she claimed, is "destroying the very soul of the neighborhood.", Such rhetoric, along with similarly emotional testimonies supporting home-sharing platforms that give locals revenue that helps keep them in their homes, has been constant in Bay Area political debates in recent years. A landmark law legalizing short-term rentals and setting up regulations for hosts went into effect in February, but those who believe Airbnb and the like are cannabilizing rental stock are pushing a proposition that would place stricter limits on rentals, banning them in certain types of housing and requiring hosts to report details about their rentals to the city. Airbnb has spent more than 8 million opposing the measure, Proposition F, airing ads like this before the November vote, Inside City Hall, progressive local lawmaker David Campos was soon at a hearing grilling officials from the city who have been tasked with collecting hotel taxes from home-sharers and making sure that hosts are registered with the city, a requirement of the new law that only a fraction of home-sharers have followed. For what Campos estimated are up to 10,000 home-sharing listings, fewer than 700 hosts have gotten through that paperwork. Several of those people appeared, however, to argue that the new law needed more time to work, saying that the revenue they earn from sharing their home is allowing them to keep up with their mortgage and stay in a city that is in the midst of a housing crisis. Proposition F, they said, would curtail that ability and end their crucial revenue stream. "I want to live in San Francisco for the rest of my life," one man said, "and this could very well stop me from doing that.", With insufficient housing stock, rental prices have shot through the roof and many low- and middle-income locals have had to leave the city. With some evidence that landlords have hoarded units to rent them out on platforms like Airbnb full-time, making more with nightly income from tourists than monthly income from locals, the wildly popular site has become a focus for some people's ire, though economists have said that issues like San Francisco's slowness to build more housing is a much bigger culprit. The reporting of data about rentals, which Airbnb has resisted in an effort to protect users' privacy, has been a central issue in these debates. On Tuesday, the city's tax collector's office announced that the company had agreed to what they believe to be the first instance of such data-sharing about who is hosting, for what price and how often. The information allows the office to collect hotel taxes directly from Airbnb, giving them the details they need to double-check the math, and relieving hosts from what can be an onerous and confusing process. Amanda Fried, a policy and legislative manager in the office, said "it's fair to say" the company only did this because of strict requirements the office has about keeping all the data confidential, much like the IRS will not share citizens' tax information. Also on Tuesday, the new office tasked with overseeing short-term rentals, defined as any rentals for 30 days or fewer, announced that they had collected roughly 155,000 in penalties from people who had violated the law, which prohibits, for example, people renting out anything other than a primary residence or renting out their home for more than 90 days per year when they are not present. Hosted rentals are currently unlimited, though Proposition F would limit all rental types to 75 days per year. One supporter of the ballot measure took her turn at the hearing to say that the progress made in enforcement and tax collection was not enough, in a time when San Franciscans continue to struggle and companies like Airbnb are valued at more than 20 billion. "Time and good intentions," she said, "cannot stop the avalanche of illegal removals from our housing stock.", In an email to TIME, Airbnb said, "We are happy to work with governments to help the community pay their fair share of taxes. Prop. F is a misguided, divisive measure that would create financial incentive for neighbors to spy on one another, file frivolous lawsuits, and require San Franciscans to report where they sleep each night. We need to continue giving the current law, passed by the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors last year, time to work.", Read next Thinking About Renting a Room to Travelers? Here's What You Need to Know |
US | GunRelated Deaths in America Keep Going Up | Firearm-related deaths rose for the second-straight year in 2016, largely due to spikes in gun violence in major cities like Chicago, newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S. 4,000 more than 2015, the new CDC report on preliminary mortality data shows. Most gun-related deaths about two-thirds in America are suicides, but an Associated Press analysis of FBI data shows there were about 11,000 gun-related homicides in 2016, up from 9,600 in 2015. The increase in gun-related deaths follows a nearly 15-year period of relative stasis. "The fact that we are seeing increases in the firearm-related deaths after a long period where it has been stable is concerning," Bob Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the CDC's Center for Health Statistics, told the New York Times. Fortune reported last week that the mortality data also showed an increase in drug-overdose deaths, largely do to the ongoing opioid epidemic. In the wake of Sunday's mass shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland, statistics on guns and gun-related deaths are bound to come up as the nation yet again struggles to understand what led to the deaths of 26 people, including children as young as 18-months-old, and how to keep future events like this from occurring. Less than 24 hours after the Texas shooting, the all-too-familiar pattern has already begun to unfold. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have offered their condolences to the families and prayers to those recovering. Many Democrats immediately began demanding gun-safety measures, and President Donald Trump said the shooting was prompted by a "mental health situation," and wasn't about firearms. "We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries," Trump said. "But this isn't a guns situation.", Trump's statement comes after he rescinded a rule that would have made it more difficult for the mentally ill to buy weapons earlier this year. The Department of Health and Human Services also says that only "3-5 of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness." That's not to say mental illness is not a factor. About 90 of those who die as a result of suicide experience some type of mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and access to firearms is listed among the group's risk factors for suicide. |
US | An 8YearOld Has Died After Being Hit by a Falling Tombstone | An 8-year-old boy in Arkansas was killed after an aged tombstone toppled over in a church cemetery. According to CBS News, the boy was attending a birthday party at the church in Lynn on Saturday and was playing in the cemetery when the tombstone fell. The boy, whose name was not released, was taken to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead over the weekend. Investigators do not believe foul play contributed to his death. The Arkansas death is the latest in a series of such tragedies that have occurred over the past few years. In 2013, a cemetery worker in Texas was crushed by a falling tombstone, and in 2014 a 4-year-old in New York suffered a serious injury after a tombstone fell on his head. A family in Utah sued a cemetery association for negligence after a 4-year-old boy was crushed by a falling tombstone in 2012. A jury decided in favor of the cemetery last October. Members of the church in Arkansas where the young boy was recently killed plan to support the family both monetarily and spiritually, CBS reports. CBS News |