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HARRISON COUNTY, Texas (KETK) — An East Texas man was indicted for criminal negligent homicide in connection to a fatal three-vehicle crash that claimed the life of a 23-year-old.
Jared Stevens, 44, of Marshall was indicted on Aug. 26.
The wreck happened in March of 2021. Stevens was driving a Mercedes east on US-80 then he crashed into the back of a Kia Optima that was stopped to turn left on a private road, said the Department of Public Safety.
Due to the first crash, the Kia traveled into the westbound lane and collided with a Ford Escape. Devon Tariq Stanfield, 23, of Pflugerville was driving the Kia and died at the scene, said DPS.
The driver of the Ford and Stevens were hospitalized after the crash but were in stable condition.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/state-news/texas/east-texas-man-indicted-in-connection-to-3-vehicle-crash-that-killed-23-year-old/
| 2022-09-21T13:31:49Z
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HARRIS COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) — State health leaders confirmed Tuesday the first death in Texas of a person who was diagnosed with monkeypox — an adult from Harris County. It could be the first in the United States.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said the person who died was “severely immunocompromised.” The death is being investigated to learn what role monkeypox played.
State health leaders explained for most people, monkeypox is painful but not life-threatening.
“Monkeypox is a serious disease, particularly for those with weakened immune systems,” said Dr. John Hellerstedt, DSHS commissioner, in a news release. “We continue to urge people to seek treatment if they have been exposed to monkeypox or have symptoms consistent with the disease.”
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the 2022 monkeypox outbreak shows 15 total deaths worldwide. Those deaths occurred outside the U.S., including in Nigeria, Ghana and Spain, among other locations. The data was last updated Monday evening.
CDC data from Monday shows Texas has recorded 1,604 cases so far. That’s currently the fourth-highest count in the country. California, New York and Florida are the state that have recorded more cases so far.
How to avoid spreading, getting monkeypox
DSHS said you should reach out to your doctor if you have a fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes and a new, unexplained rash. People diagnosed with the virus should stay home and avoid close contact with others until the rash goes away completely (when the scabs fall off and a new layer of skin forms).
The department said monkeypox spreads through close contact with an infected person, but it can be prevented using these guidelines:
- Avoid close, skin-to-skin contact with someone with a new, unexplained rash.
- Avoid close, skin-to-skin contact in large crowds where people are wearing minimal clothing, such as nightclubs, festivals, raves, saunas and bathhouses.
- Do not share cups, utensils, bedding or towels with someone who is sick.
- Stay home when you are sick.
People who have been exposed to the disease are eligible to get vaccinated against it. Others who are also at high risk of being infected can also seek out the JYNNEOS vaccine, DSHS said.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/state-news/texas/texas-confirms-1st-death-of-person-infected-with-monkeypox-could-be-1st-in-us/
| 2022-09-21T13:31:55Z
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OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Warren Buffett’s company has trimmed its stake in Chinese electric car and battery maker BYD for the first time since it bought the shares in 2008, an investment that has soared in value.
Berkshire Hathaway said in a regulatory filing Tuesday with the Hong Kong stock exchange that it had sold 1.33 million of its BYD shares for roughly $47 million ($368.8 million Hong Kong dollars).
Berkshire paid $232 million for the 225 million BYD shares it bought in 2008. By the end of last year, the value of those shares had ballooned to nearly $7.7 billion. The success of the BYD investment is one example of why so many investors follow Buffett’s moves closely because he has a remarkably successful track record over the decades.
BYD said in an earnings report this week that sales of its vehicles continued to climb in the first half of this year and help it increase market share, even as auto sales slowed in its home market of China. BYD said its revenue jumped nearly 66% in the first half of this year thanks to the rapid growth in its electric vehicle sales, and its net income more than tripled to $520 million (3.6 billion yuan).
Berkshire said it owned about 7.7% of BYD before the latest stock sales, and that figure won’t change much after the sales. Berkshire said its holdings of the Hong Kong-issued shares of BYD dipped slightly from 20.49% to 19.92%.
In the past, Buffett and Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger have heaped praise on BYD Chairman and founder Wang Chanfu and said they were investing in him even more than in BYD’s technology. Munger has said that Wang managed to accomplish several feats that seemed impossible at the time, including taking one-third of the lithium battery market away from Japanese manufacturers by 2010.
Buffett even took the rare step of visiting a BYD factory in China in 2010 to demonstrate his support for the company. Hdidn’t immediately respond Tuesday to questions about the BYD stock sale.
Besides investments, Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate also owns more than 90 companies outright including Geico insurance, BNSF railroad, several major utilities and an eclectic assortment of retail and manufacturing companies such as Dairy Queen, Helzberg Diamonds and Precision Castparts.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/tech-news/ap-buffetts-company-trims-its-stake-in-chinese-ev-maker-byd/
| 2022-09-21T13:32:01Z
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mParticle Customer Data Platform will allow Marley Spoon to deliver better promotions and improve retention.
NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- mParticle, a leader in customer data infrastructure, today announced that Marley Spoon, the multi-national meal delivery company, has selected to implement mParticle as their Customer Data Platform (CDP).
By adopting mParticle, Marley Spoon will be able to unify customer data from the numerous brands within their portfolio into single customer profiles. Equipped with a holistic view of customer engagement, the Marley Spoon CRM team will be able to develop a richer understanding of their customers and identify opportunities for cross-selling and personalized promotions.
"mParticle was our top contender to partner with for a wide range of reasons," explains Karan Gupta, Global Head of CRM for Marley Spoon. "We needed a single view of the customer in order to better understand what makes a customer use Marley Spoon for the first time and ultimately retain them more effectively. Implementing a CDP was a no-brainer."
Marley Spoon caters to multiple market segments by providing numerous brand offerings, including Marley Spoon, Dinnerly, and Chefgood, among others. The Marley Spoon brand offers high-quality meals at a premium price, while Dinnerly offers a budget meal kit product, and Chefgood provides a ready-to-heat offering for customers who have limited prep time. Because customers' needs change over time, the Marley Spoon CRM team wanted to ensure that they could use customer data to offer the right product to each customer at the right time and ultimately improve customer retention. But with each brand's customer data siloed in disparate systems, it was impossible for the team to deliver cross-sell experiences at scale.
mParticle will enable Marley Spoon to unify customer data for every portfolio brand to holistic customer profiles. With a centralized record of how customers' subscription statuses are changing, Marley Spoon will be better equipped to understand which offers are best for each customer's needs. And by leveraging mParticle's Audience builder, the CRM team will be able to deliver the right offer to the right customer at the right time without any engineering support. If a customer churns from Marley Spoon because they don't have time to cook, for example, the team can offer them a promotion for Chefgood.
"Building a single view of the customer is critical for all companies today, especially those with multiple offerings to consider," explains Jason Seeba, Chief Marketing Officer of mParticle. "By implementing a centralized customer data infrastructure, Marley Spoon will be able to drive efficiency and deliver more relevant, meaningful experiences to their customers."
mParticle is an AI Customer Data Platform that powers the entire marketing stack with real-time customer data. Companies like NBCUniversal, JetBlue, Venmo, and Airbnb use mParticle to simplify their customer data infrastructure, maximize the value of their data, and accelerate growth at scale. Over the last year, the company has raised $150M in funding and acquired two startups, Vidora and Indicative. Founded in 2013, mParticle is headquartered in New York City with employees around the globe.
For more information, visit the mParticle website at www.mparticle.com.
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https://www.wbko.com/prnewswire/2022/09/21/marley-spoon-implements-mparticle-build-single-customer-view-multi-brand-meal-kit-portfolio/
| 2022-09-21T13:32:10Z
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Kentucky reached another stage in developing an electric vehicle battery sector Tuesday, with groundbreaking for a $2 billion plant by a Japanese company that will create 2,000 full-time jobs.
The Envision AESC factory at Bowling Green in south-central Kentucky will produce battery cells and modules that will power electric vehicles produced by multiple automakers.
“The EV batteries will be in vehicles all around the world, and we’re pretty proud they’re going to be made right here in Kentucky,” Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said at the groundbreaking event with state and local officials.
Envision AESC U.S. Managing Director Jeff Deaton said the state and local support reflects a “shared ambition to be national leaders in the e-mobility transformation in the United States.”
The Bowling Green operation is expected to power up to 300,000 vehicles annually by 2027.
Kentucky House Speaker David Osborne, a Republican, said Tuesday that the project strengthens the Bluegrass State’s place in the emerging electric vehicle market.
Envision AESC announced it had picked the fast-growing college town last April. The sprawling factory will be built at the Kentucky Transpark at Bowling Green.
Warren County Judge-Executive Mike Buchanon called the groundbreaking a “monumental event.” At full employment, the project will generate more than $233 million in new spending in the community annually, he said.
The project represents one of the largest economic development investments ever in Kentucky and followed an even larger battery production announcement last year.
Ford and its battery partner, SK Innovation of South Korea, will build twin battery plants outside Glendale in central Kentucky. That $5.8 billion megaproject in Hardin County will create 5,000 jobs to produce batteries for the automaker’s next generation of electric vehicles.
The emerging EV battery segment will “reverberate” across many Kentucky communities, as battery producers attract suppliers opening plants in the state, Beshear said Tuesday. Deaton said the Envision AESC factory will provide “a catalyst for further investment in the local supply chain.”
The sector’s development already is paying dividends elsewhere, the governor said.
Last week, Advanced Nano Products, a supplier of carbon battery nanomaterials used in EV battery production, said it will locate a plant in Hardin County to supply EV battery plants throughout the region. The project will create 93 jobs.
Ascend Elements Inc., a producer of advanced battery materials made from recycled lithium-ion batteries, said recently it will invest $310 million and create 250 full-time jobs in Christian County in western Kentucky. Ascend’s Kentucky operation will serve a range of EV-related customers.
Beshear is expected to make his management of the state’s economy a cornerstone of his reelection campaign message in 2023. Kentucky last year posted records for job creation and investments and has posted record low unemployment rates for four consecutive months.
Kentucky’s ability to land projects like the Envision AESC factory show that despite policy disagreements, the governor and legislature “pull together in the same direction when it comes to delivering economic opportunities for the commonwealth,” Osborne said. Republicans have supermajorities in both legislative chambers.
Osborne and Republican Senate Pro Tem David Givens also pointed to GOP-backed measures they said helped fuel the state’s economic growth: state tax code changes, reduced regulations and the so-called “right-to-work” measure that prohibits requiring workers to join unions or pay union dues as a condition of employment.
Based on the company’s investment and employment projections, Envision AESC is eligible for a performance-based, forgivable loan from the state up to $116.8 million, the governor’s office said in a news release. The company also is eligible for training funds.
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| 2022-09-21T13:32:16Z
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DUBLIN, Sept. 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Medtronic plc (the "Company") (NYSE: MDT) today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Medtronic Global Holdings S.C.A. ( "Medtronic Luxco") has closed a registered public offering (the "Offering") of €500,000,000 principal amount of 2.625% Senior Notes due 2025, €1,000,000,000 principal amount of 3.000% Senior Notes due 2028, €1,000,000,000 principal amount of 3.125% Senior Notes due 2031 and €1,000,000,000 principal amount of 3.375% Senior Notes due 2034 (collectively, the "Notes"). All of Medtronic Luxco's obligations under the Notes are fully and unconditionally guaranteed by the Company and Medtronic, Inc., a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of Medtronic Luxco, on a senior unsecured basis.
The net proceeds from the Offering are approximately €3.47 billion, after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and estimated expenses related to the Offering payable by Medtronic Luxco. The net proceeds of the Offering are expected to be used to repay at maturity Medtronic Luxco's outstanding 0.00% Senior Notes due 2022, 0.375% Senior Notes due 2023 and 0.00% Senior Notes due 2023 and for general corporate purposes. While Medtronic Luxco may elect at a later date to repay, redeem or repurchase such notes prior to maturity, it currently has no intention to repay, redeem or repurchase such notes prior to maturity.
Information Relating to the Offering
Barclays Bank PLC, BofA Securities Europe SA, Citigroup Global Markets Limited and HSBC Continental Europe were the joint book-running managers for the Offering and Academy Securities, Inc., R. Seelaus & Co., LLC, Samuel A. Ramirez & Company, Inc. and Siebert Williams Shank & Co., LLC were the co-managers for the Offering. The Offering was made by means of a prospectus and prospectus supplement, copies of which may be obtained for free by visiting EDGAR on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission website at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, copies of the prospectus and prospectus supplement for the Offering may be obtained by contacting Barclays Bank PLC, toll-free at +1-888-603-5847, BofA Securities Europe SA, at +33(0) 1 8770 0000, Citigroup Global Markets Limited, toll-free at +1-800-831-9146 and HSBC Continental Europe, at +1-866-811-8049.
About Medtronic
Bold thinking. Bolder actions. We are Medtronic. Medtronic plc, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is the leading global healthcare technology company that boldly attacks the most challenging health problems facing humanity by searching out and finding solutions. Our Mission — to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life — unites a global team of 95,000+ passionate people across 150 countries. Our technologies and therapies treat 70 health conditions and include cardiac devices, surgical robotics, insulin pumps, surgical tools, patient monitoring systems, and more. Powered by our diverse knowledge, insatiable curiosity, and desire to help all those who need it, we deliver innovative technologies that transform the lives of two people every second, every hour, every day. Expect more from us as we empower insight-driven care, experiences that put people first, and better outcomes for our world. In everything we do, we are engineering the extraordinary.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements regarding future events that are subject to the safe harbor created under Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other safe harbors under the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including but without limitation, statements relating to the expected use of proceeds from the Offering.
You should pay particular attention to the important risk factors and cautionary statements referenced in the "Risk Factors" section of the prospectus related to the offering referenced above, as well as the risk factors and cautionary statements described in Medtronic plc's filings with the SEC, including the risk factors contained in Medtronic plc's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K. Medtronic plc does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements.
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https://www.wbko.com/prnewswire/2022/09/21/medtronic-announces-closing-public-offering-35-billion-senior-notes/
| 2022-09-21T13:32:23Z
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Twitter lobbed more accusations at each other Tuesday in the latest round of legal filings over Musk’s efforts to rescind his offer to buy the social media platform.
Musk filed more paperwork in his bid to terminate the deal, this time based on information in a whistleblower complaint filed by Twitter’s former head of security.
Twitter fired back by saying Musk’s attempt to back out is “invalid and wrongful.”
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk said his legal team notified Twitter of “additional bases” for ending the deal on top of the ones given in the original termination notice issued in July.
Twitter has sued Musk, asking the Delaware Chancery Court to force him to go through with the $44 billion deal. A high-stakes trial is set to start the week of Oct. 17.
In a letter to Twitter Inc., which was included in the filing, Musk’s advisors cited the whistleblower report by former executive Peiter Zatko — also known by his hacker handle “Mudge.”
Zatko, who served as Twitter’s head of security until he was fired early this year, alleged in his complaint to U.S. officials that the company misled regulators about its poor cybersecurity defenses and its negligence in attempting to root out fake accounts that spread disinformation.
The Musk letter, addressed to Twitter’s Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, said Zatko’s allegations provide extra reasons to end the deal if the July termination notice “is determined to be invalid for any reason.”
Billionaire Musk has spent months alleging that the company he agreed to acquire undercounted its fake and spam accounts, which means he doesn’t have to go through with the deal.
In a separate SEC filing, Twitter responded to what it called Musk’s latest “purported termination,” saying it’s “based solely on statements made by a third party that, as Twitter has previously stated, are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lack important context.”
Zatko received a subpoena Saturday from Musk’s team compelling him to testify in what Zatko’s lawyers emphasized would be an “involuntary” deposition ahead of the coming courtroom battle between Twitter and Musk.
“He did not make his whistleblower disclosures to the appropriate governmental bodies to benefit Musk or to harm Twitter, but rather to protect the American public and Twitter shareholders,” Zatko’s lawyers wrote in a prepared statement.
Twitter is likely to amend its lawsuit to include Zatko’s allegations, so the court can decide on both the bot and cybersecurity issues. That could delay the trial because Musk will say he needs more time to prepare, said Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College.
The court will have to decide whether the bot or cybersecurity issues are a “material adverse effect” that will harm Twitter’s business for years — a difficult legal bar to clear, Quinn said.
The bot issue, which Twitter disclosed in filings with the SEC, seems to be an issue that Twitter would win on, Quinn said. Cybersecurity problems raised by Zatko may not be such an easy victory, he said.
“This is more grist for the mill,” Quinn said. “It’s not as obvious for the most part that this is a winner for Twitter. But once you start to analyze these closely, it’s still an uphill battle for Musk.”
___
Associated Press Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T13:32:23Z
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SYDNEY (AP) — An Australian man was convicted on Tuesday of murdering his wife 40 years ago after a renewed police investigation that was triggered by a popular podcast.
Christopher Dawson, 74, faces a possible life sentence. He opted for a trial by judge instead of a jury in the New South Wales state Supreme Court due to his notoriety from “The Teacher’s Pet” podcast, which 60 million people have listened to since 2018. The podcast set out a circumstantial case that Dawson had murdered his wife, Lynette.
Justice Ian Harrison found that Dawson killed his wife in 1982. At the time, Dawson was a high school teacher who was in a sexual relationship with a teenage former student and babysitter for his two daughters, identified in court as J.C.
The judge found the husband killed his wife because he feared losing his lover.
Harrison rejected the possibility that the wife abandoned her husband and children to vanish without a trace. He also dismissed claims the wife had been seen alive after January 1982 or that she had contacted her husband.
“The whole of the circumstantial evidence satisfies me that Lynette Dawson is dead, that she died on or about Jan. 8, 1982 and that she did not voluntarily abandon her home,” the judge said.
The wife had a strong attachment to her husband and daughters, was no “shrinking violet,” and had limited funds to support herself. This led the judge to reject the idea that she had left with only the clothes on her back.
“The proposition is ludicrous,” the judge said.
In his reasons for the guilty verdict, Harrison found that Dawson had lied about phone calls he claimed to have received from his wife after her disappearance.
J.C. and Dawson married in 1984 and separated in 1990.
Outside court, Lynette’s brother, Greg Simms, appealed to his brother-in-law to reveal the location of her body.
“The journey is not complete. She is still missing. We still need to bring her home. We would ask Chris Dawson to find it in himself to finally do the decent thing and allow us to bring Lyn home to a peaceful rest,” Simms said.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/tech-news/ap-podcast-leads-to-australians-conviction-in-wifes-murder/
| 2022-09-21T13:32:39Z
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SAN DIEGO (KSWB) — A penguin at the San Diego Zoo has been fitted with custom orthopedic footwear to assist with a degenerative foot condition, zoo officials announced Monday.
Lucas, a 4-year-old African penguin, has a chronic condition called bumblefoot — an umbrella term for a variety of degenerative foot conditions in avian animals, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) said in a news release.
Lucas was fitted with a custom pair of orthopedic shoes made of neoprene and rubber with the help of Thera-Paw, an organization that designs custom products for animals with special needs.
The shoes will prevent pressure sores from forming on Lucas’ feet and ankles when he stands and walks, SDZWA said. Bumblefoot could lead to sepsis and death by secondary infection if left untreated.
“The boots are cushioned and Velcroed in place, so they will help Lucas to fully participate in the colony and showcase behaviors that are more typical for a penguin—such as climbing the rocks, swimming, nesting and finding a suitable mate,” senior veterinarian Dr. Beth Bicknese was quoted as saying.
The goal of the footwear is to make Lucas as comfortable as possible since his bumblefoot condition is believed to be permanent, according to SDZWA. The shoes are meant to protect the lesions he already has and minimize the risk of new ones forming.
Lucas’ foot condition stemmed from a spinal infection that left the muscles in his legs weakened, causing him to rest on his ankles to compensate in order to stand upright. That led to sores forming on his feet and legs.
Since being fitted with his new footwear, Lucas’s posture has become more natural, improving his gait and his ability to navigate his rocky habitat with ease, the zoo said.
“I’ve known Lucas for a long time, so having the ability to provide him with a chance to live a normal life brings a smile to my face,” Bicknese said.
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| 2022-09-21T13:32:46Z
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MONROE, Mich. (AP) — Severe storms that brought damaging winds, heavy rains and flash flooding to parts of the Midwest and the South are being blamed for the deaths of two children in Michigan and Arkansas.
Monday’s storms also knocked out electrical service to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Michigan and Indiana.
In the Michigan city of Monroe, a 14-year-old girl was electrocuted Monday night in the backyard of her home after coming into contact with an electrical line that was knocked down by a thunderstorm, the public safety department said in a Facebook post.
The girl was with a friend and she reached for what she believed was a stick, but it turned out to be the power line, the department said.
In Arkansas, an 11-year-old boy died after he was swept into a storm drain during heavy rainfall Monday, authorities said.
A 47-year-old woman who tried to help the child was also pulled from the drain and taken to a hospital for treatment, according to police in Bentonville. Slow-moving thunderstorms brought heavy rainfall to the area Monday and caused localized flash flooding, the National Weather Service said.
The storms were widespread in Michigan and Indiana. Tree branches and power lines fell while winds gusted as high as 58 mph (93 kilometers per hour) at Battle Creek Executive Airport in Michigan and 60 mph (96 kilometers per hour) in Huntington, southwest of Fort Wayne, Indiana, the weather service reported.
On Monday night, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said that he was declaring a state of emergency after excessive rainfall exacerbated problems in one of Jackson’s water-treatment plants and caused low water pressure through much of the capital city. A swollen Pearl River caused flooding in Jackson on Monday, days after storms dumped heavy rain.
The Mississippi flooding was less severe than flooding that caused death and destruction in Kentucky last month. Those floods left at least 39 dead and robbed thousands of families of all of their possessions. Nearly a month later, residents are wrestling with whether to rebuild at the place they call home or to start over somewhere else.
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| 2022-09-21T13:33:01Z
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NEW YORK (WPIX) — An alleged sex-trafficker may have preyed upon hundreds of fellow women over the course of a decade, authorities said Tuesday, asking anyone who may have been a victim to come forward.
Ysenni Gomez was arrested earlier this month on charges of sex-trafficking in the Bronx and Westchester County, the FBI said in a news release, detailing a joint operation with local law-enforcement agencies including the Westchester County Police Department.
Gomez posted an online ad claiming to be hiring a waitress to work in a Manhattan restaurant, officials said. She then interviewed a woman who responded and told her that she had the job, according to authorities.
But when the victim showed up for her first day of work, Gomez told her that there was no job to be had, authorities said. Gomez then allegedly forced the victim to have sex with men by threatening to call federal authorities to have her deported if she refused, according to officials.
During their investigation, agents discovered more than 1,600 online ads associated with Gomez allegedly promoting prostitution, authorities said. Dating back 10 years, the ads appeared on Facebook, as well as adult classified sites, officials said.
Now believing that hundreds of women may have been involved, investigators are asking anyone who may have been a victim or otherwise has information to come forward.
Authorities released a photo of Gomez, who is also known to go by aliases including Carolina and Ysenni Peguero. She may have used the business name “Chicas Express” in ads she allegedly placed, investigators said.
Anyone with information about Gomez, or anyone who may have been a victim is asked to contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI.
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| 2022-09-21T13:33:19Z
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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The first ship carrying grain from Ukraine for people in the hungriest parts of the world has docked at the Horn of Africa port of Djibouti as areas of East Africa are badly affected by deadly drought and conflict.
Food security experts call it a drop in the bucket for the vast needs in the worst-hit Horn countries of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, the nation where this first shipment is going. But the flow of grain from Ukraine for other hungry parts of the world is expected to continue, with another ship departing Tuesday for Yemen. The U.N. World Food Program has said it is working on multiple ships.
WFP says this first shipment of grain will be shipped overland to northern Ethiopia, where millions of people have been affected by the country’s Tigray conflict, which has now flared up again.
How any of the grain will reach Tigray is now in question as humanitarian deliveries by road and air have been suspended amid the fighting that sparked again last week between Tigray forces and Ethiopian ones. But Ethiopia’s neighboring Amhara and Afar regions also are expected to benefit.
WFP has said the 23,000 metric tons of grain on the first ship are enough to feed 1.5 million people on full rations for a month. But the U.N. has said 2.4 million in Tigray alone are severely food insecure and that 20 million people across Ethiopia face hunger.
Millions of other people in the Horn of Africa region are going hungry because of drought, and thousands have died. Somalia has been especially hard hit because it sourced at least 90% of its grain from Ukraine and Russia before Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Millions of tons of food are needed for the Horn of Africa, WFP said. “In Ethiopia alone, three-quarters of everything that we used to distribute originated from Ukraine and Russia,” regional director Michael Dunford said.
Food security experts have said it will take weeks for people in African countries to see grain from Ukraine arrive and even longer to see it bring down high food prices that have been a source of despair and protests in multiple nations.
Far more ships carrying grain from Ukraine’s reopened ports have been going to richer places like Europe as existing business contracts are fulfilled. As of Sunday, 114 ships carrying more than 1.2 million metric tons of food commodities had left Ukraine, WFP said, but “export volumes remain far below pre-conflict averages.”
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| 2022-09-21T13:33:27Z
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MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama corrections officials apparently botched an inmate’s execution last month, an anti-death penalty group alleges, citing the length of time that passed before the prisoner received the lethal injection and a private autopsy indicating his arm may have been cut to find a vein.
Joe Nathan James Jr. was put to death July 28 at an Alabama prison for the 1994 shooting death of his former girlfriend. The execution was carried out more than three hours after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request for a stay.
“Subjecting a prisoner to three hours of pain and suffering is the definition of cruel and unusual punishment,” Maya Foa, director of Reprieve US Forensic Justice Initiative, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty, said in a statement. “States cannot continue to pretend that the abhorrent practice of lethal injection is in any way humane.”
The Alabama Department of Forensic Science declined a request to release the state’s autopsy of James, citing an ongoing review that happens after every execution. Officials have not responded to requests for comment on the private autopsy, which was first reported by The Atlantic.
At the time of the execution, Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm told reporters that “nothing out of the ordinary” happened. Hamm said he wasn’t aware of the prisoner fighting or resisting officers. The state later acknowledged that the execution was delayed because of difficulties establishing an intravenous line, but did not specify how long it took.
Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology at Emory University and an expert on lethal injection who witnessed the private autopsy, said it looked like there were numerous attempts to connect a line.
Zivot said he saw “multiple puncture sites on both arms” and two perpendicular incisions, each about 3 to 4 centimeters (1 to 1.5 inches) in length, in the middle of the arm, which he said indicated that officials had attempted to perform a “cutdown,” a procedure in which the skin is opened to allow a visual search for a vein. He said the cutdown is an old-style medical intervention rarely performed in modern medical settings, and that it would be painful without anesthesia. He also said he saw evidence of intramuscular injections not in the vicinity of a vein.
The Alabama Department of Corrections prison system issued a written statement in which it noted that “protocol states that if the veins are such that intravenous access cannot be provided, the team will perform a central line procedure,” which involves placing a catheter in a large vein. “Fortunately, this was not necessary and with adequate time, intravenous access was established,” the statement said.
Alabama does not allow witnesses from news outlets to watch the preparations for a lethal injection. They get their first glimpse of the execution chamber when an inmate is already strapped to the gurney with the IV line connected.
A reporter for The Associated Press who attended the execution observed that James did not respond when the warden asked if he had final words. His eyes remained closed except for briefly fluttering at one point early in the procedure.
Lawyers who spoke with James by telephone said they were disturbed by his reported lack of movements and raised questions about what happened before the lethal injection. Hamm said James was not sedated.
“That wasn’t the Joe that I knew. He always had something to say. He always wanted to be in control,” said James Ransom, the attorney who helped James file his appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. “The fact that he did not give any sort of reaction … and that he didn’t open his eyes, tells me something was up,” Ransom said.
John Palombi, a federal defender who spoke with James twice on the day of his execution, said James, “was certainly alert” earlier in the day.
The Atlantic quoted a friend of James as saying that the inmate had planned to make a final statement.
Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a national nonprofit organization that analyzes issues concerning capital punishment, said the delay between the Supreme Court’s go-ahead and the execution, combined with the autopsy, points to a “botched execution, and it is among the worst botches in the modern history of the U.S. death penalty.”
“This execution is Exhibit A as to why execution secrecy laws are intolerable,” Dunham wrote in an email to the AP. “The public is entitled to know what went on here — and what goes on in all Alabama executions — from the instant the execution team begins the process of physically preparing the prisoner for the lethal injection until the moment the prisoner dies.”
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This story has been edited to correct the spelling of James Ransom’s name.
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| 2022-09-21T13:33:34Z
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AMSTERDAM (AP) — Amsterdam approved a plan Tuesday to temporarily accommodate at least 1,000 migrants on a cruise ship moored in the Dutch capital’s port as the Netherlands seeks to end an accommodation crisis that last week saw hundreds of asylum-seekers sleeping outside a reception center.
The ship will remain moored in Amsterdam for at least six months under an agreement between the city and the central government. It is the second Dutch city to approve plans for putting up migrants on a cruise liner. In both cases, the ships will be moored so residents can exit and enter at all times.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Friday said he was ashamed of the situation at the asylum reception center in the remote northeastern village of Ter Apel where 700 migrants had to sleep outdoors in unsanitary conditions because there was no space for them inside.
The Dutch arm of Doctors Without Borders sent a team to the camp to provide medical assistance to the migrants, the first time the agency has ever deployed in the Netherlands.
“The situation in Ter Apel is heartbreaking. Together we must solve the shortage of accommodation so that refugees can find a place,” said Amsterdam alderman Rutger Groot Wassink.
Groot Wassink called the cruise ship, which is not yet in Amsterdam but should be in use starting Oct. 1, a temporary, short-term solution and said the Dutch government needs to work with municipalities to reform the country’s asylum system.
One of the reasons for the crisis is a nationwide housing shortage. Once asylum-seekers are granted refugee status, many are unable to find a place to live and have to stay in the refugee centers, which were intended only as temporary accommodations for people awaiting decisions on their asylum application.
The minister in charge of migration, Eric van der Burg, thanked Amsterdam.
“Temporary large-scale accommodation is very important to restore calm to asylum accommodation,” he said.
___
Follow all AP stories at https://apnews.com/hub/migration.
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| 2022-09-21T13:33:42Z
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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Associated Press and other news organizations are suing officials in Uvalde, Texas, after months of refusal to publicly release records related to the May massacre at Robb Elementary School.
The lawsuit filed Monday in Uvalde County asks a court to force the city, school district and sheriff’s department to turn over 911 recordings, personnel records and other documents. Newsrooms have requested them under Texas open records laws since a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers on May 24.
More than three months after one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history, news organizations have turned to courts in an effort to obtain information and records that Uvalde officials and state police have argued they cannot release because of ongoing investigations. The Texas Attorney General’s Office has also ruled that Uvalde officials cannot withhold all records.
Misleading and outright false statements by authorities about the police response in the initial hours and days after the attack on a fourth-grade classroom — which lasted more than 70 minutes — have sowed distrust that remains among many Uvalde residents.
“The obfuscation and inaction have only prolonged the pain of victims, their families and the community at large, all of whom continue to cry out for transparency regarding the events of that day,” the lawsuit states.
A spokeswoman for the city of Uvalde said it had not been served a copy of the lawsuit and declined comment. Representatives for the school district and sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Uvalde officials, including Mayor Don McLaughlin, have previously cited ongoing investigations in their defense of the city continuing to withhold some records. The city has released some body camera footage from Uvalde police that show officers from multiple agencies in and outside the school during the attack.
The fullest account of the shooting has so far come from a report from a Texas House investigative committee that found wide failures by nearly 400 officers who rushed to the scene but waited more than an hour to confront the gunman. The report, released in July, also noted that Uvalde families had “already waited too long for answers and transparency.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which had more than 90 officers at the scene, has also denied public records requests since the shooting.
___
Associated Press writer Jake Bleiberg contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T13:33:49Z
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MADRID (AP) — Gibraltar authorities said Tuesday that a cargo ship has been beached to prevent it from sinking after it collided with a liquefied natural gas carrier in the bay of Gibraltar.
A government spokesman said that the situation was under control and the ship was not in danger. He said there had been no environmental impact so far. The government said booms had been placed in the area to contain any possible fuel seepage.
No one was injured in the collision. The crew of the cargo ship — the 178-meter (584-foot), Tuvalu-registered OS 35 — remains on board.
The spokesman, who was not authorized to be named, said they had no reports of damage to the LNG carrier.
He said the cargo vessel was resting on the seabed in 17 meters (56 feet) of water close to the coast with no damage to the hull. The ship was carrying steel bars.
The Gibraltar government set they had set up a 200-meter exclusion zone around the stricken ship but that Gibraltar port had reopened and was functioning as normal.
Gibraltar, a British territory located on southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, is a busy shipping port.
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| 2022-09-21T13:33:57Z
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BEIJING (AP) — China says a key congress of the ruling Communist Party at which leader Xi Jinping is expected to be granted a third five-year term will open on Oct. 16.
Such congresses are held every five years and usually bring in a new slate of leaders, particularly on the party’s all-powerful seven-member Politburo Standing Committee.
Xi, who is also head of state and chief of the powerful military, broke with convention in 2018 by amending the party constitution to remove all term limits on the presidency, essentially making him leader for life.
Xi’s past two predecessors had both served two five-year terms, but Xi has shown no sign of relinquishing power, while taking control over the economy and other fields previously assigned to the premier and others.
The party brooks no political opposition and has increasingly been cracking down on independent actors in the economy, civil society and religious circles.
Xi has also mounted an increasingly assertive foreign policy, raising concerns about a possible confrontation with the U.S., possibly over the self-governing democracy of Taiwan.
He has also waged a wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign that has targeted political rivals, cracked down on democracy and civil liberties in Hong Kong, overseen the detention of more than 1 million members of minority Muslim groups in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, and pursued a hard0line “zero-COVID” policy on the mainland that has exacted a growing economic and social cost.
Xi’s accumulation of power has drawn comparison’s to former dictator Mao Zedong, with his political theories written into the constitution and his cultivation of a cult of personality superseding all other current top Chinese officials.
The official Xinhua News Agency said the date of the congress was announced Tuesday at a meeting of the party’s Politburo.
The congress is “of great significance to be convened at a crucial moment, as the whole Party and the entire nation embark on a new journey toward building a modern socialist country in all respects, and advance toward the Second Centenary Goal,” Xinhua said, referring to a long-standing economic development target.
“The congress will thoroughly review the international and domestic situations, comprehensively grasp the new requirements for the development of the cause of the Party and the country on the new journey in the new era, as well as the new expectations of the people,” it said.
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| 2022-09-21T13:34:04Z
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Pennsylvania cannot keep a cache of weapons seized from the parents of a gunman who killed one state trooper and permanently disabled another eight years ago, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The parents of Eric Frein sued after authorities refused to return 25 rifles, 19 pistols and two shotguns that were taken from their home in September 2014, days after Frein ambushed the troopers outside a state police barracks in the Pocono Mountains.
Eugene Michael Frein and Deborah Frein were not charged in their son’s crime — for which he was convicted and sentenced to death — and none of their weapons were used in his deadly late-night assault.
The Pike County district attorney, who was named as a defendant in the parents’ suit, had argued that authorities had the right to hold the seized weapons, saying they might be needed as evidence during Eric Frein’s state and federal appeals.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, saying in its ruling Tuesday that state authorities never used Michael and Deborah’s guns as evidence at their son’s trial and violated the parents’ constitutional rights by holding onto them indefinitely.
Curt Parkins, the Freins’ attorney, called the seizure a “terrible case of government overreach.”
“It’s really the government being vindictive,” Parkins said in a telephone interview. The Freins, he said, were “punished for being the parents of Eric Frein.”
State police declined to comment on the ruling, which overturned a lower court decision to dismiss the parents’ lawsuit. A message was sent to the district attorney seeking comment.
The state seized the Freins’ property without compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment, and hindered their ability to keep firearms in violation of the Second Amendment, the appeals court said.
“The police understandably seized the parents’ guns in 2014 while a killer was still at large. But he has long since been captured and convicted, and his conviction has been affirmed,” the panel wrote in its decision. “The judicial warrant does not authorize keeping the guns past this point.”
The state would have to get another warrant to justify keeping the parents’ property, which the district attorney’s office conceded was unlikely because of a lack of probable cause, the court said.
Prosecutors have said Eric Frein was hoping to start an uprising against the government when he opened fire with a rifle on the Blooming Grove barracks. Cpl. Bryon Dickson II, a Marine veteran and married father of two, was killed in the late-night ambush, and Trooper Alex Douglass was left with devastating injuries.
Frein was captured after a 48-day manhunt. He was convicted and sentenced to death, though Pennsylvania has a moratorium on executions.
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| 2022-09-21T13:34:12Z
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PRAHOVO, Serbia (AP) — The worst drought in Europe in decades has not only scorched farmland and hampered river traffic, it also has exposed a part of almost forgotten World War II history: The hulks of dozens of World War II German battleships have emerged from the Danube River as its water levels have dropped.
In the middle of the mighty river separating Serbia and Romania near the Serbian port of Prahovo, a rusty hull, a broken mast where the swastika flag used to fly, an upper deck where a command bridge used to be, a barrel that could have been holding fuel — or even explosive materials — lean on a pebblestone dune that has emerged from the water.
The ships, some still laden with munition, belonged to Nazi Germany’s Black Sea fleet that was deliberately sunk by the Germans as they retreated from Romania as Soviet forces advanced.
Historians say up to 200 German warships were scuttled in September 1944 near Prahovo in the Danube gorge known as The Iron Gate on the orders of the fleet’s commander as they came under heavy fire from the Soviets. The idea behind the deliberate sinking was to at least slow down the Soviet advance in the Balkans. But it did not help as Nazi Germany surrendered months later, in May 1945.
The unusually hot weather across Europe this summer was linked by scientists to global warming and other factors. The dropping water levels created dangerous conditions for shipping on many rivers on the continent, including the Danube, Europe’s second-longest river that flows through 10 nations. Authorities in Serbia have used dredging to keep vessels moving.
The wrecks appearing from the depths are an impressive sight, but they have caused decades of trouble for those using the river, and now the Serbian government, with European Union support, is planning to do something about them.
Some of the wrecks were removed from the river by the Communist Yugoslav authorities right after the war. But most of them remained, hampering shipping, especially in summer when water levels are low. For years there were plans to take the ships out of the muddy waters, but the operation was considered too risky because of the explosives they carried and there were no funds to do it until recently.
Now, the European Union and the European Investment Bank have agreed to provide loans and grants the operation to pull out some of the vessels near Prahovo in order to improve the traffic capacity of the Danube. The total cost of the operation is estimated at 30 million euros.
“These vessels have been sunk and they have been lying on the river bed ever since,” the European Union ambassador to Serbia, Emanuele Giaufret, said during a recent trip to the wreckage site. “And this is a problem. It’s a problem for the traffic on the Danube, it restricts the capacity to move, it’s a hazard because certain vessels still contain unexploded ordnance.”
Accompanying Giaufret was Alessandro Bragonzi, the head of the European Investment Bank in the Western Balkans.
He said the project consists of the removal of 21 sunken vessels.
“It has been estimated that more vessels are underwater, up to 40, but those that are currently impeding the fairway conditions of the Danube, especially during periods of low water level, are 21,” Bragonzi said.
Experts say the salvage operation will consist of removing the explosive materials from the sunken vessels and then destroying the wrecks, rather than dragging the ships out of the river.
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| 2022-09-21T13:34:19Z
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PRAGUE (AP) — Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren expressed concern Tuesday about gun violence in the United States in the aftermath of a shooting in Indianapolis over the weekend that left one Dutch soldier dead and two wounded.
“We do many trainings of our servicemen in the United States, and we really don’t expect this to happen. So it’s very, very concerning for us.” Ollongren told The Associated Press at a meeting of European Union defense ministers in Prague.
A 26-year-old member of the Dutch Commando Corps, identified by U.S. authorities as Simmie Poetsema, died of his injuries “surrounded by family and colleagues,” the Dutch Defense Ministry said in a statement Monday.
Poetsema and the two other soldiers were shot after what Indianapolis police believe was a disturbance outside the hotel where they were staying about 3:30 a.m. Saturday near several downtown bars and nightclubs, authorities said. The soldiers were in the U.S. for training exercises at a southern Indiana military base.
Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett said Monday that the soldiers had returned to the hotel after a “scuffle” at a bar and were outside when the gunfire came from what he called “a drive-by shooting.”
Indianapolis police declined to confirm Hogsett’s account Tuesday or release more information on the circumstances or the investigation of the shooting. No arrests have been announced.
Ollongren declined to comment on the shooting while investigations continue. She said there is “good contact” between Dutch military police and authorities in Indianapolis.
“We have read things in the media, we have heard what the mayor said but we feel it’s very important to have a real thorough investigation. So we’re waiting for that until we comment on what actually happened,” she said.
Ollongren said U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin contacted her Monday “to express his regrets and his condolences.”
Hogsett said he believed the city’s downtown area was safe and that city officials were working to reduce violence.
“Too often, not just in Indianapolis, conflict resolution has become just people pulling out guns and shooting each other,” Hogsett said.
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| 2022-09-21T13:34:27Z
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PRAGUE (AP) — European Union nations were divided Tuesday over whether to slap a broad visa ban on Russian citizens, torn between a desire to ramp up pressure on President Vladimir Putin and concern about punishing people who may not even support his war on Ukraine.
The 27-nation EU already tightened visa restrictions on Russian officials and businesspeople in May, but calls have mounted from, notably, Poland and the Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — for a broader ban on tourists.
“There must be more restrictions on travel for Russian citizens,” Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks said.
“We cannot simply give bonuses to people which are supporting such presidents as Putin,” he told reporters in Czech capital Prague, where EU defense and foreign ministers are meeting.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who is chairing the talks, has said that a visa ban on all Russian citizens is unlikely to be agreed on. Germany and France are leading a push to tighten visa restrictions, rather than impose an outright ban.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock expressed support for suspending more parts of the 2007 EU agreement with Russia, and to halt the issuing of multiple-entry or multi-year visas.
But Baerbock said it’s important “that we don’t deprive ourselves of what made it possible for us to allow persecuted people in Russia to leave very quickly.”
“We should not punish those who have the courage to stand up against this regime,” Baerbock said at a Cabinet gathering north of Berlin, from where she is due to travel to Prague on Wednesday.
Finland’s foreign minister, Pekka Haavisto, said his country is worried about a kind of Russian “tourist route” through Helsinki airport. He said Finland will unilaterally slash the granting of tourist visas to Russians to 10% of their usual number from Sept. 1.
As of Thursday, Finland, which has the longest border with Russia of all EU countries, will only allow Russian citizens to apply for tourist visas on one day a week, and only in four cities in Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that Moscow was closely following the EU visa discussions and described them as part of Western moves against Russia that are “irrational and bordering on madness.” He warned that Moscow will retaliate if Russian citizens are targeted.
In talks earlier Tuesday, EU defense ministers weighed the possibility of setting up a training mission for Ukraine’s beleaguered armed forces, but the bloc’s countries disagree over what added value such an effort might bring.
Ukraine has provided the EU with a list of short- and long-term requirements, ranging from basic military training and organizing resistance to high-level instruction on the use of equipment or defending against nuclear and chemical weapons.
Several countries already provide military training on a bilateral basis, but some feel that it’s important to throw the EU’s combined weight behind the effort. The Netherlands highlighted new demining training that it’s providing with Germany.
Others fear that an EU effort of 27 countries might be too unwieldy.
“It’s not maybe the quickest way. I’m not so convinced,” Luxembourg Defense Minister Francois Bausch said. Austria was also cool on the idea. Pabriks said that Latvia stands ready to help, but that such an EU-wide mission “must be practical.”
In the end, Borrell said, the ministers agreed “on launching the work necessary to define the parameters” of what such a mission might look like, meaning that little movement is likely at the EU level for some time.
The ministers also discussed ways of pooling military resources and material, and using their collective weight to jointly purchase defense equipment and help European industry “to ramp up production capacities,” Borrell said.
“We are depleting our stocks. We are providing so many capacities to Ukraine that we have to refill our stocks,” he said.
Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad sought help from EU partners to “backfill” his country’s national defense needs so that it can be free to send more military equipment to Ukraine, including Mig-29 fighter jets.
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Geir Moulson in Berlin, and Jari Tanner in Helsinki, contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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| 2022-09-21T13:34:36Z
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine claimed to have destroyed bridges and ammunition depots and pounded command posts in a surge of fighting in the Russian-occupied south, fueling speculation Tuesday that its long-awaited counteroffensive to try to turn the tide of war is underway. Russia said it inflicted heavy casualties in return.
The clashes took place in Ukraine’s Kherson region, where Moscow’s forces rolled up major gains early in the war.
While independent verification of battlefield action has been difficult, Britain’s Defense Ministry said in an intelligence report that several Ukrainian brigades had stepped up their artillery fire in front-line sectors across southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities kept the world guessing about their intentions, sidestepping talk of a major counteroffensive over the past couple of days.
The port city of Kherson, with a prewar population of about 300,000, is an important economic hub close to the Black Sea and the first major city to fall to the Russians in the war that began six months ago.
Occupation forces have spoken of plans to hold a referendum on making the Kherson region a part of Russia and have pressured residents to take Russian citizenship and stop using Ukraine’s currency.
Ukraine’s presidential office reported “tough battles” going on across practically all of the area and said Ukrainian forces destroyed ammunition depots and all large bridges across the Dnieper River vital to supplying Russian troops.
The Ukrainian military said Tuesday evening that the Russians were shelling more than 15 settlements in the Kherson area and resorting to airstrikes.
The British said that most of Russia’s units around Kherson “are likely under-manned and are reliant upon fragile supply lines” while its forces there are undergoing a significant reorganization.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov maintained that its forces stood up well and that Ukraine lost hundreds of troops, tanks and other armored vehicles in Monday’s action. His claim could not be independently verified.
Ukrainian independent military analyst Oleh Zhdanov told The Associated Press that “it will be possible to talk about the effectiveness of Ukrainian actions only after large cities are retaken.” He added that Ukrainian forces had breached the first and the second lines of defense in the Kherson region several times in the past, “but it didn’t bring about results.”
“The most important thing is Ukrainian artillery’s work on the bridges, which the Russian military can no longer use,” Zhdanov said.
The war has turned into a stalemate over the past months, with casualties and destruction mounting and the population bearing the brunt of the suffering during relentless shelling in the east and south.
In other battlefield reports, at least nine civilians were killed in more Russian shelling, Ukrainian officials said, from the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv to the northeastern industrial hub of Kharkiv, where five were killed in the city center.
The fighting complicates what could be a treacherous trip from Kyiv to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia, by an inspection team from the U.N.’s atomic energy agency.
The experts may have to pass through areas of active fighting, with no publicly announced cease-fire, to reach the Russian-occupied plant, where shelling has driven fears of a catastrophe. Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling the area over and over.
Nikopol, a city just across the Dnieper from the plant, again came under a barrage of heavy shelling, authorities said, with a bus station, stores and a children’s library damaged. And a Russian missile strike targeted the city of Zaporizhzhia, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the plant, Ukraine said.
In other developments:
—The first ship carrying grain from war-torn Ukraine for people in the hungriest parts of the world docked at the Horn of Africa port of Djibouti as deadly drought and conflict grip East Africa. The grain is going to Ethiopia.
—European Union nations were divided over whether to slap a broad visa ban on Russian citizens, torn between a desire to ramp up pressure on President Vladimir Putin and concern about punishing people who don’t support his war.
—German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said his country — Europe’s biggest economy — is well prepared to tackle a possible energy shortage because of Russia’s squeeze on European gas supplies. Russia has cut off or reduced the flow of gas to a dozen EU countries, raising fears ahead of winter. Seven Baltic Sea countries announced plans for a sevenfold increase of wind power production by 2030 to free northern Europe from its dependence on Russian natural gas.
—The Vatican defended Pope Francis from allegations he hasn’t come down hard enough on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, saying the pontiff clearly views the war as “senseless, repugnant and sacrilegious.”
___
Yuras Karmanau contributed to this report from Tallinn, Estonia.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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| 2022-09-21T13:34:51Z
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JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi’s capital city is grappling with multiple water problems — there’s been too much on the ground after heavy rainfall in the past week, and not enough safe water coming through the pipes for people to use.
Parts of Jackson were without running water Tuesday because flooding exacerbated longstanding problems in one of two water-treatment plants. The city of 150,000 had already been under a boil-water notice for a month because the Health Department found cloudy water that could cause digestive problems. Long lines have formed each day for limited supplies of bottled water at distribution sites.
Restaurant owner Derek Emerson told The Associated Press on Tuesday that water problems “are making it impossible for us to do business in Jackson, Mississippi.” Emerson and his wife, Jennifer, own the upscale Walker’s Drive-In, and he said they have been spending $300 a day for ice and bottled water in the past month.
“I love doing business in Jackson, and I like the people of Jackson,” Emerson said. “I just — I hate dealing with the problems.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency for Jackson’s water system on Tuesday. The state will try to help resolve problems by hiring contractors to work at the treatment plant, which was operating at diminished capacity with backup pumps after the main pumps failed “some time ago,” Reeves said.
And President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration request for the state of Mississippi, directing his administration to surge federal assistance to the region, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted late Tuesday.
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said Jackson’s water system is troubled by short staffing and “decades of deferred maintenance.” He said the influx of water from torrential rain changed the chemical composition needed for treatment, which slowed the process of pushing water out to customers.
Lumumba is Democrat and was not invited to the Republican governor’s Monday night news conference. Although the two politicians are often at odds, Lumumba said Tuesday that he’s having productive discussions with the Health Department and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency and he’s grateful for the state’s help.
Like many cities, Jackson faces water system problems it can’t afford to fix. Its tax base has eroded the past few decades as the population decreased — the result of mostly white flight to suburbs that began after public schools integrated in 1970. The city’s population is now more than 80% Black, with about 25% of its residents living in poverty.
Low water pressure left some people unable to take showers or flush toilets and officials said the low pressure caused concern for firefighting. Those who did have water flowing from the tap were told to boil it to kill bacteria that could make them sick.
Jackson schools held classes online Tuesday and Wednesday, and some restaurants closed. Jackson State University brought in temporary restrooms for students, and Jackson State football coach Deion Sanders said the water crisis left his players without air conditioning or ice at their practice facility. In a video that one of his sons posted to social media, Sanders — also known as Coach Prime — said he wanted to move players into a hotel so they could shower.
“We’re going to find somewhere to practice, find somewhere that can accommodate every durn thing that we need and desire to be who we desire to be, and that’s dominate,” Sanders said. “The devil is a lie. He ain’t going to get us today, baby.”
The problems at the water treatment plant came after the city appeared to largely avoid widespread flooding from a Pearl River swollen by days of heavy rain. One home was flooded Monday but the mayor said the water did not rise as high as expected. Earlier projections showed about 100 to 150 buildings in the Jackson area faced possible flooding.
The National Weather Service said the Pearl River crested Monday short of the major flood stage level of 36 feet (10.97 meters). Parts of Jackson flooded in 2020 after the river topped that level.
Jackson has two water-treatment plants, and the larger one is near a reservoir that provides most of the city’s water supply. The reservoir also has a role in flood control.
The mayor said Monday that low water pressure could last a few days, but by Tuesday he said some customers were regaining service.
“We have seen steady improvements in the system,” Lumumba said.
Jackson has longstanding problems with its water system. A cold snap in 2021 left a significant number of people without running water after pipes froze. Similar problems happened again early this year, on a smaller scale.
Lumumba said last week that fixing Jackson’s water system could cost $200 million, but Tuesday he said the cost could run to “quite possibly the billions of dollars.” Mississippi is receiving $75 million to address water problems as part of a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Jackson resident Bernard Smith said he filled containers with water Monday night in case his home lost service. He bought bottled water Tuesday and said he hopes Jackson is on track to solve its water woes.
“Sometimes you’ve to go through the hardship to get back to the good ship,” Smith said.
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| 2022-09-21T13:34:59Z
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NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AP) — Environment officials from the Group of 20 leading rich and developing nations are gathering Wednesday on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali for talks to spur global climate action and other troubles that have worsened due to the war in Ukraine.
Implementing each G-20 nation’s contribution and synchronizing targets among developing and developed countries are to be discussed in the closed-door meetings, Indonesia’s environment minister Siti Nurbaya said before the one-day meeting.
She expected the meeting to produce a joint agreement with three priority issues — sustainable recovery, land-based and ocean-based climate action as well as resource mobilization — to realizing the Paris Agreement, the first universal and legally binding commitment on climate change.
Nurbaya opened the meeting by urging fellow environment ministers to safeguard environmental multilateralism and to make it work, as it is the only way to effectively coordinate efforts to tackle global challenges.
“Environmental multilateralism is the only mechanism where all countries, regardless of their size and wealth, stand on equal footing and equal treatment,” Nurbaya said. “The voices of all countries, North and South, developed and developing, must be heard.”
Indonesia, the holder of this year’s G-20 presidency, ratified the Paris Agreement in 2016. The country is committed to reducing emissions by 41% with international assistance by 2030, or by 29% independently.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry was among 17 environment ministers and climate officials in addition to over 200 delegates who were attending the talks in person. Top officials from China, Russia and Argentina joined the meeting virtually.
In their closed-door meetings, the environment ministers are seeking for ways to increase efforts to control climate change and prevent a 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures in line with the Paris Agreement and also searching for commitments from developed countries to fulfill their own climate pledges and climate financing for developing countries.
Russia’s war in Ukraine still overshadows Wednesday’s talks as countries raised its global environment impact.
Italy’s climate envoy Alessandro Modiano in his speech said the war was having grave consequences on the environment, on food and energy security, on the pandemic recovery efforts as well as on pursuing of sustainable development goals.
“I must therefore stress that my government consider crucial to have in this final text, a clear language that reflects the unjustifiable and unprovoked Russia war of aggression against Ukraine,” Modiano said.
That apparent commitments may be put to the test as the G-20 environment ministers meet in the heavily-guarded Nusa Dua tourist haven to lay the groundwork for the leaders meeting in November in Bali, the mostly Hindu “island of the gods” in the majority Muslim archipelago nation.
In recent years, signs of climate change have become glaring, including in Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation of more than 17,000 islands. Last year, Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency reported a total of 2,943 disasters, comprising 1,288 floods, 623 landslides and 677 tornadoes.
The agency said most disasters were classified as hydro-meteorological disasters and strongly influenced by climatic conditions. Environment watchdog Indonesian Forum for the Environment has predicted that hydro-meteorological disasters in Indonesia will increase 7% this year.
Despite the worsening impact of climate change, financing for the coal industry continues to accelerate in Indonesia. Between 2014-2019, bank loans for coal-fired power plants alone reached $19.4 billion, involving a number of state-owned banks, according to the government data.
Southeast Asia’s largest economy is a key exporter of coal, palm oil and minerals amid a global shortage in commodities after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Coal exports increased to record levels in March after a brief ban on its shipments early this year to secure domestic supplies.
Members of the G-20 account for about 80% of the world’s economic output, two-thirds of the world’s populations and an estimated 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
——-
Karmini reported from Jakarta.
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| 2022-09-21T13:35:07Z
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BEERSHEBA, Israel (AP) — An Israeli court on Tuesday sentenced a Gaza aid worker to 12 years in prison after he was found guilty of several terrorism charges in a high-profile case in which independent audits and investigations found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Mohammed el-Halabi, the Gaza director for the international Christian charity World Vision, was arrested in 2016 and accused of diverting tens of millions of dollars to the Islamic militant group Hamas that rules the territory. The trial, and his prolonged detention, have further strained relations between Israel and humanitarian organizations that provide aid to Palestinians. The sentence is likely to continue to affect those ties.
“It’s inconceivable,” el-Halabi’s lawyer, Maher Hanna, said of the length of the sentence. “They insist that injustice will persist throughout the whole process.”
Both el-Halabi and World Vision have denied the allegations and an independent audit in 2017 also found no evidence of support for Hamas. Australia, which was the biggest single donor to World Vision’s humanitarian work in Gaza, came to similar conclusions in its own review.
In a statement, World Vision said the sentence stood in sharp contrast to the evidence and facts of the case.
“The arrest, six-year trial, unjust verdict and this sentence are emblematic of actions that hinder humanitarian work in Gaza and the West Bank,” the group said. “It adds to the chilling impact on World Vision and other aid or development groups working to assist Palestinians.”
Hanna said el-Halabi intended to appeal the verdict and the sentence to the country’s Supreme Court.
Israeli authorities have repeatedly said they have proof that Hamas had infiltrated the aid group and was diverting funds from needy Gazans. Then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu trumpeted the charges in an online video shortly after el-Halabi’s arrest.
Critics say Israel often relies on questionable informants. They allege that Israel smears groups that provide aid or other support to Palestinians in order to shore up its nearly 55-year military occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state.
Israel says it supports the work of aid organizations but must prevent donor funds from falling into the hands of armed groups like Hamas that do not recognize it and attack its citizens.
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| 2022-09-21T13:35:14Z
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ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek authorities say they have picked up a group of 30 people from a wooden boat that had lost steering and was drifting close to the rocky coast of a small islet north of Crete, in the latest case of boats carrying migrants running into trouble in southern Greece.
The coast guard said Tuesday they had received a distress call on Monday from the boat while it was sailing between Crete and the small island of Antikythera. The wooden motorboat was eventually located near the uninhabited islet of Gramvousa, just off the northwestern tip of Crete.
The 30 people on board, who included nine minors and four women, were transported to Crete, the coast guard said. There was no immediate information on their nationalities.
It was the latest of several migrant boats that have run into trouble and ended up on southern Greek islands in recent days. Over the weekend, the coast guard announced it had picked up 69 people on Friday from a sailboat that was drifting and had sent out a distress signal 26 nautical miles (30 miles, 48 kilometers) southwest of the Ionian island of Zakythnos.
The boat had set sail from the Turkish coast near Izmir on Aug. 22 and had been heading to Italy when it ran into trouble, the coast guard said.
The 69 — 61 people from Iran, two from Afghanistan and six from Turkey — were rescued by a passing cargo ship and taken to the southern mainland coast of Kalamata on Saturday, the coast guard said. The six Turks were arrested on suspicion of migrant smuggling.
Earlier this month, about 240 people arrived on the southern island of Kythera on three sailboats that had also set sail from Turkey and had been aiming directly for Italy.
For years, the preferred route for people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa was the much shorter sea route from Turkey to nearby Greek islands in the eastern Aegean.
But with Greek authorities increasing patrols in the area and facing persistent reports of pushbacks — summary and illegal deportations of new arrivals back to Turkey without allowing them to apply for asylum — more people are attempting to circumvent Greece and head directly to Italy.
Greece denies it carries out pushbacks, but insists it robustly protects its borders.
“No new tactic by smugglers and no new maneuver by Turkey will change our stance,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said during a speech at the start of a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, where he also touched on migration.
“We save the innocent, we protect our borders, and the other side should look at its own unguarded borders,” he said.
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Follow AP’s coverage of migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration
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| 2022-09-21T13:35:30Z
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Survey respondents represent over 80% of global ETF AUM
AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sage Advisory released the results of its 2022 ETF Stewardship Survey today. A record number of 23 ETF providers participated (up from 17 in 2021), including seven of the 10 largest U.S. ETF providers, managing $37 trillion in total assets. The survey results can be found here.
The fourth annual survey examines how well ETF providers (e.g., State Street, BlackRock, Invesco) perform their fiduciary duty on behalf of ETF investors. It includes questions about their voting practices, engagement activities, climate initiatives, and diversity and inclusion policies. Seven providers received an overall score of an "A" – three more than in 2021.
The survey's results revealed three emerging themes in the ETF industry. Sage noted that participant transparency was "restrained," which the firm attributes to increased regulatory scrutiny of "greenwashing," or the overselling of ESG credentials that could lead to fines.
"On the positive side, 'greenwashing' will hopefully become less pervasive in the industry and managers will err on the side of caution when tempted to overemphasize their ESG capabilities," said Bob Smith, President of Sage Advisory.
Another issue that could affect a core function of ETF stewardship is the proposed Index Act, which would allow ETF providers to pass on voting rights to the ETF investor.
"Some of the obvious challenges to the proposed Index Act are logging and tracking voting preferences of every retail investor, getting those preferences through multiple levels of custody, and a lack of quorums at annual shareholder meetings," said Emma Harper, Sage Senior Research Analyst and author of the report.
Lastly, Sage noted that 70% of managers incorporate Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) standards in their processes. The use of the TCFD standards shows a high level of standardization in climate reporting that has long been sought by both proponents and opponents of the ESG investing movement.
"Reporting standardization will help providers bonify their ESG credentials, and the broad use of standards for climate reporting is a step in the right direction," Harper said.
Sage is an independent investment management firm headquartered in Austin, TX, that serves the institutional and private client marketplace with traditional fixed income asset management, ESG-integrated portfolios, global tactical ETF strategies, and liability driven investment solutions. As of June 2022, Sage manages and advises over $17 billion in client assets. For more information, visit sageadvisory.com.
View original content:
SOURCE Sage Advisory Services
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| 2022-09-21T13:35:33Z
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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indianapolis police arrested a man Tuesday in connection with a shooting over the weekend that left one Dutch soldier dead and two wounded.
Shamar Duncan, 22, of Indianapolis, was arrested on a preliminary charge of murder, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said.
Duncan was being held in jail and will not be eligible for release from jail while the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office reviews the case, police said.
Duncan’s arrest did not appear in online court records, and it wasn’t clear whether he has an attorney who might comment on the case.
A 26-year-old member of the Dutch Commando Corps, identified by U.S. authorities as Simmie Poetsema, died of his injuries “surrounded by family and colleagues,” the Dutch Defense Ministry said in a statement Monday.
The shooting occurred Saturday in downtown Indianapolis.
“IMPD detectives want to thank members of the community for their cooperation during this investigation,” IMPD spokesman Shane Foley said. “During the investigation, multiple individuals spoke with detectives and provided detectives with video connected to the investigation.”
Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren expressed concern Tuesday about gun violence in the United States in the aftermath of the shooting.
“We do many trainings of our servicemen in the United States, and we really don’t expect this to happen. So it’s very, very concerning for us.” Ollongren told The Associated Press at a meeting of European Union defense ministers in Prague.
Poetsema and the two other soldiers were shot after what Indianapolis police believe was a disturbance outside the hotel where they were staying about 3:30 a.m. Saturday near several downtown bars and nightclubs, authorities said. The soldiers were in the U.S. for training exercises at a southern Indiana military base.
Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett said Monday that the soldiers had returned to the hotel after a “scuffle” at a bar and were outside when the gunfire came from what he called “a drive-by shooting.”
Indianapolis police declined to confirm Hogsett’s account Tuesday or release more information on the circumstances or the investigation of the shooting.
Ollongren declined to comment on the shooting while investigations continue. She said there is “good contact” between Dutch military police and authorities in Indianapolis.
“We have read things in the media, we have heard what the mayor said but we feel it’s very important to have a real thorough investigation. So we’re waiting for that until we comment on what actually happened,” she said.
Ollongren said U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin contacted her Monday “to express his regrets and his condolences.”
Hogsett said he believed the city’s downtown area was safe and that city officials were working to reduce violence.
“Too often, not just in Indianapolis, conflict resolution has become just people pulling out guns and shooting each other,” Hogsett said.
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| 2022-09-21T13:35:45Z
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TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran sentenced two Swedish citizens to multiyear prison terms on charges of drug smuggling, the judiciary announced on Tuesday, the latest in a string of cases heightening tensions between the Islamic Republic and the Nordic nation.
Iran’s hard-line judiciary handed down a five-year sentence and fine of roughly $34,000 to Swedish national Simon Kasper Brown for allegedly trafficking 9.7 kilograms (about 22 pounds) of the banned pain medication Tramadol. Security forces scooped up Brown from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and confiscated his stash of the mild narcotic pills, said Masoud Setayeshi, the judiciary spokesman.
Tehran also sentenced Swedish citizen Stephen Kevin Gilbert to eight years in prison and ordered he pay a $500 fine. Gilbert was arrested at the airport in January 2020 for allegedly smuggling 9.8 kilograms of opium-based drugs into the country, the judiciary said.
Brown and Gilbert are the latest Swedes to land in Iranian prison as relations between the two countries deteriorate. Earlier this year, Iran jailed two Swedish visitors in separate incidents on widely criticized espionage charges. Another Swedish citizen, a respected 50-year-old doctor who Iran accuses of spying for Israel, faces the death penalty.
The cases come amid a landmark quest in Sweden to hold accountable a former Iranian official accused of committing atrocities has kindled outrage back in Tehran. A court in Stockholm sentenced Hamid Nouri to life imprisonment over his alleged war crimes, prompting Iran to recall its ambassador.
Iran has imprisoned at least a dozen dual nationals in recent years as Tehran negotiates for money and influence with the West. Most of them are held on disputed spying charges.
Iran’s law also stipulates harsh punishment for drug crimes. Those charged with drug possession, dealing or trafficking offenses make up some 73% of executions in the country.
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| 2022-09-21T13:36:00Z
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NABLUS, West Bank (AP) — Several Israelis were wounded overnight after they entered the Palestinian West Bank city of Nablus and came under fire, the Israeli military said Tuesday.
The Israelis appeared to be headed on their own to a flashpoint shrine in the city, where visits are usually coordinated with the military under tight security precautions.
After they came under fire, troops entered the city, which is under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and its security forces, to evacuate the Israelis, the military said. Israelis are prohibited from entering the Palestinian-controlled areas, although some still do.
The military later said forces were exchanging fire with armed Palestinians in the city. It was not immediately clear if the events were connected.
Israel has been conducting near-daily raids in the occupied West Bank since March, driving up tensions in the area.
The raids were launched after a spate of deadly attacks against Israelis that killed 19 people. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed since the start of the year, many of them militants or people involved in clashes with Israeli forces, the military says. But civilians have also been killed.
Some Jews believe the biblical Joseph is buried in the Nablus tomb, while Muslims say a sheikh is buried there. The army escorts Jewish worshippers to the site, known to Jews as Joseph’s Tomb, several times a year, in coordination with Palestinian security forces.
As Israeli-Palestinian violence has flared this year, the site has again become a flashpoint. In April, some 100 Palestinians marched toward Joseph’s Tomb and set it ablaze before they were dispersed by Palestinian security forces. Images on social media showed parts of the tomb inside the shrine smashed and charred.
Earlier this month, the Israeli military said forces escorting Jewish worshippers to the shrine came under fire and then shot back. An 18-year-old Palestinian man was killed in the violence.
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| 2022-09-21T13:36:07Z
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TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Wednesday his ruling party will cut ties with the Unification Church following a widening scandal triggered by former leader Shinzo Abe’s assassination last month, and apologized for causing the loss of public trust in politics.
Widespread cozy ties between members of Kishida’s governing Liberal Democratic Party, many of them belonging to Abe’s faction, and the South Korean-born church have surfaced since Abe was shot to death while giving a campaign speech in July.
The suspect, Tetsuya Yamagani, who was arrested at the scene, allegedly told police he killed Abe because of his apparent link to the church. In a letter seen by The Associated Press and social media posts believed to be his, Yamagani said he believed his mother’s large donations to the church had ruined his life.
Some Japanese have expressed understanding, even sympathy, as details of the man’s life emerged, creating deep implications for the political party that has governed Japan virtually uninterrupted since World War II.
While religious groups must abide by law, “politicians are strictly required to be careful about groups with social problems,” Kishida said. Members of his Cabinet and other key posts have agreed to review their past links and cut ties with the church.
“As president of the LDP, I honestly express my apology” for causing the public’s doubts and concerns over the continuing revelations in media reports about the party’s extensive ties to the church, Kishida said.
The Unification Church, which was founded in South Korea in 1954 and came to Japan a decade later, has built close ties with a host of conservative lawmakers over their shared interests of opposing communism. Abe’s grandfather and former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi was a key figure who helped the church’s political unit in Tokyo.
Since the 1980s, the church has faced accusations of problematic recruiting, sales of religious items and donations, which often lead to financial strains on the followers’ families and, according to experts, mental health of adherents’ children. The issues led to the government’s decision to cut ties with the church.
Abe sent a video message last year to the Universal Peace Federation, an international group affiliated with the church, which experts say may have motivated the suspect in Abe’s shooting. Abe had praised the federation’s co-founder Hak Ja Han Moon, who is also head of the church, for her effort in promoting traditional family values.
Experts and cult watchers also say that the church has promoted its key agendas such as the opposition to women’s advancement and same-sex marriage to influence policy.
Kishida shuffled his Cabinet earlier in August to purge seven ministers linked to the church. Among them was Abe’s younger brother Nobuo Kishi, who acknowledged that church followers volunteered in his election campaign. Dozens of LDP members have since come forward with their ties to the church and related organizations.
Kishida said at the news conference that he has instructed LDP Secretary General Toshimitsu Motegi to survey the party fully over any other members’ ties to the church. Kishida said he is rushing the effort but it may take time because the review will span decades.
Kishida apologized for the loss of public trust because of the scandal and his lack of explanation for organizing a state funeral for Abe, one of most divisive leaders in Japan’s postwar history.
The state funeral scheduled for Sept. 27 has split public opinion. The only other state funeral in postwar Japan was for former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who signed the San Francisco Treaty that restored ties with the Allies and ended the U.S. occupation of Japan.
Kishida’s Cabinet last week allocated at least a 250 million yen ($1.8 million) budget to invite about 6,000 guests for the funeral at the Budokan arena in Tokyo.
Kishida insisted that Abe deserved a state funeral because of his achievement in raising Japan’s global profile as its longest-serving postwar leader. He said Japan must respond with courtesy to “outpouring of condolences” from foreign leaders and legislations.
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| 2022-09-21T13:36:15Z
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MIAMI (AP) — A Los Angeles attorney detained in Venezuela is pleading for help from the Biden administration, saying in a jailhouse message that he feels forgotten by the U.S. government as he faces criminal charges at the hands of one of the nation’s top adversaries.
Eyvin Hernandez, who has been detained for five months, describes in the recording how he has dedicated the past 15 years to public service as an employee of the Los Angeles County public defender’s office, seeking fair treatment for often penniless clients.
“No one should be abandoned at the time of their greatest need and when they’re most vulnerable,” he said in the almost two-minute recording, which was provided to The Associated Press by Hernandez’s family. “However, I don’t feel like my government feels that way about me.”
In a calm voice, Hernandez said he and other Americans imprisoned in Venezuela — there are at least 10, including five oil executives and three veterans — feel “like our government has abandoned us.”
Hernandez’s appeal comes as the Biden administration is under pressure to do more to bring home roughly 50 Americans it believes have been wrongfully detained by hostile governments around the world. Much of the focus is on Russia, where the U.S. has taken the unusual step of proposing a swap of a convicted arms dealer for WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner. U.S. officials have for months been quietly pursuing a separate deal with Nicolás Maduro’s socialist government in Venezuela, which holds the largest contingent of Americans suspected of being used as bargaining chips.
Henry Martinez said his brother sent him the voice message Aug. 21. A copy was also provided to the State Department, which has been weighing whether to turn Hernandez’s case over to the administration’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, Roger Carstens.
In the recording, Hernandez said it’s been months since he or any of his fellow Americans have seen a courtroom, nor do they have any hopes of getting a fair trial.
“This place is meant to break you psychologically and spiritually,” he said of confinement at a maximum security prison housing many of Maduro’s opponents. “We’re all innocent, yet we’re being charged and treated as terrorists.”
He said the uncertainty, isolation and human rights violations are taking a toll, with two Americans having already attempted suicide and a third on the brink with daily mental breakdowns.
“If you don’t get us out soon, then there might not be anyone left to save,” he said.
The AP was unable to verify Hernandez’s claims. But United Nations officials have long complained about the lack of independence for Venezuelan judges and prosecutors and about conditions at the facility where Hernandez and several other Americans are being held.
A State Department spokesman declined to comment on Hernadez’s case, citing privacy limitations, but said the agency continuously reviews the detentions of Americans overseas. He also noted that the U.S. government has issued an advisory warning Americans to avoid all travel to Venezuela due to the risk of wrongful detentions and threats from illegal armed groups, especially along the country’s porous borders.
Hernandez, who turned 44 in jail, was arrested March 31 along the Colombia-Venezuela border. His family says he traveled there from the city of Medellin with a Venezuelan friend who needed to get her passport stamped to resolve an issue with her migratory status in Colombia. His family said he never intended to enter Venezuela, and he was due to fly home three days later.
But the two apparently fell into the hands of criminal gangs.
Upon arrival by bus to the city of Cucuta, they hailed a taxi for the short drive to the Simon Bolivar International Bridge, according to an account Hernandez shared with his family. A fourth individual hopped in the front seat, purportedly offering his services as a guide who could help them navigate the confusion at the border, an area overrun by squatters, criminal gangs and a mass of people making their way back and forth in illegal crossings.
Before they knew it, the cab was stopped along a dirt path, and the two were ordered to get out and walk across the invisible border separating the two countries.
Once Hernandez realized his mistake, it was too late to turn back. A man carrying a rifle demanded he cough up $100, according to his family. When he protested that he didn’t have any cash, they put a hood over his head.
When his captors found his American passport, they told him he was in trouble and handed him over to security forces, who kept him incommunicado for weeks.
Adding to the Hernandez family’s anguish is the fact that he isn’t classified as wrongfully detained, a definition that covers Americans believed innocent or jailed for the purpose of exacting concessions from the U.S. Without such designation, a process that can take months, the U.S. government’s ability to push for his release is limited.
At least three of the 11 other Americans known to be detained in Venezuela are in a similar state of limbo. They include Jerrel Kenemore, a computer programmer arrested within a week of Hernandez, and two former Green Berets who took part in a blunder-filled beach attack in 2020 aimed at overthrowing Maduro.
Biden last month signed an executive order aimed at providing more information to families of Americans detained abroad and imposing stiff sentences on the criminals, terrorists and government officials holding them.
Maduro’s socialist government is a harsh critic of U.S. foreign policy. But more recently, as the Biden administration has shown a willingness to review the Trump-era policy of punishing Maduro with sanctions and calling for regime change, the outlook for a possible release has improved.
In March, the Maduro government freed two Americans following a surprise trip to Caracas by senior White House and State Department officials, including Carstens, who met with Hernandez in a subsequent wellness check on detained Americans in June. Maduro also vowed to resume negotiations with his opponents, although has so far failed to follow through.
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Follow Goodman on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/APJoshGoodman
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| 2022-09-21T13:36:22Z
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — A man who was beaten and held down by Arkansas law enforcement officers during an arrest that was caught on a widely circulated video has filed a federal lawsuit against the officers.
Attorneys for Randal Worcester filed the lawsuit Monday over the Aug. 21 arrest outside a convenience store in the small town of Mulberry that’s prompted state and federal criminal investigations. A bystander’s video shows one officer hold Worcester down as a sheriff’s deputy repeatedly punches and knees the 27-year-old man in the head before grabbing his hair and slamming him against the pavement. At the same time, a third officer also kneed Worcester repeatedly.
All three officers — Mulberry Officer Thell Riddle and Crawford County deputies Zachary King and Levi White — are white. Worcester is also white, according to jail booking information.
Worcester’s lawsuit accuses the officers, all of whom have been suspended, of violating his constitutional rights. The lawsuit also names the city of Mulberry, its police chief, Crawford County and its sheriff as defendants.
“Any reasonable law enforcement officer should have known that his conduct violated clearly established federal law and was a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the lawsuit said.
Mulberry is a community of about 1,600 people that’s roughly 140 miles (220 kilometers) northwest of Little Rock, near the Oklahoma state line.
Crawford County Sheriff Jimmy Damante has said Worcester was being questioned for threatening a clerk at a convenience store in nearby Alma. Damante said Worcester had tackled one of the deputies and punched him in the head before what is seen on the bystander’s video. The deputy suffered a concussion, Damante has said.
Damante has said that before the arrest, Worcester handed over a knife and gave the officers a false name.
An attorney for the two deputies said he was not aware of the lawsuit.
“However, I will vigorously defend the lawsuit like I do every lawsuit against my law enforcement clients,” Russell Wood said in an email.
Damante and Mulberry Police Chief Shannon Gregory did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment Tuesday afternoon.
Policing experts have said that the video of Worcester’s arrest raises red flags about the officers’ actions, saying that blows to the head amount to a potentially deadly use of force that’s only justified when someone poses a current and serious threat.
Worcester was treated at a hospital before being jailed on charges including second-degree battery and resisting arrest. He was released the following day on a $15,000 bond. The lawsuit said Worcester has permanent injuries from the arrest and that he will need continued medical treatment for injuries to his face, body and head.
Worcester’s lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages, as well as money for medical bills and lost wages.
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| 2022-09-21T13:36:30Z
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DENVER (AP) — A mentally ill man charged with killing three people and wounding eight others at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015 could become well enough to stand trial if he is forcibly given anti-psychotic medication, a prison psychologist and psychiatrist said Tuesday.
During a federal court hearing in Denver which Robert Dear interrupted proceedings several times with outbursts, psychologist Lea Ann Preston Baecht testified that there was a substantial likelihood medication would be able to treat his delusional disorder to a point where he would be able to participate in his case and help his defense, even if it did not completely get rid of his delusions.
Neither Preston Bacht nor Dr. Robert Sarrazin, who worked with her to evaluate Dear, 64, at the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri, thought psychotherapy alone would help Dear. Preston Bacht said Dear, 64, does not have an understanding of his illness, which she said is mainly marked by beliefs of being persecuted by others, including former President Barack Obama and the FBI.
“I don’t believe there is a less intrusive option in Mr. Dear’s case,” Preston Baecht said.
Dear responded by shouting “Marijuana,” one of many comments from him during the hearing.
When Preston Baecht said she did not think there would be any side effects from the medication that would make him incompetent to stand trial or communicate with his attorneys, Dear said loudly, “Bull—-t.”
“This is my brain at stake. They want to turn me into a zombie,” he said, prompting Judge Robert E. Blackburn to issue another warning to be quiet or risk being removed from the hearing.
Previously in court, Dear has declared himself a “warrior of the babies” and said he was guilty. He made other similar statements during Tuesday’s hearing, such as “I’m glad I did what I did. Total success.” At the end of the day as he was being led out of the courtroom by U.S. Marshals, he shouted at the judge “I had a right to take the stand, you bastard. Go to hell.”
The hearing was set to continue Wednesday, when Dear’s lawyers are expected to present their case. In questioning Sarrazin, federal public defender Natalie Stricklin stressed that the anti-psychotic medication proposed for Dear could cause side effects that would aggravate Dear’s existing health problems including high blood pressure and high cholesterol, which Dear has refused medication for.
Sarrazin said Dear could also be forced to take drugs to treat those health problems as part of his forcible medication for his delusions and blood could also be drawn from Dear against his will for laboratory tests to monitor his overall health. However, he acknowledged that it would be difficult to force him to submit to an electrocardigram to check the condition of of his heart since it would require him to be still.
Dear’s prosecution in state court and then federal court for the attack on the clinic in Colorado Springs has been stalled because he has been repeatedly found to be mentally incompetent to stand trial. Federal prosecutors are asking Blackburn to order that Dear be given medication against his will.
According to medical records cited by prosecutors, Dear said he had a heart attack after being forcibly medicated while at the state hospital in Colorado but Sarrazin said there was nothing to back that up in the records.
Dear was forcibly given medication over the course of about several days during a stay at Colorado’s state mental hospital, not long enough to determine if it was effective, Preston Baecht said.
Preston Baecht said she was recommending medication for Dear based on her experience as a psychologist and studies that have done been on prisoners given medication for delusional disorder.
While being questioned by defense attorney Jennifer Beck, Preston Baecht acknowledged that delusional disorder is relatively rare and not much research has been done on its treatment as a result.
According to state court documents, Dear told police he attacked the clinic because he was upset with Planned Parenthood for “the selling of baby parts.”
Federal prosecutors allege that Dear intended to wage “war” against the clinic because it offered abortion services, arming himself with four semi-automatic SKS rifles, five handguns, two other rifles, a shotgun, propane tanks and 500 rounds of ammunition. He allegedly began shooting outside the clinic before getting inside by shooting his way through a door, according to his federal indictment.
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| 2022-09-21T13:36:38Z
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BERLIN (AP) — Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union and for many the man who restored democracy to then-communist-ruled European nations, was saluted Wednesday as a rare leader who changed the world and for a time brought hope for peace among the superpowers.
But the man who died Tuesday at 91 was also reviled by many countrymen who blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union and its diminution as a superpower. The Russian nation that emerged from its Soviet past shrank in size as 15 new nations were created.
The loss of pride and power also eventually led to the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tried for the past quarter-century to restore Russia to its former glory and beyond.
U.S. President Joe Biden praised Gorbachev for being open to democratic changes. Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War.
“After decades of brutal political repression, he embraced democratic reforms. He believed in glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring – not as mere slogans, but as the path forward for the people of the Soviet Union after so many years of isolation and deprivation,” Biden said.
Biden added that “these were the acts of a rare leader – one with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it. The result was a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people.”
Although Gorbachev was widely feted abroad, he was a pariah at home. Putin acknowledged that Gorbachev had “a deep impact on the course of world history.”
“He led the country during difficult and dramatic changes, amid large-scale foreign policy, economic and social challenges,” Putin said in a short telegram sending his condolences to Gorbachev’s family.
Gorbachev “realized that reforms were necessary and tried to offer his solutions to the acute problems,” Putin said.
Reactions from Russian officials and lawmakers were mixed. They applauded Gorbachev for his part in ending the Cold War but censured him for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Oleg Morozov, a member of the main Kremlin party, United Russia, said Gorbachev should have “repented” for mistakes that went against Russia’s interests.
“He was a willing or an unwilling co-author of the unfair world order that our soldiers are now fighting on the battlefield,” Morozov said, in a reference to Russia’s current war in Ukraine.
Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s pro-democracy Solidarity movement in the 1980s and the country’s president from 1990-1995, had a more nuanced view of Gorbachev. He said he “admired, even liked him, but did not understand (him).”
“He believed to the last that communism could be reformed, but I, on the contrary, did not believe it was possible,” Walesa told the Wirtualna Polska media.
Walesa added: “He knew that the Soviet Union could not last much longer and he was doing everything he could to prevent the world from bringing Russia to account for communism. And he was successful there.”
World leaders paid tribute to a man some described as a great and brave leader.
In Germany, where Gorbachev is considered one of the fathers of the country’s reunification in 1990 and is popularly referred to as “Gorbi,” former Chancellor Angela Merkel saluted him as “a unique world politician.”
“Gorbachev wrote world history. He exemplified how a single statesman can change the world for the better,” she said, recalling how she had feared that Russian tanks might roll into East Germany, where she lived, as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised Gorbachev for paving the way for his country’s reunification, though he also pointed out that Gorbachev died at a time when many of his achievements have been destroyed.
“We know that he died at a time when not only democracy in Russia has failed — there is no other way to describe the current situation there — but also Russia and Russian President Putin are drawing new trenches in Europe and have started a horrible war against a neighboring country, Ukraine,” Scholz said.
Other European leaders picked up on that contrast between Gorbachev’s fame for peace-making and Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
Outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that “in a time of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, (Gorbachev’s) tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all.”
Gorbachev’s “desire for peace, his opposition to an imperialist vision of Russia, earned him a Nobel prize,” Italian Premier Mario Draghi said. “They are messages that are even more relevant in the face of the tragedy of the invasion of Ukraine.”
Others in Europe challenged the positive recollections of Gorbachev.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s top diplomat who is also the son of Vytautas Landsbergis, who led Lithuania’s independence movement in the early 1990s, tweeted that “Lithuanians will not glorify Gorbachev.”
Memories are still fresh in the Baltic country of Jan. 13, 1991, when hundreds of Lithuanians headed to the television tower in Vilnius to oppose Soviet troops deployed to crush the country’s bid to restore its independence. In the clashes that followed, 14 civilians were killed and more than 140 others were injured. Moscow recognized Lithuania’s independence in August that year.
“We will never forget the simple fact that his army murdered civilians to prolong his regime’s occupation of our country. His soldiers fired on our unarmed protesters and crushed them under his tanks. That is how we will remember him,” Landsbergis wrote.
But another Baltic leader, Latvian President Egils Levits, noted that Gorbachev’s policies enabled the eventual independence of the three Baltic countries.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Gorbachev “a one-of-a kind statesman who changed the course of history” and “did more than any other individual to bring about the peaceful end of the Cold War.”
“The world has lost a towering global leader, committed multilateralist, and tireless advocate for peace,” the U.N. chief said.
Gorbachev’s contemporaries pointed to the end of the Cold War as one of his achievements.
“Mikhail Gorbachev played a critical role in the peaceful end to the Cold War. At home, he was a figure of historical importance, but not in the way he intended,” said Robert M. Gates, who headed the CIA from 1991 to 1993 and later became U.S. defense secretary.
Calling Gorbachev “a brave leader and great statesman,” Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said the last Soviet leader “opened the gates of the Soviet Union for the great wave of Jewish immigration to Israel in the 1990s.”
In Asia, Gorbachev was remembered as a leader with the courage to bring change.
China recognized Gorbachev’s role in healing relations between Moscow and Beijing. Gorbachev had been an inspiration to reformist thinkers in China during the late 1980s, and his visit to Beijing in 1989 marked a watershed in relations between the sides.
“Mr. Gorbachev made positive contributions to the normalization of relations between China and the Soviet Union. We mourn his passing and extend our sympathies to his family,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said.
However, China’s Communist Party leaders also regard Gorbachev’s liberal approach as a fatal display of weakness and his moves toward peaceful coexistence with the West as a form of surrender.
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Patrick Quinn reported from Bangkok. AP journalists around the world contributed to this report.
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More AP stories on Mikhail Gorbachev here: https://apnews.com/hub/mikhail-gorbachev
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| 2022-09-21T13:36:46Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Amid the bright lights and electronic billboards across New York’s Times Square, city authorities are posting new signs proclaiming the bustling crossroads a “Gun Free Zone.”
The sprawling Manhattan tourist attraction is one of scores of “sensitive” places — including parks, churches and theaters — that will be off limits for guns under a sweeping new state law going into effect Thursday. The measure, passed after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June expanded gun rights, also sets stringent standards for issuing concealed carry permits.
New York is among a half-dozen states that had key provisions of its gun laws invalidated by the high court because of a requirement for applicants to prove they had “proper cause” for a permit. Gov. Kathy Hochul said Friday that she and her fellow Democrats in the state Legislature took action the next week because the ruling “destroyed the ability for a governor to be able to protect her citizens from people who carry concealed weapons anywhere they choose.”
The quickly adopted law, however, has led to confusion and court challenges from gun owners who say it improperly limits their constitutional rights.
“They seem to be designed less towards addressing gun violence and more towards simply preventing people from getting guns — even if those people are law-abiding, upstanding citizens, who according to the Supreme Court have the rights to have them,” said Jonathan Corbett, a Brooklyn attorney and permit applicant who is one of several people challenging the law in court.
Under the law, applicants for a concealed carry permit will have to complete 16 hours of classroom training and two hours of live-fire exercises. Ordinary citizens would be prohibited from bringing guns to schools, churches, subways, theaters and amusement parks — among other places deemed “sensitive” by authorities.
Applicants also will have to provide a list of social media accounts for the past three years as part of a “character and conduct” review. The requirement was added because shooters have sometimes dropped hints of violence online before they opened fire on people.
Sheriffs in some upstate counties said the additional work for their investigators could add to existing backlogs in processing applications.
In Rochester, Monroe County Sheriff Todd Baxter said it currently takes two to four hours to perform a pistol permit background check on a “clean” candidate. He estimate the new law will add another one to three hours for each permit. The county has about 600 pending pistol permits.
“It’s going to slow everything down just a bit more,” he said.
In the Mohawk Valley, Fulton County Sheriff Richard C. Giardino had questions on how the digital sleuthing would proceed.
“It says three years worth of your social media. We’re not going to print out three years of social media posts by everybody. If you look at my Facebook, I send out six or 10 things a day,” said the sheriff, a former district attorney and judge.
The list of prohibited spaces for carrying guns has drawn criticism from advocates who say it’s so extensive it will make it difficult for people with permits to move about in public. People carrying a gun could go into private business only with permission, such as a sign posted on the window.
Giardino has already started giving out signs to local businesses saying people can carry legal firearms on the premises. Jennifer Elson, who owns the Let’s Twist Again Diner in Amsterdam, said she put up the sheriff’s sign, along with one of her own reading in part “per our governor, we have to post this nonsense. If you are a law abiding citizen who obtained a legal permit to carry, you are welcome here.”
“I feel pretty strongly that everybody’s constitutional rights should be protected,” she said.
But in Times Square, visited by about 50 million tourists annually, and many less crowded places carrying a gun will be illegal starting Thursday.
New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said Tuesday she looked forward to seeing authorities move to “protect New Yorkers and visitors who frequent Times Square.”
One lawsuit challenging provisions of the law argued the rules make it hard for license holders to leave home without violating the law. A federal judge is expected to rule soon on a motion challenging multiple provisions of the law, which was filed on behalf of a Schenectady resident who holds a license to carry.
The Supreme Court ruling also led to a flurry of legislation in California to tighten rules on gun ownership, including a new law that could hold gun dealers and manufacturers responsible for any harm caused by anyone they have “reasonable cause to believe is at substantial risk” of using a gun illegally.
Earlier this month, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed into law a measure that would require gun permit applicants to undergo personal interviews with a licensing authority.
New Jersey required people to get training before receiving a permit and would require new residents to register guns brought in from out of state.
Hawaii, which has the nation’s lowest number of gun deaths, is still weighing its options. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, the state has only granted one new gun permit.
While New York does not keep statewide data on pistol permit applications, there are reports of long lines at county clerks’ office and other evidence of a surge in applications before the law takes effect.
In the Mohawk Valley, Pine Tree Rifle Club President Paul Catucci said interest in the club’s volunteer-run safety courses “blew right up” late this summer.
“I had to turn hundreds of them away,” he said.
___
Maysoon Khan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Follow Maysoon Khan on Twitter.
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Hill and Khan contributed from Albany, New York.
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| 2022-09-21T13:36:53Z
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TULUM, Mexico (AP) — Scraping the smelly sargassum seaweed off some beaches on Mexico’s resort-studded Caribbean coast has become not only a nightmare, but possibly a health threat, for the workers doing it — with the quantities washing ashore this year seemingly mountains not mounds.
Decomposing sargassum, which is actually algae, generates hydrogen sulfide gas. In small amounts in open areas, it’s not much more than an annoying odor: sulfurous, like rotting eggs.
But in the quantities seen in once-paradisical beach towns like Playa del Carmen, Tulum, and Xcalak, scientists say it can be dangerous to workers with respiratory problems as they rake up the seaweed maskless in the scorching heat. This year appears on track to be worse than even the peak sargassum year of 2018.
Ezequiel Martínez Lara is one of thousands of laborers who work six to eight hours per day heaving mounds of sargassum into wheelbarrows with pitchforks and then wheeling them off the beach to a growing pile on a neighboring street.
Martínez Lara used to earn as much as $50 per day guiding sports fishermen on catch-and-release outings, but now makes less than half that for collecting around 40 wheelbarrows of sargassum every day.
It is a Sisyphean task at a beach north of Tulum, where huge mats of seaweed float just offshore.
“If we clean it all off today, tomorrow more will have washed in,” said another worker, Austin Valle.
But workers like Martínez and Valle are exposing themselves to more than just the burning sun, says Rosa Rodríguez Martínez, a biologist in the beachside town of Puerto Morelos who studies reefs and coastal ecosystems for Mexico’s National Autonomous University.
“At the university we have started to measure the quantity of gases that sargassum produces when it is scraped up,” Rodríguez Martínez said. “At one spot (in a decomposed pile of seaweed) it reached 56 parts per million. That’s very high. Above two, that can be dangerous for people with respiratory problems.”
“I took off running” from the spot, she said.
Martínez Lara doesn’t have the luxury of avoiding the hydrogen sulfide gas. Like almost every other sargassum worker on the coast, he has no mask, gas sensor or medical care. He works at a day rate for the person who owns the house in front of the beach.
“When sargassum rots, it gives off a very strong odor like acid, and it is very bothersome when you breath it; it hurts a lot,” Martínez Lara said. He said he takes more simple precautions.
“We try to clean it off (the beach) as quickly as possible … to get it off when it is as fresh as possible,” he says.
A 2019 article in the Journal of Travel Medicine includes the disturbing warning, “More chronic exposure to these gasses can lead to conjunctival and neurocognitive symptoms such as memory loss and impaired balance, as well as non-specific symptoms such as headache, nausea and fatigue.”
The Florida Health Department, on the other hand, says “hydrogen sulfide levels in an area like the beach, where large amounts of air flow can dilute levels, is not expected to harm health.”
The sargassum problem isn’t as bad for tourists as for workers. But neither is it pleasant.
Ligia Collado-Vides, a marine botanist at Florida International University who specializes in studying macroalgae like sargassum, said, “If you’re swimming for a little bit, it shouldn’t be a danger at all,” but added that tiny jellyfish cousins known as hydrozoa often inhabit sargassum mats.
“If you’re going to be there for a long time playing in the sargassum, you can get like many, many, many stings from hydrozoans and those are toxic,” she noted, adding that long sleeves — something almost nobody wears at the beach — might help.
Sarah Callaway, a tourist from Denver, Colorado, was pretty much confined to playing with her kids in the pool in front of their rented beach house.
“The property is beautiful, but we were automatically struck … by the smell,” Callaway said. “The smell is really pungent and very strong. And then, yeah, we were disappointed with how much seaweed sargasso there is here.”
“The kids have tried to get in the ocean, but then they get kind of overwhelmed by it. So we really haven’t gotten to do the beach part of it, which is why we came,” she said.
It will also impact locals who depend on the tourist trade. Hundreds of thousands of people migrated to the coast in recent years for better paying jobs, but some may now be considering leaving.
Valle, the seaweed cleaner, said one of his friends in Tulum has been thinking of giving up her snack stand business because sales have dipped so much.
It’s hard to measure the impact on tourism. The Caribbean coast suffered a drop in visits during the coronavirus pandemic, but because Mexico never declared travel restrictions, testing requirements or mandatory mask rules, Americans have continued to come.
International tourism to the country as a whole surpassed pre-pandemic levels in the first half of 2022, with 10.26 million visitors from January to June, 1.5% higher than the 10.11 million tourists who arrived in Mexico in the first half of 2019.
Mexico’s strongest showing was with U.S. tourists. The number of Americans arriving by air in the first six months of 2022 was 6.66 million; that is 19.1% higher than in the same period of 2019.
But that boom may be slowing. Grupo Financiero Base noted in a research report that international tourist arrivals in June 2022 were down 13.8% from levels in June 2019. It’s unclear what — sargassum, inflation, or the war in Ukraine — may have caused that dip.
And overall tourist spending remains below pre-pandemic levels.
The picture is mixed because some of the most-heavily developed resorts like Cancun have not suffered as much from sargassum as lower-key resorts further south, like Playa del Carmen and Tulum.
Ocean currents and islands like Isla Mujeres shield Cancun from much of the floating sargassum. Given the large number of big hotels in Cancun with huge cleaning staffs and money to deploy floating booms, what sargassum does arrive is cleaned up more quickly.
The jury is still out on the floating booms, meant to trap sargassum mats at sea before they reach the beach.
“When the sea is calm, all types of booms work,” Rodríguez Martínez said. “When there are waves, none of them work.”
Some tourists like the area so much they’ll keep coming back.
“I will absolutely be back. We love it here,” said Jeff Chambers, a tourist from Palm Desert, California, who was strolling down the main seaside street in Tulum. “We like things a little slower.”
Some locals like Victor Reyes, who works in real estate in Tulum, are more sanguine about the seaweed, noting that it’s not so bad in the winter months.
“In the winter it’s better. In November, when the tourists want to come, the sargassum is gone,” Reyes says.
As bad as sargassum is for people — and Collado-Vides stresses that much more study is needed — it’s far worse for seagrass, fish and other marine life suffocated by seaweed that drops to the bottom, decomposes and creates oxygen-depleted or anoxic layers similar to dead zones.
“Sargassum stays there and goes down into the water column so nobody sees it, but on the bottom it is creating anoxic conditions,” she said.
Recounting one recent monitoring expedition, Collado-Vides said: “It’s really terrible … the amount of vertebrates, the amount of crabs, the amount of fish dead in just a 1-square meter quadrant.”
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ROME (AP) — Pope Francis on Tuesday wrapped up two days of closed-door meetings with about 180 cardinals, many of them young enough to elect a future pontiff, including discussions about how the Catholic Church’s governance could be made more inclusive.
The sessions focused on a new Apostolic constitution that, among other things, allows lay people to head important Vatican offices, envisioning greater decision-making roles for them, including women.
But since the church has closed the door to women in the priesthood, the most prestigious, and ultimately most powerful roles — including that of a pontiff — remain the realm of men.
The reforms also lend more institutional weight to efforts to fight clerical sex abuse. The document, made public earlier this year, replaced the constitution written by St. John Paul II in 1988.
Francis on Saturday raised 20 churchmen to the rank of cardinal, including 16 younger than 80 and thus eligible to vote in a conclave to elect his successor, when the time comes.
Until Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, the first pontiff in almost 600 years to do so, conclaves in recent centuries had followed the death of popes. Francis, who is 85, has said that resignation can be a valid option for pontiffs who can’t adequately carry out their role as leader of the world’s more than 1.3 billion Catholics.
But he has brushed off talk that he is contemplating stepping down soon despite health problems, including a bad knee that necessitates frequent wheelchair use.
In his homily at a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica to close out the meetings, Francis offered no details about this week’s discussions. But he exhorted the cardinals, known as the “princes of the church,” to be on guard against the “cancer, the woodworm, of worldly spirituality.”
While in Rome these days, cardinals from around the world could size each other up. Encounters, including informal ones, allow them to see who might have the potential to become a future pope as well as to ponder possible alliances among geographical groupings or among like-minded churchmen from more conservative or more progressive factions.
The Vatican said among themes discussed were the role of lay persons, financial transparency, the managerial structure of the Vatican bureaucracy as well as how to “announce the Gospel in an epoch like the current one.”
Francis has worked to reform the Holy See’s finances, including its multimillion-dollar investments, one of which is at the heart of a trial underway at the Holy See and involving, among others, a Vatican cardinal.
Francis has tried to make the church more inviting to those who might feel unwelcome, including LGBTQ Catholics, or undervalued, including women.
On Monday, a half-dozen female activists protested as cardinals, with their iconic red headgear, flocked to the meeting on Vatican grounds. The women held up red parasols with slogans reading, “Sexism is a Cardinal Sin.” Other slogans were: “It’s reigning men” and “Ordain Women.”
One protester, Miriam Duignan, lamented that the cardinals were “going to talk about the future of the church without half of the church.”
___
Sabrina Sergi contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T13:37:08Z
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CHICAGO (AP) — Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday at R. Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago after presenting two weeks of testimony, including from four Kelly accusers, in their bid to prove the singer enticed underage girls for sex, produced child pornography and successfully rigged his 2008 state trial.
Among the last prosecution witnesses was a 42-year-old woman who went by the pseudonym “Nia.” Taking the stand Tuesday morning, she was the fourth and final accuser to testify at the trial in Kelly’s hometown. A fifth accuser, who prosecutors had said during openings would testify, never did. They didn’t explain why.
Through her testimony, Nia painted a picture of Kelly as a master manipulator who reeled in star-stuck fans, like her, to sexually abuse them and then discarded them.
The highlight of prosecutors’ case came two weeks ago with the testimony of a 37-year-old woman who used the pseudonym “Jane.” She described Kelly sexually abusing her hundreds of times starting in 1998 when she was 14 and Kelly was around 30.
Jane’s testimony is vital to the charge accusing Kelly of fixing his 2008 child pornography trial, at which he was acquitted. She testified that Kelly and his associates threatened and paid off her and her parents to lie to a grand jury before that trial.
Legal teams for Kelly and two co-defendants now get their chance to attack the government’s case. Judge Harry Leinenweber told jurors they would have Wednesday off, then return for the first defense witnesses Thursday. Closing arguments are expected to happen in the middle of next week.
A New York federal judge sentenced Kelly in June to 30 years in prison for convictions on racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
Kelly gave Nia, an aspiring actress and model, his telephone number after the then-15 year-old asked him for an autograph at an Atlanta mall in 1996, she testified. She said Kelly knew her age when he invited her to a concert in Minnesota, bought her plane ticket and sent a limousine with an all-red interior to pick her up.
On the way to the airport, Nia stopped to buy a red rose for Kelly, which she placed in her hotel room. When Kelly came to her room, he kissed her, then told her to undress and sit next to him on the bed. She said she was uncomfortable but did as he said. After touching her and himself, he quickly left, she said.
“I never got the chance to give him the rose,” Nia told jurors.
Nia spoke calmly and clearly as Kelly, wearing in a dark blue suit and black face mask, sat some 25 feet (7.6 meters) in front of her and looked directly at her. When Jane testified earlier in the trial, he often kept his eyes down.
Nia said that for weeks after meeting Kelly, he promptly answered all her calls. But before long, he never answered them. When she saw him years later at a video shoot, she said she was hurt when he didn’t appear to recognize or acknowledge her.
She ended up suing Kelly in the early 2000s, alleging sexual abuse. Kelly quickly settled, paying her $500,000.
Kelly’s 2008 state trial revolved around a video prosecutors said showed him sexually abusing Jane. She did not testify at that trial, but she told jurors at the current trial that she was the child in the video and Kelly was the adult man. Jurors at the ongoing trial viewed excerpts of that video and two others.
Kelly sold millions of albums even after allegations about his abuse began circulating publicly in the 1990s. Widespread outrage didn’t emerge until after the #MeToo reckoning and the 2019 docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly.”
Kelly associates Derrel McDavid and Milton Brown are co-defendants at the Chicago trial. McDavid, a longtime Kelly business manager, is accused of helping Kelly rig the 2008 trial. Brown is charged with receiving child pornography. Like Kelly, they have denied wrongdoing.
___
Follow Michael Tarm on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mtarm. Find AP’s full coverage of the R. Kelly trial at https://apnews.com/hub/r-kelly.
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| 2022-09-21T13:37:15Z
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PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Parents of children enrolled in Maine religious schools fought for years — all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — for the state to treat tuition reimbursements the same as other private schools.
But only one of the religious high schools that stood to benefit has signed up to participate this fall, after Maine’s attorney general warned that the schools would have to abide by state antidiscrimination laws, including those that protect LGBTQ students and faculty. That development has frustrated the families who sued.
“Their hands are tied. The state said you can take the money, but we’ll tie your hands,” said David Carson, whose daughter was a sophomore at Bangor Christian Schools when his family and two other plaintiffs sued in 2018.
The Supreme Court ruled in June that Maine can’t exclude religious schools from a program that offers tuition for private education in rural towns where there are no public schools.
Religious high schools with a known stake in the tuition fight include two Roman Catholic-affiliated schools, along with schools in Bangor, Waterville and Houlton.
Last year, 29 private schools participated in the tuition reimbursement program, enrolling more than 4,500 students, officials said. Those schools that meet the state’s criteria can get about $12,000 per student in taxpayer funding.
So far, only one religious school has signed up to participate, and that application will go through a review process, said Marcus Mrowka, a state education spokesperson. Mrowka declined to identify the school.
The deadline for applications is Thursday.
Michael Bindas is a senior attorney at the Virginia-based Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian law firm that represented the families who sued. He said he’s not surprised the schools are slow to decide whether to participate, because of the questions raised by the attorney general.
“Those open questions, however, will be resolved in time, and we certainly expect religious schools to participate,” he said.
It’s more likely that there will be a greater impact in the 2023-24 school year, said Carroll Conley, executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine, and a former Christian school headmaster.
“People want to see it happening, but schools are being cautious. It’s a big change,” Conley said.
There have been several lawsuits over the years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling earlier this year, which was hailed as a victory for school choice proponents — potentially giving life to efforts in some of the states that have not directed taxpayer money to private, religious education.
The Association of Christian Schools International, a Colorado-based organization that promotes Christian education, said the fact that 32 other states already have a school choice program speaks volumes.
“We hope that the 18 states that do not have school choice programs will one day have one,” the organization said in a statement.
In Maine, Attorney General Aaron Frey criticized the Supreme Court ruling and said all schools that accept public funds, including religious schools, must abide by the Maine Human Rights Act, which bans discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or disability. That would mean accepting gay and transgender teachers and pupils, he said.
Both Christian schools associated with the lawsuit — Temple Academy in Waterville and Bangor Christian Schools — have policies that discriminate against students and staff on a basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, he said.
The Rev. Tom Brown, who is senior pastor and president at Bangor Christian Schools and an affiliated church, said in an email that the “we are processing” the attorney general’s statements. He confirmed that no students will be getting state tuition reimbursement this fall.
Officials from Temple Academy didn’t return messages.
The Supreme Court ruling doesn’t affect the Carson family because their daughter already graduated from high school, and is enrolled in college.
But David Carson, of Glenburn, said it’s frustrating to see the legal victory muddied by the attorney general.
“It’s disappointing when you do all this and nothing happens,” he said. “It’s kind of a circus to me. The Supreme Court says one thing, but the state attorney general just does what he wants to do.”
___
Follow David Sharp on Twitter @David_Sharp_AP
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| 2022-09-21T13:37:23Z
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MOSCOW (AP) — Mikhail Gorbachev, who set out to revitalize the Soviet Union but ended up unleashing forces that led to the collapse of communism, the breakup of the state and the end of the Cold War, died Tuesday. The last Soviet leader was 91.
The Central Clinical Hospital said in a statement that Gorbachev died after a long illness. No other details were given.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies that Russian President Vladimir Putin offered deep condolences over Gorbachev’s death and would send an official telegram to Gorbachev’s family in the morning.
Though in power less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a breathtaking series of changes. But they quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian domination and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation.
His decline was humiliating. His power hopelessly sapped by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, he spent his last months in office watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned on Dec. 25, 1991. The Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion a day later.
A quarter-century after the collapse, Gorbachev told The Associated Press that he had not considered using widespread force to try to keep the USSR together because he feared chaos in the nuclear country.
“The country was loaded to the brim with weapons. And it would have immediately pushed the country into a civil war,” he said.
Many of the changes, including the Soviet breakup, bore no resemblance to the transformation that Gorbachev had envisioned when he became Soviet leader in March 1985.
By the end of his rule he was powerless to halt the whirlwind he had sown. Yet Gorbachev may have had a greater impact on the second half of the 20th century than any other political figure.
“I see myself as a man who started the reforms that were necessary for the country and for Europe and the world,” Gorbachev told The AP in a 1992 interview shortly after he left office.
“I am often asked, would I have started it all again if I had to repeat it? Yes, indeed. And with more persistence and determination,” he said.
Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War and spent his later years collecting accolades and awards from all corners of the world. Yet he was widely despised at home.
Russians blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union — a once-fearsome superpower whose territory fractured into 15 separate nations. His former allies deserted him and made him a scapegoat for the country’s troubles.
His run for president in 1996 was a national joke, and he polled less than 1% of the vote.
In 1997, he resorted to making a TV ad for Pizza Hut to earn money for his charitable foundation.
“In the ad, he should take a pizza, divide it into 15 slices like he divided up our country, and then show how to put it back together again,” quipped Anatoly Lukyanov, a one-time Gorbachev supporter.
Gorbachev never set out to dismantle the Soviet system. What he wanted to do was improve it.
Soon after taking power, Gorbachev began a campaign to end his country’s economic and political stagnation, using “glasnost” or openness, to help achieve his goal of “perestroika” or restructuring.
In his memoirs, he said he had long been frustrated that in a country with immense natural resources, tens of millions were living in poverty.
“Our society was stifled in the grip of a bureaucratic command system,” Gorbachev wrote. “Doomed to serve ideology and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, it was strained to the utmost.”
Once he began, one move led to another: He freed political prisoners, allowed open debate and multi-candidate elections, gave his countrymen freedom to travel, halted religious oppression, reduced nuclear arsenals, established closer ties with the West and did not resist the fall of Communist regimes in Eastern European satellite states.
But the forces he unleashed quickly escaped his control.
Long-suppressed ethnic tensions flared, sparking wars and unrest in trouble spots such as the southern Caucasus region. Strikes and labor unrest followed price increases and shortages of consumer goods.
In one of the low points of his tenure, Gorbachev sanctioned a crackdown on the restive Baltic republics in early 1991.
The violence turned many intellectuals and reformers against him. Competitive elections also produced a new crop of populist politicians who challenged Gorbachev’s policies and authority.
Chief among them was his former protegee and eventual nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, who became Russia’s first president.
“The process of renovating this country and bringing about fundamental changes in the international community proved to be much more complex than originally anticipated,” Gorbachev told the nation as he stepped down.
“However, let us acknowledge what has been achieved so far. Society has acquired freedom; it has been freed politically and spiritually. And this is the most important achievement, which we have not fully come to grips with in part because we still have not learned how to use our freedom.”
There was little in Gorbachev’s childhood to hint at the pivotal role he would play on the world stage. On many levels, he had a typical Soviet upbringing in a typical Russian village. But it was a childhood blessed with unusual strokes of good fortune.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born March 2, 1931, in the village of Privolnoye in southern Russia. Both of his grandfathers were peasants, collective farm chairmen and members of the Communist Party, as was his father.
Despite stellar party credentials, Gorbachev’s family did not emerge unscathed from the terror unleashed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin: Both grandfathers were arrested and imprisoned for allegedly anti-Soviet activities.
But, rare in that period, both were eventually freed. In 1941, when Gorbachev was 10, his father went off to war, along with most of the other men from Privolnoye.
Meanwhile, the Nazis pushed across the western steppes in their blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union; they occupied Privolnoye for five months.
When the war was over, young Gorbachev was one of the few village boys whose father returned. By age 15, Gorbachev was helping his father drive a combine harvester after school and during the region’s blistering, dusty summers.
His performance earned him the order of the Red Banner of Labor, an unusual distinction for a 17-year-old. That prize and the party background of his parents helped him land admission in 1950 to the country’s top university, Moscow State.
There, he met his wife, Raisa Maximovna Titorenko, and joined the Communist Party. The award and his family’s credentials also helped him overcome the disgrace of his grandfathers’ arrests, which were overlooked in light of his exemplary Communist conduct.
In his memoirs, Gorbachev described himself as something of a maverick as he advanced through the party ranks, sometimes bursting out with criticism of the Soviet system and its leaders.
His early career coincided with the “thaw” begun by Nikita Khrushchev. As a young Communist propaganda official, he was tasked with explaining the 20th Party Congress that revealed Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s repression of millions to local party activists. He said he was met first by “deathly silence,” then disbelief.
“They said: ‘We don’t believe it. It can’t be. You want to blame everything on Stalin now that he’s dead,’” he told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview.
He was a true if unorthodox believer in socialism. He was elected to the powerful party Central Committee in 1971, took over Soviet agricultural policy in 1978, and became a full Politburo member in 1980.
Along the way he was able to travel to the West, to Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and Canada. Those trips had a profound effect on his thinking, shaking his belief in the superiority of Soviet-style socialism.
“The question haunted me: Why was the standard of living in our country lower than in other developed countries?” he recalled in his memoirs. “It seemed that our aged leaders were not especially worried about our undeniably lower living standards, our unsatisfactory way of life, and our falling behind in the field of advanced technologies.”
But Gorbachev had to wait his turn. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, and was succeeded by two other geriatric leaders: Yuri Andropov, Gorbachev’s mentor, and Konstantin Chernenko.
It wasn’t until March 1985, when Chernenko died, that the party finally chose a younger man to lead the country: Gorbachev. He was 54 years old.
His tenure was filled with rocky periods, including a poorly conceived anti-alcohol campaign, the Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
But starting in November 1985, Gorbachev began a series of attention-grabbing summit meetings with world leaders, especially U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, which led to unprecedented, deep reductions in the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals.
After years of watching a parade of stodgy leaders in the Kremlin, Western leaders practically swooned over the charming, vigorous Gorbachev and his stylish, brainy wife.
But perceptions were very different at home. It was the first time since the death of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin that the wife of a Soviet leader had played such a public role, and many Russians found Raisa Gorbachev showy and arrogant.
Although the rest of the world benefited from the changes Gorbachev wrought, the rickety Soviet economy collapsed in the process, bringing with it tremendous economic hardship for the country’s 290 million people.
In the final days of the Soviet Union, the economic decline accelerated into a steep skid. Hyper-inflation robbed most older people of their life’s savings. Factories shut down. Bread lines formed.
And popular hatred for Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, grew. But the couple won sympathy in summer 1999 when it was revealed that Raisa Gorbachev was dying of leukemia.
During her final days, Gorbachev spoke daily with television reporters, and the lofty-sounding, wooden politician of old was suddenly seen as an emotional family man surrendering to deep grief.
Gorbachev worked on the Gorbachev Foundation, which he created to address global priorities in the post-Cold War period, and with the Green Cross foundation, which was formed in 1993 to help cultivate “a more harmonious relationship between humans and the environment.”
Gorbachev took the helm of the small United Social Democratic Party in 2000 in hopes it could fill the vacuum left by the Communist Party, which he said had failed to reform into a modern leftist party after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He resigned from the chairmanship in 2004.
He continued to comment on Russian politics as a senior statesman — even if many of his countrymen were no longer interested in what he had to say.
“The crisis in our country will continue for some time, possibly leading to even greater upheaval,” Gorbachev wrote in a memoir in 1996. “But Russia has irrevocably chosen the path of freedom, and no one can make it turn back to totalitarianism.”
Gorbachev veered between criticism and mild praise for Putin, who has been assailed for backtracking on the democratic achievements of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras.
While he said Putin did much to restore stability and prestige to Russia after the tumultuous decade following the Soviet collapse, Gorbachev protested growing limitations on media freedom, and in 2006 bought one of Russia’s last investigative newspapers, Novaya Gazeta.
Gorbachev also spoke out against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. A day after the Feb. 24 attack, he issued a statement calling for “an early cessation of hostilities and immediate start of peace negotiations.”
“There is nothing more precious in the world than human lives. Negotiations and dialogue on the basis of mutual respect and recognition of interests are the only possible way to resolve the most acute contradictions and problems,” he said.
Gorbachev ventured into other new areas in his 70s, winning awards and kudos around the world. He won a Grammy in 2004 along with former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Italian actress Sophia Loren for their recording of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and the United Nations named him a Champion of the Earth in 2006 for his environmental advocacy.
Gorbachev is survived by a daughter, Irina, and two granddaughters.
The official news agency Tass reported that Gorbachev will be buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery next to his wife.
___
Vladimir Isachenkov and Kate de Pury in Moscow contributed.
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| 2022-09-21T13:37:30Z
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MOSCOW (AP) — Russian prosecutors at the trial of a former journalist asked the court Tuesday to hand him a 24-year prison sentence on treason charges.
Ivan Safronov. who worked as a journalist for a decade before becoming an adviser to the head of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, has been in custody since his July 2020 arrest in Moscow. He has rejected the charges of passing military secrets to Czech intelligence and insisted on his innocence.
Safronov’s case reflects the challenges faced by Russian journalists, which have grown even tougher amid Moscow’s military action in Ukraine.
Safronov, who covered military and security issues for the leading Russian business daily Kommersant before joining Roscosmos, stated that he had collected all the information from open sources in the course of his work and did nothing illegal. He has argued that the investigators have failed to spell out the treason charges and explain what secrets he had allegedly revealed.
Many Russian journalists and human rights activists have pushed for Safronov’s release, and some have alleged that the authorities may have wanted to take revenge for his reporting that exposed Russian military incidents and shady arms deals.
Roscosmos has said that Safronov didn’t have access to state secrets, and claimed that the charges didn’t relate to Safronov’s work for the corporation, which he joined in May 2020.
Rights activists, journalists, scientists and corporate officials who have faced treason accusations in Russia in recent years have found it difficult to defend themselves because of secrecy surrounding their cases and a lack of public access to information.
Safronov’s father also worked for Kommersant covering military issues after retiring from the armed forces. In 2007, he died after falling from a window of his apartment building in Moscow.
Investigators concluded that he killed himself, but some Russian media outlets questioned the official version, pointing to his intent to publish a sensitive report about secret arms deliveries to Iran and Syria.
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| 2022-09-21T13:37:38Z
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CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The Solomon Islands on Wednesday asked countries to not send naval vessels to the South Pacific nation until approval processes are overhauled, amid concerns over a new security pact between the Solomons and China.
The government made the request after the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Oliver Henry and the British navy patrol boat HMS Spey canceled planned port calls last week due to bureaucratic delays.
The United States and Britain are among countries concerned that a new security pact with Beijing could lead to a Chinese naval base being constructed less than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) off Australia’s northeast coast.
Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said the Oliver Henry crew had failed to provide required information in time for his office to approve the visit. The Oliver Henry refueled at Papua New Guinea instead.
The HMS Spey withdrew its application to visit, Sogavare said.
“The delay in these approvals demonstrate the need for the government to review and refine its approval requirements and procedures for visiting military vessels to Solomon Islands,” Sogavare said in a statement.
“To this end, we have requested our partners to give us time to review and put in place our new processes before sending further requests for military vessels to enter the country.”
He said the new process would universally apply to all visiting military vessels.
The American and British ships had been taking part in Operation Island Chief, which monitors fishing in the region.
The Coast Guard said the Oliver Henry diverted to the Papua New Guinea capital Port Moresby after the Solomons’ government failed to respond to a request for diplomatic clearance to land in the country.
Britain’s Royal Navy did not comment directly on reports that the HMS Spey was denied a port call in the Solomons.
Australian police have been maintaining peace in the Solomons under a bilateral security treaty since rioting in the capital Honiara late last year.
The Australian center-left Labor Party, which was elected to government in May, described the Sino-Solomons security pact as Australia’s worst foreign policy failure in the Pacific since World War II.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declined to say whether intelligence officials had warned him not to send warships.
“I don’t discuss the briefings that I receive on national security,” Albanese told reporters.
“Australia is very engaged with our Pacific neighbors and indeed Prime Minister Sogavare is going to visit Australia and I will welcome his visit,” Albanese added. The date of the visit has yet to be announced.
Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said whether military vessels were allowed to visit the Solomons was a question for the Solomons’ government.
“I’m confident that if we put in the work as a nation, we will be the partner of choice for Solomon Islands and we are putting in that work,” Marles said.
Asked if he had sought clarification from the Solomons, Marles said there were “ongoing conversations” with Honiara.
The U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy is currently in Honiara.
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| 2022-09-21T13:37:45Z
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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa faced a grilling by lawmakers in Parliament on Tuesday as they demanded answers on his handling of the theft of millions of dollars from his farm.
Ramaphosa faced loud heckling from opposition members who called for him to answer questions about the theft at his Phala Phala farm in Limpopo province. The parliamentary session was adjourned before he answered all questions on the matter.
The president is being investigated over allegations that he was holding foreign currency at his farm that had not been properly declared to financial officials. This has raised suspicion that Ramaphosa did not report the theft because the cash was being held illegally.
When questioned in Parliament about the allegations, Ramaphosa said he had been advised that he should not make any public statements about the matter until investigations have been concluded.
“I have responded, and will continue to respond, to all the questions that have been put to me by the relevant authorities with regards to the theft at my farm,” said Ramaphosa.
“It is important for me that due process is followed, including the process that is going to unfold in Parliament,” he said.
However, some opposition lawmakers insisted that Ramaphosa was obliged to answer questions on the matter as he has not been formally charged and the issue is not before a court of law.
At least three members of the leftist opposition party, Economic Freedom Fighters, were physically ejected from the chambers for shouting and disrupting order.
Parliament has agreed to form an independent panel of experts to look into the allegations against Ramaphosa regarding the money at his Phala Phala farm. The report will be referred to parliament’s intelligence committee.
The allegations against Ramaphosa come as he will be seeking re-election as leader of the ruling African National Congress party in December. He must be the party’s leader in order to stand as its presidential candidate to be reelected as South African president in the 2024 general elections.
The allegations are a blow to Ramaphosa’s carefully crafted image as a corruption-buster. He campaigned on promises to clean up South Africa’s rampant corruption in 2019 when he was elected president.
Not only is Ramaphosa confronted by heated criticism from opposition parties, he also has detractors within his African National Congress party. A large number of ANC officials and even Cabinet members are loyal to his predecessor, former President Jacob Zuma, despite the corruption charges against the ex-leader. They have called for Ramaphosa to step down until he is cleared of any wrongdoing in what is called the Phala Phala scandal.
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| 2022-09-21T13:37:52Z
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MONROE, Mich. (AP) — Severe storms that brought damaging winds, heavy rains and flash flooding to parts of the Midwest and the South were blamed for the deaths of three people, including two children in Michigan and Arkansas as well as a woman in Ohio.
Monday’s storms also knocked out electrical service to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Indiana and Michigan, with dozens of schools canceling classes in Michigan alone on Tuesday because of power outages.
In the Michigan city of Monroe, a 14-year-old girl was electrocuted Monday night in the backyard of her home after coming into contact with an electrical line that was knocked down by a thunderstorm, the public safety department said in a Facebook post.
The girl was with a friend and she reached for what she believed was a stick, but it turned out to be the power line, the department said.
And in the Detroit-area community of Warren, two boys were hospitalized — including an 8-year-old who was in critical condition — after one of them touched a downed power line Tuesday morning, The Detroit News reported, citing a fire department official.
In Arkansas, an 11-year-old boy died after he was swept into a storm drain during heavy rainfall Monday, authorities said.
A 47-year-old woman who tried to help the child was also pulled from the drain and taken to a hospital for treatment, according to police in Bentonville. Slow-moving thunderstorms brought heavy rainfall to the area Monday and caused localized flash flooding, the National Weather Service said.
“Those heavy rains, when they fell, a lot of them fell really quickly and in a short time,” said meteorologist Brad McGavock with the weather service in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which covers parts of Arkansas. “Water management through those storm drains can really lead to a big volume of water through those culverts.”
In Ohio, a woman was killed Monday night when a tree fell on her behind her home in Toledo just as a strong storm moved through the area, the city’s fire department said. Her name and age were not released.
The storms were widespread in states including Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. Tree branches and power lines fell while winds gusted as high as 58 mph (93 kilometers per hour) at Battle Creek Executive Airport in Michigan and 60 mph (96 kilometers per hour) in Huntington, Indiana, the weather service reported.
On Monday night, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said that he was declaring a state of emergency after excessive rainfall exacerbated problems in one of Jackson’s water-treatment plants and caused low water pressure through much of the capital city. A swollen Pearl River caused flooding in Jackson on Monday, days after storms dumped heavy rain.
The Mississippi flooding was less severe than flooding that caused death and destruction in Kentucky last month. Those floods left at least 39 dead and robbed thousands of families of all of their possessions. Nearly a month later, residents are wrestling with whether to rebuild at the place they call home or to start over somewhere else.
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| 2022-09-21T13:38:00Z
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A team of international nuclear inspectors was heading Wednesday to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant caught in the middle of the fighting in southern Ukraine amid international concern of a potential accident or radiation leak.
Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he hoped to establish a permanent mission in Ukraine to monitor Europe’s largest nuclear plant.
“These operations are very complex operations. We are going to a war zone. We are going to occupied territory. And this requires explicit guarantees from not only from the Russians, but also from the Republic of Ukraine,” Grossi said in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv before the monitoring the mission’s departure.
“We have been able to secure that. … So now we are moving.”
The power plant has been occupied by Russian forces and operated by Ukrainian workers since the early days of the 6-month-old war.
It was recently cut off temporarily from the electrical grid because of fire damage, causing a blackout in the region and heightening fears of a catastrophe in a country haunted by the Chernobyl disaster.
Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko said Kyiv is seeking international assistance to try and demilitarize the area.
“We think that the mission should be a very important step to return (the plant) to Ukrainian government control by the end of the year,” Galushchenko told The Associated Press.
“We have information that they are now trying to hide their military presence, so they should check all of this.”
Zaporizhzhia is a vital source of energy for Ukraine and remains connected to its power grid. Ukraine and Russia accuse each other of shelling the wider region around the nuclear power plant and the risks are so severe that officials have begun distributing anti-radiation iodine tablets to nearby residents. Grossi met Tuesday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss the mission that is expected to last several days. The inspectors from the IAEA, a United Nations body, where due to reach the Zaporizhzhia region, 450 kilometers (280 miles) southeast of the Ukrainian capital, later Wednesday.
___ Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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| 2022-09-21T13:38:15Z
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ISLAMABAD (AP) — The United Nations and Pakistan issued an appeal Tuesday for $160 million in emergency funding to help millions affected by record-breaking floods that have killed more than 1,160 people since mid-June.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Pakistan’s flooding, caused by weeks of unprecedented monsoon rains, were a signal to the world to step up action against climate change.
“Let’s stop sleepwalking toward the destruction of our planet by climate change,” he said in a video message to an Islamabad ceremony launching the funding appeal. “Today, it’s Pakistan. Tomorrow, it could be your country.”
Guterres will visit Pakistan on Sept. 9 to tour areas “most impacted by this unprecedented climate catastrophe,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric announced Tuesday. The U.N. chief meet displaced families and witness how U.N. staff are their humanitarian partners are supporting government efforts to provide assistance, Dujarric said
More than 33 million people, or one in seven Pakistanis, have been affected by the catastrophic flooding, which has devastated a country already trying to revive a struggling economy. More than 1 million homes have been damaged or destroyed in the past two and half months, displacing millions of people. Around a half million of those displaced are living in organized camps, while others have had to find their own shelter.
Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif said the floods badly destroyed crops, and his government was considering importing wheat to avoid any shortage of food.
Sharif said Pakistan was witnessing the worst flooding in its history and any inadvertent delay by the international community in helping victims “will be devastating for the people of Pakistan.”
He promised funds from the international community would be spent in a transparent manner and that he would ensure all aid reaches those in need. “This is my commitment,” he told reporters, saying his country is “facing the toughest moment of its history.”
Pakistan says it has received aid from some countries, and others were dispatching aid too.
On Tuesday, the U.S. government said it would provide $30 million in assistance to help victims of the flood. According to a statement released by the U.S. Agency for International Development, this aid will be given to Pakistan through USAID. It said the United States is deeply saddened by the devastating loss of life and livelihoods throughout Pakistan.
According to initial government estimates, the devastation caused $10 billion in damage to the economy.
“It is a preliminary estimate likely to be far greater,” Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal told The Associated Press. More than 243 bridges and more than 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) of road have been damaged.
Although rains stopped three days ago, large swaths of the country remain underwater, and the main rivers, the Indus and the Swat, are still swollen. The National Disaster Management Authority on Tuesday warned emergency services to be on maximum alert, saying flood waters over the next 24 hours could cause further damage.
Rescuers continued to evacuate stranded people from inundated villages to safer ground. Makeshift tent camps have sprung up along highways.
Meteorologists have warned of more rains in coming weeks.
“The situation is likely to deteriorate even further as heavy rains continue over areas already inundated by more than two months of storms and flooding. For us, this is no less than a national emergency,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said Tuesday, urging the international community to give generously to the U.N. appeal.
“Since mid-June, in fact, Pakistan has been battling one of the most severe, totally anomalous cycles of torrential monsoon weather,” he said. Rainfall during that time was three times the average, and up to six times higher in some areas, he said.
The U.N. flash appeal for $160 million will provide food, water, sanitation, health and other forms of aid to some 5.2 million people, Gutteres said.
“The scale of needs is rising like the flood waters. It requires the world’s collective and prioritized attention,” he said.
Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman Asim Iftikhar told U.N. correspondents at a virtual press conference that Turkey, China, United Arab Emirates and Qatar all offered relief supplies, some of which has already arrived. More important will be the next reconstruction and rehabilitation phase where requirements are going to be “huge,” he said.
A day earlier, the International Monetary Fund’s executive board approved the release of a much awaited $1.17 billion for Pakistan.
The funds are part of a $6 billion bailout agreed on in 2019. The latest tranche had been on hold since earlier this year, when the IMF expressed concern about Pakistan’s compliance with the deal’s terms under the government of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Khan was ousted through a no-confidence vote in the parliament in April.
Pakistan has risked default as its reserves dwindle and inflation has spiraled, and to get the IMF bailout, the government has had to agree to austerity measures.
The flooding catastrophe, however, adds new burdens to the cash-strapped government. It also reflects how poorer countries often pay the price for climate change largely caused by more industrialized nations. Since 1959, Pakistan is responsible for only 0.4% of the world’s historic emissions blamed for climate change. The U.S. is responsible for 21.5%, China for 16.5% and the EU 15%.
Several scientists say the record-breaking flooding has all the hallmarks of being affected by climate change.
“This year, Pakistan has received the highest rainfall in at least three decades,” said Abid Qaiyum Suleri, executive director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute and a member of Pakistan’s Climate Change Council. “Extreme weather patterns are turning more frequent in the region and Pakistan is not an exception.”
___
Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Geneva and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T13:38:22Z
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ROME (AP) — The Vatican on Tuesday moved to defend Pope Francis from allegations he hasn’t come down hard enough on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, saying the pontiff clearly views the war launched by Moscow as “senseless, repugnant and sacrilegious.”
Last week, Ukraine summoned the top papal diplomat to complain about recent comments by Francis. At an audience a day earlier at the Vatican, Francis had referred to a national Russian TV commentator who was killed by a car bomb in Moscow as a “poor girl.”
Francis was speaking about the slaying of Darya Dugina, the daughter of right-wing Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin, who fiercely backs the war.
Russia has accused Ukrainian intelligence in the bombing, which Ukraine denies.
In his remarks, Francis also said orphans in Ukraine and Russia were among the “innocents” who have been victimized by the “insanity of war.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba summoned the Vatican ambassador to Kyiv last week and told reporters that “the Ukrainian heart is torn apart by the pope’s words.”
In a statement, the Vatican appeared intent Tuesday on doing damage control.
“In recent days, public discussions have arisen about the political significance to attribute” to comments by Francis, the statement said.
“The words of the Holy Father on this dramatic question should be read as a voice raised in defense of human life and of the values linked to that, and not taken as a political position,” the Vatican said. “As for as the war of wide dimensions in Ukraine, begun by the Russian Federation, the interventions of the Holy Father Francis are clear and unequivocal in condemning it as morally unjust, unacceptable, barbaric, senseless, repugnant and sacrilegious.”
On the same day that the Ukraine slammed the pope’s remarks, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church cancelled a planned meeting with Francis for September.
Francis has said he wants to go to Ukraine if that could further the cause of peace but so far logistics have made that trip impossible for the 85-year-old pontiff who has mobility issues.
___
Follow all AP stories on the impact of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.
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| 2022-09-21T13:38:30Z
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Before taking a shot, Ukrainian sniper Andriy buries his face in a foldout mat, breathing slowly and deliberately.
“I need to be completely relaxed, to find a place where I will not move the rifle when I pull the trigger,” he says. “I don’t think about anything. It’s a kind of vacuum.”
In a semicircle around his head are boxes of bullets, printouts of charts, a heavy-duty stapler and a roll of tape.
Strapped to his wrist is a monitor, which is the shape of a jewelry box. It’s a ballistics calculator to factor in the wind and other surrounding conditions. Bees persistently circling his head and scope are ignored.
After a long pause, he says the word “shot” in Ukrainian.
Crack! A sound not unlike a starting gun used at sporting events produces a reflexive jolt in people unaccustomed to war.
Six months ago, the noise might have startled Andriy, who had moved to Western Europe to pursue a career in engineering.
His experience resembles that of many Ukrainians who returned home to the war, abruptly pulled from civilian life to embrace fighting methods ‒ modern but also makeshift ‒ that have held back the far larger Russian military.
Andriy comes from Bucha, a district near Kyiv’s airport that was hammered during the Russian advance. Hundreds of civilian killings took place there, the bodies found in mass graves or left lying where they were shot in what the United Nations describes as potential war crimes.
Tall and with a good command of English, the sniper spoke to The Associated Press while practicing alone at an informal firing range near Kyiv, hoping to resolve some issues with his weapon through hours of trial and error before his next deployment.
He asked only to be identified by his first name and that some details of his civilian life remain private.
Andriy scrambled home, taking a flight to Budapest and arranging an 1,200-kilometer (750-mile) overland route that included paying “a big amount of money” to a driver willing to take a risky journey eastward. Within a few days he had joined the ferocious fight around Kyiv, adopting the war nickname “Samurai.”
He bought his own gear and a U.S.-made sniper rifle, and began receiving training from a special forces instructor, connected through friends in the military.
“Early in the morning on Feb. 24, I received a call from my mother. She lives in Bucha and told me the war had started. She could hear helicopters, airplanes, bombing and explosions. I decided to return,” he said.
While not allowed to discuss any specifics of his operational activity, Andriy describes Ukraine’s military as a force that prides itself on flexibility, harnessing a wide range of skills from its personnel to become more versatile in combat.
Snipers, he said, are often used to spot Russian military positions for artillery targeting.
“I have also gained experience in tactical medicine, with drones and shooting with assault rifles,” he said.
Military specialists are encouraged to learn new skills and even find their own equipment, with Western suppliers still delivering to Ukraine in a private market that is monitored by the army.
To protect his hearing, Andriy acquired a set of hunter’s headphones that suppress the noise from his rifle while amplifying voices. “You really need these,” he says.
Russia has more than doubled the territory it controls in Ukraine since launching the invasion in February, to about 20% of the country, but Andriy shares the optimism of many fellow Ukrainians that victory will be possible after the winter.
“I think with the help of our friends in Europe and the United States that we can push them out of our territory,” he said.
His desire to become a sniper came from a familiarity with hunting rifles, common in Ukraine, and playing the role of a distance shooter in video games.
But his goal at war: “It’s to return to my home, to my family,” he says.
“No one of us wanted to be a warrior, a shooter, a sniper. It’s just a necessity to be here now and do what we’re doing here.”
After a pause he adds: “I don’t know how to explain this: I don’t like to kill people. It’s not something you want to do, but it’s something you have to do.”
___
Follow AP coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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| 2022-09-21T13:38:38Z
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PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — One of the men shot to death at a Safeway store in Bend, Oregon, Sunday night died a hero after confronting the shooter, police said Monday.
Investigators say Donald Surrett Jr., who worked at the Safeway, was one of two people killed Sunday night after he reportedly tried to disarm the shooter, who was carrying an AR-15-style rifle in the grocery’s produce section.
The other person killed was 84-year-old Glenn Bennett, who was slain when the shooter entered the store. Police identified the suspected shooter as 20-year-old Ethan Miller, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police are still working to determine a motive and say their investigators are looking into several posts the suspected shooter made on social media leading up to the tragedy.
Many people stopped by the scene Monday, some dropping off flowers and others giving water to law enforcement officers on scene.
Miller reportedly came from an apartment complex that borders the shopping center and shot a gun several times, including at a Big Lots a few stores down from the Safeway. Police say he entered the Safeway and shot Bennett before Surrett tried to stop him.
Surrett was a part of the Disabled American Veterans chapter in Bend and was in the Army for more than 20 years before being honorably discharged in 2000. He was decorated 13 times and was the Treasurer and Adjutant for Central Oregon DAV.
George McCart, who was in the Central Oregon Disabled American Veterans with Surrett, said that his friend was a “really nice guy and personable as all get out.” He also said that Surrett’s actions were based on his training.
“When you’re trained to do things like that, and he was trained, it becomes an instant reaction. When things go south, you react,” McCart said.
People in Bend are not surprised that one of their own took action to save lives.
“That’s Bend, everyone here, for the most part, the people I grow up with, they will stand up for whoever whenever. They’ll say something because they care and because they probably know you,” said Bend resident Sophia Rodriguez. She went to high school with Miller, she said.
There were reports of two shootings Sunday, but police say there is only evidence of this one, and that there is no evidence of a second shooter.
A vigil took place at Drake Park, remembering the lives that were lost.
“I just knew that our community was hurting and that we can feel better being together,” said Brandy Steelhammer, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action who helped organize the vigil.
“I really trust that being in relationship, knowing that neighbors caring about one another, seeing the employees from Safeway, the community that they’ve developed, that’s what will get us through,” added Reverend Erika Spaet. “That’s what community looks like. And I think that’s what we’re all longing for. And when communities take care of one another and are creative about keeping one another safe, I think these kinds of things don’t happen.”
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| 2022-09-21T13:38:45Z
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TITUSVILLE, Fla. (WFLA) — NASA will make another attempt this weekend to launch the historic Artemis I mission after the first attempt was scrubbed on Monday.
The agency confirmed Tuesday evening that the next launch attempt is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 3. The two-hour launch window is set to open at 2:17 p.m. ET.
The announcement was made during a teleconference with Artemis Mission Manager Mike Sarafin, Artemis Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson and Space Launch System (SLS) Program Manager John Honeycutt.
Artemis I was initially set to launch on Monday morning but NASA teams spent several hours troubleshooting different problems before the launch window opened. The launch director eventually scrubbed Monday’s attempt due to an issue with one of the rocket’s engines. According to NASA, teams had trouble “getting one of the four RS-25 engines on the bottom of the rocket’s core stage to the proper temperature range for liftoff.”
After the launch was scrubbed, engineers stayed on-site to gather data on what went wrong. The mission’s management team met Tuesday afternoon before the teleconference to discuss how to move forward.
“We agreed on what was called ‘Option 1,’ which is to operationally change the loading procedure and start our engine chill-down earlier,” Sarafin explained during Tuesday’s teleconference. “We also agreed to do some work at the pad to address the leak that we saw at the hydrogen tail service mast umbilical.”
Weather during Saturday’s launch window is expected to be less favorable than it was on Monday. Launch Weather Officer Mark Berger said during the teleconference the probability for a weather violation during the countdown appears “rather high.”
“We will have a fairly strong onshore flow so that does favor showers and possibly a few thunderstorms moving in from the coast during the morning and early afternoon hours, so we’ll have to watch that as far as tanking,” Berger said.
If the launch has to be scrubbed again on Saturday, the earliest NASA could make another attempt would be Monday.
“With all scrubs, it depends on the reason you scrub. That really drives your turnaround,” Blackwell-Thompson said. “But provided that it was a weather issue, we are driven by replenishment of our commodities – hydrogen being the primary driver. We could go as soon as Monday, so 48 hours is our turnaround.”
The SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft were still sitting at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39B as of Tuesday evening. There were concerns after Monday’s scrub that the rocket would have to be rolled back into the vehicle assembly building.
Once Artemis I lifts off, the mission will travel a total of about 1.3 million miles. The mission is the first step in NASA’s plan to send us back to the moon, establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface and eventually send astronauts to Mars.
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| 2022-09-21T13:38:53Z
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(KTLA) – South African actress Charlbi Dean died on Monday.
According to Variety, the 32-year-old passed away in New York from an unexpected illness.
The up-and-coming star was recently in the 2022 Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness.” She starred in the film opposite Woody Harrelson.
She also starred in The CW hit “Black Lightning, which is based on the DC Comics series. She played Syonide, a highly skilled assassin.
She made her acting debut in the 2010 South African film “Spud” and its 2013 sequel “Spud 2: The Madness Continues,” according to her IMDb page.
Dean would go on to appear in “Blood in the Water,” the horror film “Don’t Sleep,” “An Interview With God,” and “Porthole,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Dean was also a model and appeared on various magazine covers and runways, including appearing on the cover of Vogue.
She was engaged to male model Luke Volker.
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| 2022-09-21T13:39:00Z
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BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – Two Brink’s guards were tasked with transporting millions of dollars in jewelry and gemstones from San Mateo, California, to a secure storage yard in Los Angeles in July. But the delivery didn’t go according to plan, a new lawsuit explains.
Following a San Mateo gem and jewelry show on July 10, an armored big rig was loaded with 73 bags containing jewelry, according to a separate lawsuit filed by Brink’s on Aug. 4 in federal court in New York. The truck left around midnight with the shipment ultimately intended for a jewelry show in Pasadena.
As they made the roughly 370-mile trip, one guard slept while the other drove “in compliance with Department of Transportation regulations,” according to the Brink’s suit. The truck briefly stopped at the Buttonwillow Rest Area on Interstate 5, just west of Bakersfield, for the driver to use the bathroom.
At 2:05 a.m. on July 11, they arrived at the Flying J in Lebec, about 40 miles south of Bakersfield. The driver left his partner in the sleeping berth and went inside for food.
Upon returning at 2:32 a.m., the driver noticed both the plastic seal around the truck and its rear lock had been cut, but the guard who had been sleeping said he “did not see or hear anything unusual,” the suit stated.
In the 27 minutes the driver was gone, thieves allegedly stole nearly two dozen bags of jewelry, according to a suit filed by jewelers impacted by the incident.
The guards “failed miserably,” jewelers wrote.
“One left a truckload of jewelry and gemstones for a half-hour completely out of his sight at a remote truck stop while he was buying food, and the other literally was asleep on the job, snoozing away just a few feet from where thieves were stealing approximately $100 million of plaintiffs’ property,” according to the jewelers’ lawsuit, which was filed on Aug. 19 in the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The heist left the “small, mostly older jewelers, without the means to earn their living,” their suit reads. Of the 73 large orange bags the truck had been carrying, 22 were missing.
The jewelers accuse Brink’s of negligence and breach of contract, among other causes of action, and name Flying J as a defendant, arguing the plaza had inadequate lighting and video or other surveillance of the parking area.
The actual value of jewelry and gemstones reportedly stolen is also under dispute.
Brink’s argues the manifests for the missing bags list them as having a total value of $8.7 million, much less than the $100 million the jewelers alleged.
“On information and belief, Brink’s believes that each defendant seeks to recover more from Brink’s than is permitted under the contract,” according to the security company’s suit filed in federal court in New York.
The Los Angeles Times first reported the suits last week. While the sheriff’s investigators have acquired video related to the theft, no arrests have been made.
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| 2022-09-21T13:39:07Z
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(KTLA) – A pregnant inmate in California who lost her baby after sheriff’s deputies stopped at a Starbucks while driving her to a hospital in 2016 has reached a $480,000 settlement in the case.
Sandra Quinones, who is no longer in custody, was awarded the settlement during an Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting in a unanimous vote on Aug. 23.
On March 28, 2016, Quinones pushed the call button in her jail cell when her water broke on March 28, but no jail staff responded for two hours, the Associated Press reported, citing her federal lawsuit.
She was then given a ride to Anaheim Global Medical Center in a patrol car instead of an ambulance, but not until deputies stopped for coffee at a local Starbucks, the lawsuit alleged.
When Quinones finally reached the hospital, her fetus did not survive.
The lawsuit accused deputies of acting with “deliberate indifference” toward Quinones’ civil rights and her medical condition, the Orange County Register reported.
Her lawyer, Dick Herman, told the Register that Quinones is homeless and mentally ill.
The $480,000 settlement must still be formally accepted before it becomes final.
“This poor woman, she’s in jail having a miscarriage and, instead of calling an ambulance, they take her to the hospital in a patrol car and the cops stop at Starbucks while she’s bleeding,” Herman told the Register.
Sheriff’s officials have declined to comment on the settlement, the AP reported.
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NEWBURG, Pa. (WXIN) – Various kinds of cheeses are being recalled because they have the potential to be contaminated with listeria monocytogenes.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says the recall involves cheeses from Keswick Creamery. They were recalled after routine sampling revealed some finished products contained the bacteria. The creamery stopped production and distribution until the cause of the problem can be determined.
So far, no illnesses have been reported in connection with the recall.
What cheeses are included in the recall?
The recalled cheeses were distributed at Dupont Circle Freshfarm Market in Washington, D.C.; Takoma Park Farmers Market in Takoma Park, Maryland; Smith Meadows Farm Store in Berryville, Virginia; Oylers Organic Farms and Market in Biglerville, Pennsylvania; and Talking Breads Farm Store in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
The following products are included in the recall:
- Calverley Cheese in 4-12-ounce packages
- Vulkwin’s Folly Cheese in 4-12-ounce packages
- Havarti Cheese in 4-12-ounce packages
- Vermeer Cheese in 4-12-ounce packages
- Wallaby Cheese in 4-12-ounce packages
- Cider Washed Tomme Cheese in 4-12-ounce packages
- Feta cheese in 4-12-ounce packages
- Whole Milk Ricotta, 8- and 16-ounce clear deli container, expiration dates 7/18/22, 7/25/22, 8/1/22, 8/8/22, 8/18/22
- Bovre Cheese (plain, oregano and garlic, herbes de Provence, cranberry and honey), 8-ounce clear deli container, expiration dates 7/25/22, 8/1/22, 8/8/22, 8/22/22
- Quark Cheese (plain and dill and onion), 8- and 16-ounce clear deli container, expiration dates 7/7/22, 8/4/22, 8/25/22
What is listeria?
Listeria monocytogenes is a bacterium that can cause listeriosis, a serious infection. It can also cause common food poisoning symptoms.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says around 1,600 people get listeriosis every year, resulting in about 260 deaths. It is most likely to sicken pregnant women and their newborns, adults 65 and older, and people with weakened immune systems.
Invasive listeriosis happens when the bacteria spread beyond the gut to other parts of the body. Symptoms usually start within two weeks after eating food contaminated with listeria.
Symptoms in pregnant people are usually mild, with some never showing symptoms. However, the CDC says, infection during pregnancy commonly results in miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery, or life-threatening infection in the newborn.
In non-pregnant people, the CDC says, symptoms can be severe, with almost 1 in 20 people with invasive listeriosis dying.
Anyone who bought any of the listed cheeses is urged to throw them away. Customers can email Keswick Creamery directly at keswickrecall@gmail.com or call 1-800-946-1631 Monday thru Friday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET to report their product and receive a full refund.
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Bowling Green Kiwanis Club to host Mardi Gras Parade
Published: Sep. 21, 2022 at 7:28 AM CDT|Updated: 1 hour ago
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) - The BG Kiwanis Club is bringing a touch of New Orleans to Bowling Green!
The Kiwanis Club is hosting a Mardi Gras Madness parade next year on March 4 at Circus Square Park.
The parade will have floats, costumes and other festivities with proceeds going toward the Kiwanis Club.
Preparations are underway and volunteers should register as soon as possible for planning purposes.
To register for the parade you can visit the Kiwanis Club’s website.
Copyright 2022 WBKO. All rights reserved.
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(NEXSTAR) – Chipotle is adding some spice to its menu in two markets as it tests out a “fiery” new menu item, the restaurant chain announced Tuesday.
Chicken al pastor will be available at 94 restaurants in Denver and Indianapolis for the trial period. While “al pastor” might make you think of the popular pork option at many taquerias, Chipotle says its chicken innovation adds “an exciting level of spice to guests’ go-to orders.”
The meat, which will be prepared in small batches throughout the day, starts in a marinade of Chipotle’s signature adobo, seared morita peppers, ground achiote with a splash of pineapple. The chicken is then chopped into bite sized pieces and finished with cilantro and lime. The “premium” option will cost 65 cents extra.
“We created Chicken Al Pastor to fuel our fans who have been craving spicy chicken from Chipotle,” Chris Brandt, the chain’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “The new menu item artfully pairs fire with flavor in a uniquely Chipotle way.”
Al pastor is the second test of a new chicken item in less than a year, following the launch of pollo asado in March. The first new chicken dish in nearly three decades, pollo asado was a wild success, CNBC reports.
Chipotle doesn’t release sales numbers for the tests, but the company said it was on par with smoked brisket, one of its bestselling new menu additions in recent history, according to trade publication Restaurant Business.
Chipotle is also offering $0 delivery on chicken al pastor orders made through the Chipotle app and on the restaurant’s website from Sept. 6 – 11.
Chipotle’s stock is down about 15% over the last year after rocketing to an all-time high in 2021 during the pandemic.
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AUSTIN (KXAN/NEXSTAR) — Which restroom will take the throne in a competition for America’s ‘Best Restroom’? The suspense is leaving the country on the edge of its seat.
Cintas — a corporation that supplies uniforms, cleaning products and restroom supplies to businesses — is currently accepting votes for the America’s Best Restroom Contest, an annual celebration of the most eye-catching or otherwise interesting facilities in the country. Now in its 21st year, the contest aims to crown 2022’s “Best Restroom” from a pool of finalists that include restaurant restrooms, watering-hole washrooms and even airport lavatories.
“The public holds higher standards for the cleanliness and technology used in public restrooms which is why we’re proud to recognize these businesses that maintain clean and exceptional facilities,” said Julia Messinger, the marketing manager at Cintas, in a recent press release.
The bathrooms selected as finalists were deemed to be especially elegant or eclectic, and chosen for their cleanliness and aesthetic allure, according to Cintas.
This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order, are located at:
- Delaware Botanic Gardens, in Dagsboro, Delaware, where the bathroom incorporates garden elements and floor-to-ceiling windows to showcase the outdoors
- Eberly, a restaurant in Austin, Texas, with bathrooms that feature a “vacancy” light on the exterior of each stall door
- Headlands Lodge and Spa, in Pacific City, Oregon, where restroom visitors are treated to a “spa-like feel,” according to Cintas
- La Patisserie, a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, which earned a spot thanks to its bathrooms’ chandeliers and fully enclosed stalls
- Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, where the all-gender restroom in Terminal B offers “potty parity for all,” Cintas says
- No. 5 Bistro and Bar, in Sedalia, Missouri, where the bathrooms are said to pay homage to a historic building
- North Hollywood Recreation Center, in California, with lavatories that feature self-cleaning capabilities
- Stone Mountain Public House, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where the washroom takes on a “fun, prohibition theme”
- Tampa International Airport, in Florida, in the Airside C section, where the bathroom is decorated with images of Florida’s fauna
- Tori Tori, a restaurant in Orlando, which features restroom flower arrangements perfect for “mirror selfies and photos,” Cintas says
Voting for America’s “Best Restroom” is open through Aug. 31 at BestRestroom.com. The winner will be honored with a place in the America’s Best Restroom Hall of Fame, as well as a restroom cleaning service and $2,500 in facility services or future restroom cleanings.
“While most people would likely characterize their trip to the restroom as a fairly unremarkable experience, we at Cintas think it should be unforgettable,” Cintas writes of its annual contest.
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NEW YORK (WPIX) – A former New York Police officer claims he was booted from the department for his right-wing political views and his interpersonal relationships with former Donald Trump advisor Roger Stone and “Manhattan Madam” Kristin Davis.
According to a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, Salvatore Greco was at the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and was filmed palling around with Stone and Davis, who was convicted of prostitution at a Washington. D.C. hotel in the 2000s but was never accused of doing anything illegal or violent at the insurrection.
Greco is suing the NYPD, claiming the department and Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell violated his First Amendment rights when they terminated him for supporting ‘Making America Great Again’ ideals. He acknowledged he has “familial” and “political” ties to Stone and Davis, and also supports extremist groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the suit said.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Greco’s case is not unusual in that the department has been engaging in these sorts of ‘political viewpoint’ hit jobs for more than forty (40) years. With these legal claims, Mr. Greco intends to shed light on the institutional problem and hold the city and the other defendants accountable for these actions,” said lawyer Eric Sanders in a statement.
In January 2021, the suit alleges Internal Affairs received an anonymous letter saying Greco and another cop attended the riots at Capitol Hill and “these officers want to have a civil war in America.” The Bureau launched an investigation and reviewed Greco’s phone, social media, and other personal accounts and eventually filed departmental charges in April, according to the filing.
The NYPD accused the former cop of “wrongfully and knowingly associating with persons, Roger Jason Stone, Jr., and Kristin M. Davis, reasonably believed to be engaged in, likely to engage in, or to have engaged in criminal activities,” the suit said.
Greco was found guilty in June and fired in early August. He claims the anonymous letter was a political witchhunt, according to court records.
“The action taken against me has cost me my reputation, my job, and my life savings,” Greco said in a statement.”
The lawsuit did not mention a specific amount for monetary damages.
The NYPD declined to comment on the pending litigation, said an NYPD spokesperson.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Any federal student loans used to attend the for-profit Westwood College from 2002 through 2015 will be canceled after federal officials found that the school greatly exaggerated the job prospects of its graduates, the Biden administration announced Tuesday.
The action will automatically erase $1.5 billion in federal student debt for 79,000 borrowers who attended the now-defunct college, according to the Education Department.
It adds to the administration’s mounting effort to cancel federal loans for students who were defrauded by their colleges — more than $14 billion has been erased so far — and it follows President Joe Biden’s sweeping plan to cancel at least $10,000 in student debt for millions of Americans.
The Westwood College cancellation applies to all students who attended the chain from Jan. 1, 2002, through Nov. 17, 2015, when the college stopped enrolling new students before its 2016 closure. Students will not need to apply for the relief.
With help from attorneys general in Colorado and Illinois, federal officials found that the college routinely misled prospective students about their chances of getting good jobs after graduating.
In its marketing materials, the chain advertised employment rates and salary outcomes that were “grossly inflated,” the Education Department found. It also promised to help graduates pay their bills if they couldn’t find jobs within six months after graduating — a pledge officials say wasn’t kept.
In Illinois, the chain’s criminal justice programs told students they could expect law enforcement jobs in agencies including the Illinois State Police, but Westwood never had the accreditation needed to meet employment requirements for the state, authorities found.
“Westwood operated on a culture of false promises, lies, and manipulation in order to profit off student debt that burdened borrowers long after Westwood closed,” said James Kvaal, under secretary of education.
Kvaal said the administration is ramping up efforts to protect students and to “ensure that executives who commit such harm never work at institutions that receive federal financial aid again.”
Before its closure, Westwood operated 15 campuses in California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois and Virginia, along with online programs.
A group of students and civil rights organizations sued the Education Department in May demanding debt cancellation for Westwood students in Illinois based on findings of fraud there. It followed a settlement between the college and Illinois that erased institutional loans but not federal debt.
“It never should have taken this long — or litigation — for the Department of Education to do the right thing, but we are thrilled that the department has finally discharged the loans of defrauded Westwood College students,” said Dan Zibel, chief counsel at National Student Legal Defense Network, one of the groups behind the suit.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., called it a victory for students but said more must be done “to crack down on for-profit colleges that lie and lead Illinoisans into mountains of student debt without a viable degree or career path.”
The cancellation is being granted through a federal rule known as borrower defense, which provides federal student debt cancellation to borrowers whose colleges misled them or defrauded them in other ways. The rule has mostly been used to erase debt used to attend for-profit colleges.
In similar actions, the Biden administration also moved to cancel nearly $6 billion for former students of Corinthian Colleges and nearly $4 billion for former students of ITT Technical institute.
After months of intense pressure for broader student debt cancellation, Biden last week unveiled a plan to forgive $10,000 in federal student debt for all borrowers with incomes less than $125,000 a year or $250,000 per household. Those who received a federal Pell Grant to attend college are eligible for an additional $10,000 in cancellation.
The plan, which is almost certain to be challenged in court, applies to federal student loans that were paid out before July 1 of this year. It applies to loans used to attend undergraduate and graduate programs.
Most borrowers will need to apply for cancellation through an application that the Education Department is expected to create by early October. Early applicants could see their student debt canceled before the start of next year, when a federal pause on student debt payments is set to expire.
The White House estimates the cancellation will cost $240 billion over the next 10 years, but outside analysts say it could be much higher. Official cost projections from the federal government are expected in coming weeks.
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LAS VEGAS (KLAS) – What drives the homeless into living in the tunnels of Las Vegas? What pulls them out?
Robert Banghart has some of the answers. In the past seven months, his crew of volunteers has pulled 220 people from the violence and desolation of cavelike living, up from 80 for all of the past year.
Every Saturday for four years, he and about 60 to 80 volunteers — in groups of six to eight — go into the tunnels, caves, flood channels and freeway underpasses handing out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bottled water, first-aid kits and other items of survival.
These safety checks are one step on a path out, a way of making connections, building relationships with members of a population that’s leery of normal, protective of what’s theirs and often unpredictably violent.
“There’s 600 miles of tunnels in Las Vegas and 1,500 people living in them,” said Banghart, the outreach director at Shine A Light Foundation, a nonprofit focused on the Las Vegas homeless. “But everyone in there is a life, someone worth saving.”
Addiction, mental illness, a broken family unit. These are common themes in the lives of the Las Vegas tunnel dwellers. Banghart, 46, knows firsthand, too. He lived in the tunnels until about four years ago. A savage beating started his path out, he said.
“I got hit in the head with an ax, split my skull, beaten with a pipe and my jaw broken,” Banghart said. “I was dead twice.”
The people at Freedom House Sober Living, another Las Vegas nonprofit, pulled him out, got him into a hospital. Banghart credits Paul Vautrinot, the director of Shine A Light, for his recovery. But after prison, 67 trips to rehab and “primal” living underground, Banghart had many reasons to say enough.
For Donica Martinez, 42, removed from the tunnels for five months in August, “the gift of despair” was her way out, she said.
Addiction and prostitution sent Martinez underground. “I was trafficked. I had a pimp, and he completely controlled my life for 14 years. And then he chased me for another three after that, and that’s how I got into the tunnels.”
Martinez, who has lived in Las Vegas for 20 years, said she took to the tunnels to shake free from her stalking pimp. “My addiction kept me there,” she said.
Her father’s death in October started her on a path out. She took all sorts of drugs, was once pistol-whipped and ended up on the side of railroad tracks — in triple-digit heat. She found the drugs did little to ease the pain of her father’s death. And that primal existence – instant gratification in finding food, water, shelter or the next fix – was taking its toll. She was dirty, alone, tired and lost.
“I felt I was a lost cause,” she said. “I wanted to just lay down in the dirt and turn to dust. But at the same time, I knew it was something my dad wouldn’t want for me.”
She knew from Shine A Light visits a crew was looking for her. So now she’s into her second round of seeking normalcy.
America DePasquale, 42, a lifelong Las Vegas resident, knows exactly what Martinez has been through. She agrees with Banghart’s description of the lifestyle being primal.
Much like Banghart and Martinez, addiction and a rebellious nature sent her underground. She lost custody of her two children; her mother took guardianship years ago when they were young.
She now works in homeless services, as does Martinez. She works at repairing her relationship with her family. And she works with Banghart, Martinez and others visiting the tunnels, trying to pull people up and out.
Tunnel life is dangerous, there’s a hierarchy and a distrust, so the crews often approach cautiously. When a tunnel dweller doesn’t want the help, Banghart said the crew backs off.
“It’s cool, we say,” Banghart said. “We’re handing out free stuff. You want a cigarette? You got water? Here’s a bag of stuff. We’ll leave it for you.
“And then maybe next time, they see what we’ve done, that we’re good, here to help. No strings,” he said.
Violence is part of the primal existence, Banghart said. Going into the tunnels alone is unwise, he said. Shine A Light volunteers wear T-shirts and bracelets and identify themselves by announcing the nonprofit’s name and a message of “We’re here to help.”
Some of the danger for DePasquale is relaxed because she still has friends down there, people who helped her through some desperate times.
“There are people down there who need the example of my story,” she said. “I still have people down there I care about, who helped me out from some dark, dark times. I was once one of them, and I want them to see it is possible to recover from such a hopeless state.
“That’s why there’s this merry band of us. We were once down there. And now we go back to help,” she said.
All of it is one step at a time.
For the volunteers, about 90% of whom were homeless or tunnel dwellers, Banghart urges the working of a program called IPATH (for Instant Placement with Access to Treatment and Housing).
The Saturday tunnel visits are part of the program, part of the healing — hopefully, for the homeless and certainly for volunteers — especially Banghart.
“I lived here a long time, but it never felt like home until I started giving back,” he said. “I need to give back, to go back where I came from, where I escaped.
“It’s a reminder of where I can go. Now, it’s part of my life,” he said.
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Note: An earlier version of this story sourced the Tax Foundation saying as many as 13 states could tax student loan forgiveness and included potential amounts owed. The Tax Foundation has since amended its list and removed those estimates. NewsNation has removed all of the Tax Foundation’s information from this article.
(NewsNation) — Those receiving student loan forgiveness would not be taxed federally, but some people could get taxed at the state level anywhere between $300 and $1,100.
Last week, President Joe Biden announced student debt cancellations of $10,000 for those who earn less than $125,000. People who received Pell Grants can get $20,000 forgiven.
Under the American Rescue Plan, the federal government will not tax student loan forgiveness again until 2025. Several states’ tax plans are coupled to the federal code, meaning changes at the federal level kick in at the state level. But states that don’t fall under that rule could come calling for a piece of the forgiven debt if they don’t amend their statutes.
Mississippi has come out against making an exception for Biden’s debt relief recipients, Bloomberg reports.
Other states, such as Pennsylvania and California, have issued notices clarifying residents won’t be taxed on their debt relief. New York will also not list it as taxable income, the Gothamist reports.
But several states still have decisions to make. Arkansas, for example, would need to make an exception. Scott Hardin, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration, told NewsNation the department’s legal team is reviewing the federal tax changes and a final decision should come “over the next couple of days.” The move would require legislative action.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said his state is still waiting for federal guidance on how this will work, according to NewsNation local affiliate WWLP. By default, residents could be liable for hundreds of dollars, depending on the size of the debt forgiven.
Minnesota also needs to amend its tax code to whitelist the student debt relief, but is not scheduled to return to session for the rest of the year. State Sen. Carla Nelson (R), the chair of the Senate Tax Committee, has called for a special session to iron it out.
“I think that should be one of the first bills out the door, next session. Just like we did with unemployment insurance — not taxing those unemployment insurance benefits — or not taxing those Pandemic PPP loans, we felt the same about the forgiven student loans,” Nelson said, according to KARE11.
In Minnesota, Republicans control the Senate, but Democrats control the House and governor’s mansion. Nelson’s willingness to make student debt forgiveness work could signal a path to a compromise.
A similar situation would be required in Wisconsin, though Democrats may have a more difficult time delivering. Gov. Tony Evers (D) has signaled he wants to find a way to avoid taxing student debt relief, but would need to get it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate.
North Carolina’s tax code also lists forgiven student debt as income, but there is a chance they will amend it. They changed their tax laws during the pandemic to allow Paycheck Protection Program loans to go tax free.
States and debt holders alike are waiting for clarification on how this will work. For now, anyone interested can sign up for an email list from the Education Department to get updates on the specifics.
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HERSHEY, Pa. (WHTM) — Lady Gaga’s “The Chromatica Ball” tour made its stop at Hersheypark Stadium on Sunday and became the highest-grossing show in the venue’s history.
According to a press release, Hersheypark Stadium’s previous highest-grossing record was held by the Rolling Stones in 2005.
“Never thought I’d see the day,” remarked Gaga of the record-setting feat, which she shared in an Instagram post shortly after the show that played to a crowd of 30,000 fans.
Additionally, Lady Gaga’s Aug. 19 stop on “The Chromatica Ball” tour broke the attendance record at Boston’s Fenway Park, with over 37,200 coming to the performance.
The superstar singer’s current tour has made stops in Germany, Paris, London, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Boston, Tokyo, and more.
According to Billboard, The Chromatica Ball Tour was supposed to begin in 2020, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was postponed a year — and then again until 2022.
The tour wraps up on Sept. 17 in Miami, Florida.
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(The Hill) — The Monkees singer Micky Dolenz is suing the FBI in an effort to “obtain any records” the agency has on the hit band and its members.
A lawsuit filed by Dolenz, the last surviving member of the band, noted the performer had “exhausted all necessary required administrative remedies” after submitting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to receive the files from the FBI.
Portions of an FBI file on the “I’m a Believer” singers were released in 2011 and included references to anti-Vietnam War rhetoric and “subliminal messages” depicted on a screen at a 1967 Monkees concert that an informant claimed featured “left wing innovations of a political nature.”
The FBI was known to keep tabs on several famous faces during the 1960s and 1970s under then-Director J. Edgar Hoover, including anti-war musicians such as John Lennon and John Denver, among others.
Dolenz’s attorney, Mark Zaid, told Rolling Stone that the 77-year-old entertainer and the last surviving member of the band had originally submitted a FOIA request in June to obtain the full file from the FBI. The lawsuit was brought after the FBI failed to follow through with the FOIA request within 20 working days, as is legally required, Zaid told the music publication.
Zaid wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that he has been a Monkees fan since the early 1970s, calling it a “pleasure to be representing” Dolenz.
“Why was the FBI monitoring the band back in the late 1960s? We will find out!” Zaid said.
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(NEXSTAR) – Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet president and the man known for ending the Cold War, has died at the age of 91, Reuters reports.
News organizations quoted a statement from the Central Clinical Hospital as saying he died after a long illness. No other details were given.
Gorbachev served as the last president of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s after serving as the last general secretary of the party from 1985 to 1991.
Though in power less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a breathtaking series of changes. But they quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian domination and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation.
His decline was humiliating. His power was hopelessly sapped by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, he spent his last months in office watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned on Dec. 25, 1991. The Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion a day later.
Gorbachev won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his work to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end. He is also credited for starting the fall of communism in Europe after he declared he would not support Communist regimes in other countries if their peoples didn’t support them, his Nobel Prize biography reads.
In the early 2000s, Gorbachev won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children alongside former President Bill Clinton and Italian actress Sophia Loren. In 2007, Gorbachev appeared in an advertisement for Louis Vuitton. He was photographed in a car with a Vuitton bag at his side as he rides past the Berlin Wall.
Gorbachev was born in 1931 in Privolnoye, Russia.
The official news agency Tass reported that Gorbachev will be buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery next to his wife.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T13:41:00Z
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JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) — Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency Monday due to Jackson’s water shortage.
Reeves said the Mississippi State Department of Health (MSDH) is also working to prepare an emergency order due to little or no water pressure in the city.
This comes after Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba declared a water system emergency due to complications from the Pearl River flooding. The mayor said the flooding led to water pressure issues at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Facility, causing little to no water pressure for many Jackson customers.
Until the issue at the treatment facility has been fixed, there is no reliable, running water in the city, affecting more than 100,000 people.
“It means the city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to reliably flush toilets, and to meet other critical needs,” Reeves said.
State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney said neighbors should boil their water for one minute before consuming it.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) will take the lead to distribute drinking water and non-potable water in the city.
The state has created a mobile incident command center, which will help with repairs and improvements at the water treatment plant. Reeves said the city of Jackson will be responsible for half of the cost of the emergency repairs that will be made at the facility.
The command center was expected to be in operation on Tuesday.
According to the city, the water shortage is likely to last for the next couple of days.
All Jackson Public Schools were to shift to virtual learning Tuesday due to the water issues.
Jackson has been under a boil water notice since July 29.
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| 2022-09-21T13:41:09Z
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(The Hill) – Pregnant people are being exposed through various household products to toxic compounds that can increase the risk of cancer and harm child development, a new study has found.
Scientists identified two such compounds — the industrial chemical melamine and its byproduct cyanuric acid — in the urine of almost all the pregnant subjects they tested, with the highest levels occurring in women of color and in those with greater exposure to tobacco.
Four types of chemicals used in dyes, called aromatic amines, were also present in the urine of nearly all pregnant participants, according to the study, published in Chemosphere on Tuesday.
“These chemicals are of serious concern due to their links to cancer and developmental toxicity, yet they are not routinely monitored in the United States,” co-senior author Tracey Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement.
Woodruff and her colleagues decided to investigate the presence of melamine, its derivative cyanuric acid and aromatic amines because they are all nitrogen-containing compounds with known toxicity and widespread commercial use.
People can be exposed to melamine and aromatic amines in a variety of way of ways: by breathing polluted air, consuming contaminated food or water, ingesting household dust and using products that contain plastic, dyes and pigments, the scientists explained.
The production of cyanuric acid and melamine exceeds 100 million pounds per year in the U.S. alone, according to the authors. Melamine is found in dishwater, plastics, flooring, kitchen counters and pesticides, while cyanuric acid is used as a disinfectant, plastic stabilizer and cleaning solvent in swimming pools, the scientists noted.
When exposure to melamine and cyanuric acid chemicals happens simultaneously, they can be more toxic than either one alone, the authors cautioned.
Aromatic amines, meanwhile, are present in hair dyes, mascara, tattoo ink, paint, tobacco smoke and diesel exhaust.
Despite the prevalence of these chemicals in household products, the authors stressed that biomonitoring of the chemicals is lacking, particularly during pregnancy.
Melamine was recognized as a kidney toxin after baby formula and pet food poisoning events in 2004, 2007 and 2008 left several individuals dead and caused kidney stones and urinary tract obstructions in others, according to the authors.
Additional research from animal experiments, they added, has suggested that melamine impedes brain function.
To draw their conclusions in the Chemosphere study, the researchers measured 45 chemicals linked to cancer and other health risks in urine samples from a small but diverse group of 171 pregnant people.
The subjects had participated in the National Institutes of Health’s Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes Program between 2008 and 2020.
The 171 participants came from California, Georgia, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York and Puerto Rico, according to the study.
About 34 percent of them were white, 40 percent were Latina, 20 percent were Black, 4 percent were Asian and the remaining 3 percent were from other or multiple ethnicities.
Levels of one of the aromatic amines, 3,4-dichloroaniline, were more than 100-percent higher among Black and Hispanic women in comparison to white women, the study found.
“It’s disconcerting that we continue to find higher levels of many of these harmful chemicals in people of color,” study co-senior author Jessie Buckley, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a statement.
Giehae Choi, a postdoctoral fellow at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and first author of the study, stressed that their observations “raise concerns for the health of pregnant women and fetuses.”
“Some of these chemicals are known carcinogens and potential developmental toxicants,” Choi added. “Regulatory action is clearly needed to limit exposure.”
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| 2022-09-21T13:41:39Z
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(NewsNation) — An iconic and controversial 1998 Pizza Hut advertisement was certainly a big win for Pizza Hut and its effort to bring global attention to its brand. But perhaps even more so, the Pizza Hut commercial featuring USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a win for western capitalism.
Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at 91 years old, can be seen in the advertisement entering a Russian version of the American fast-food chain Pizza Hut with his granddaughter.
Patrons who spot him entering the restaurant get into an argument over whether or not Gorbachev was a good leader.
“Because of him we have economic confusion,” one disgruntled patron says.
“Because of him we have economic opportunity,” a Gorbachev supporter responds.
“Because of him we have political instability,” came the response.
“Because of him we have freedom!”
“Complete chaos!”
“Hope!”
The two go back and forth, exchanging both praise and criticism for Gorbachev before eventually another patron intervenes and reminds the pair that because of Gorbachev, Russia has Pizza Hut. The proclamation gets the entire restaurant on its feet.
“Hail Gorbachev,” the restaurant proclaims while feasting on their American pizza.
The ad closes with a message: “Sometimes nothing brings people together like a nice hot pizza from Pizza Hut.”
The commercial was aired internationally, but not in Russia. It aired during the 1998 Rose Bowl matchup between Michigan and Washington State on Jan. 1, 1998.
Pizza Hut opened in Russia in 1990, shortly after McDonald’s was allowed to open shop in Soviet Russia, marking two of the first western chains allowed to do business there. Pizza Hut’s salad bar was said to be the first of its kind in Russia.
It wasn’t Gorbachev’s only appearance in an advertisement. In 2007, Gorbachev appeared in an ad for Louis Vuitton. He was photographed in a car with a Vuitton bag at his side as he rides past the Berlin Wall.
He also won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children alongside former President Bill Clinton and Italian actress Sophia Loren in the early 2000s.
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| 2022-09-21T13:41:46Z
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(NerdWallet) – Hundreds of thousands of borrowers made payments on their federal student loans since forbearance began in March 2020, taking advantage of the opportunity to pay down their balances.
Now that the White House has announced plans to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt, some of those borrowers may be wondering how to get a refund. The idea is that a refund of student loan payments could put cash in borrowers’ pockets and maximize the amount of canceled debt — but that may not be the best idea for everyone.
Here’s what you need to know.
Who can request a refund?
More than 40 million borrowers were allowed to pause their payments, interest-free, during the pandemic. The White House says up to 27 million people may be eligible for debt cancellation.
Those who made payments or paid off their federally held loans during the interest-free forbearance — by single payment or lump sum — are eligible for refunds. Any payment made since March 13, 2020, is eligible.
Private student loan payments aren’t included. Neither are payments made on some FFELP or Perkins loans.
Who should request a refund?
Qualified borrowers who have loan balances less than their maximum cancellation amount — $10,000, or $20,000 if you accepted a Pell Grant — and have made at least one payment during the pause may be rushing to request a refund to ensure they get the most relief possible.
However, only borrowers experiencing financial hardship should request a payment refund at this time, says Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance.
Buchanan says that because full details of the loan cancellation program have not yet been released, borrowers can’t be sure they’ll actually benefit from getting a refund on payments made at 0% interest.
Just as the cutoff for cancellation-eligible loans is set for those disbursed before July 2022, Buchanan warns borrowers that the Education Department may decide to cancel debt based on a balance at a date in the past as well. In that case, any refunded payments won’t help borrowers maximize their cancellation amount.
“What I worry about is people potentially taking money out, spending it on something and then it doesn’t apply,” Buchanan says.
He advises borrowers to sign up for updates with the Education Department for official information on when to request a refund — and whether it will even be beneficial.
How do I request a refund?
Starting the process for getting a refund on payments is relatively simple if you have the right information handy. You need:
- Your loan servicer’s phone number.
- Your Social Security number.
- Payment confirmation numbers or bank payment information.
- The address where you want your refund delivered.
You can likely find payment confirmation numbers on your loan servicer account portal under your payment history. Each payment has a unique identification number that will allow the servicer representative to apply your refund accurately. You can find your bank transaction dates or check numbers on your bank account portal.
The first step is to call your loan servicer. Your loan servicer representative could ask for your Social Security number to pull up your account. After they verify your account and identity, let them know you want to request a refund on payments made during the interest-free forbearance period.
Expect long hold times, Buchanan says.
The representative will ask you which payments, specifically, you want refunded. To make this go quickly and smoothly, be prepared to provide them with the applicable payment confirmation numbers or transaction numbers.
You will also need to confirm your address on file: Refunds could come via check or electronically.
Then, the representative will submit the request on your behalf and provide you with a confirmation.
When will I get my money back?
If you don’t get your refund electronically, you will receive a check in six to 12 weeks. You will also see your loan balance increase by your refunded amount in that time frame.
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| 2022-09-21T13:42:01Z
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HARRIS COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) — State health leaders confirmed Tuesday the first death in Texas of a person who was diagnosed with monkeypox, and it could be the first in the United States.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said the person — an adult from Harris County — was “severely immunocompromised.” The death is being investigated to learn what role monkeypox played.
State health leaders explained that for most people, monkeypox is painful but not life-threatening.
“Monkeypox is a serious disease, particularly for those with weakened immune systems,” Dr. John Hellerstedt, DSHS commissioner, said in a news release. “We continue to urge people to seek treatment if they have been exposed to monkeypox or have symptoms consistent with the disease.”
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the 2022 monkeypox outbreak shows 15 total deaths worldwide. Those deaths occurred outside the U.S., including in Nigeria, Ghana and Spain, among other locations. The data was last updated Monday evening.
CDC data from Monday shows Texas has recorded 1,604 cases so far. That’s currently the fourth-highest count in the country, behind California, New York and Florida.
How to avoid spreading, getting monkeypox
The Texas DSHS said those experiencing fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes and a new, unexplained rash should reach out to a doctor. People diagnosed with the virus should stay home and avoid close contact with others until the rash goes away completely (when the scabs fall off and a new layer of skin forms).
The department said monkeypox spreads through close contact with an infected person, but it can be prevented using these guidelines:
- Avoid close, skin-to-skin contact with someone with a new, unexplained rash.
- Avoid close, skin-to-skin contact in large crowds where people are wearing minimal clothing, such as nightclubs, festivals, raves, saunas and bathhouses.
- Do not share cups, utensils, bedding or towels with someone who is sick.
- Stay home when you are sick.
People who have been exposed to the disease are eligible to get vaccinated. Others who are also at high risk of being infected can seek out the JYNNEOS vaccine, DSHS said.
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| 2022-09-21T13:42:23Z
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New York City (WPIX) — A woman fell from her apartment bathroom into the basement of her building when the floor partially collapsed on Sunday morning, police in New York City said.
The woman, 28, was a tenant in a first-floor apartment of the Bronx building, a representative for the city’s Department of Buildings confirmed. Inspectors with the department said she suffered minor injuries.
She was taken to a hospital for treatment, according to police.
Inspectors with the DOB ultimately determined that the floor — specifically, a 4-foot-by-2-foot section directly in front of the shower and toilet — collapsed due to a lack of proper maintenance.
“As a result, DOB has issued a violation to the landlord for failure to properly maintain the building,” the DOB confirmed in an email.
The building’s owner has also been ordered to hire a professional engineer to conduct an inspection and file a report on the structural stability of the rest of the apartment, the DOB said.
In the meantime, a partial vacate order was issued for the impacted apartment and the area of the cellar below it.
“DOB Engineers will be following up with the building owner and their contracted engineer,” the DOB said.
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| 2022-09-21T13:42:31Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Any federal student loans used to attend the for-profit Westwood College from 2002 through 2015 will be canceled after federal officials found that the school greatly exaggerated the job prospects of its graduates, the Biden administration announced Tuesday.
The action will automatically erase $1.5 billion in federal student debt for 79,000 borrowers who attended the now-defunct college, according to the Education Department.
It adds to the administration’s mounting effort to cancel federal loans for students who were defrauded by their colleges — more than $14 billion has been erased so far — and it follows President Joe Biden’s sweeping plan to cancel at least $10,000 in student debt for millions of Americans.
The Westwood College cancellation applies to all students who attended the chain from Jan. 1, 2002, through Nov. 17, 2015, when the college stopped enrolling new students before its 2016 closure. Students will not need to apply for the relief.
With help from attorneys general in Colorado and Illinois, federal officials found that the college routinely misled prospective students about their chances of getting good jobs after graduating.
In its marketing materials, the chain advertised employment rates and salary outcomes that were “grossly inflated,” the Education Department found. It also promised to help graduates pay their bills if they couldn’t find jobs within six months after graduating — a pledge officials say wasn’t kept.
In Illinois, the chain’s criminal justice programs told students they could expect law enforcement jobs in agencies including the Illinois State Police, but Westwood never had the accreditation needed to meet employment requirements for the state, authorities found.
“Westwood operated on a culture of false promises, lies, and manipulation in order to profit off student debt that burdened borrowers long after Westwood closed,” said James Kvaal, under secretary of education.
Kvaal said the administration is ramping up efforts to protect students and to “ensure that executives who commit such harm never work at institutions that receive federal financial aid again.”
Before its closure, Westwood operated 15 campuses in California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois and Virginia, along with online programs.
A group of students and civil rights organizations sued the Education Department in May demanding debt cancellation for Westwood students in Illinois based on findings of fraud there. It followed a settlement between the college and Illinois that erased institutional loans but not federal debt.
“It never should have taken this long — or litigation — for the Department of Education to do the right thing, but we are thrilled that the department has finally discharged the loans of defrauded Westwood College students,” said Dan Zibel, chief counsel at National Student Legal Defense Network, one of the groups behind the suit.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., called it a victory for students but said more must be done “to crack down on for-profit colleges that lie and lead Illinoisans into mountains of student debt without a viable degree or career path.”
The cancellation is being granted through a federal rule known as borrower defense, which provides federal student debt cancellation to borrowers whose colleges misled them or defrauded them in other ways. The rule has mostly been used to erase debt used to attend for-profit colleges.
In similar actions, the Biden administration also moved to cancel nearly $6 billion for former students of Corinthian Colleges and nearly $4 billion for former students of ITT Technical institute.
After months of intense pressure for broader student debt cancellation, Biden last week unveiled a plan to forgive $10,000 in federal student debt for all borrowers with incomes less than $125,000 a year or $250,000 per household. Those who received a federal Pell Grant to attend college are eligible for an additional $10,000 in cancellation.
The plan, which is almost certain to be challenged in court, applies to federal student loans that were paid out before July 1 of this year. It applies to loans used to attend undergraduate and graduate programs.
Most borrowers will need to apply for cancellation through an application that the Education Department is expected to create by early October. Early applicants could see their student debt canceled before the start of next year, when a federal pause on student debt payments is set to expire.
The White House estimates the cancellation will cost $240 billion over the next 10 years, but outside analysts say it could be much higher. Official cost projections from the federal government are expected in coming weeks.
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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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| 2022-09-21T13:42:53Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department will no longer allow political appointees to go to fundraisers and other campaign events under restrictions handed down Tuesday that are aimed at maintaining the department’s independence from politics.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who is currently overseeing investigations including the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s home and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, said in a memo that the restrictions are to ensure that politics “both in fact and appearance” won’t affect the way the law is enforced or how inquiries are carried out.
Appointees, hired under presidential administrations rather than making long careers at the Justice Department, have been allowed to attend political events passively on their personal time with prior approval. The new policy bans attendance altogether.
It also removes an exception that had allowed people with close family members running for office to attend political events during presidential election years, and it bars attending such events on the evening of Election Day.
“It is critical that we hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards to avoid even the appearance of political influence as we carry out the department’s mission,” Garland wrote.
On his first day in office more than a year ago, Garland vowed to prioritize the Justice Department’s political independence after the departure of Trump, who had insisted on officials’ personal loyalty.
More recently, Trump and his allies have sought to cast the Aug. 9 search at Mar-a-Lago — part of an investigation into the removal of classified records — as a political weaponization of the Justice Department. A rash of online threats against federal agents followed.
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For more AP coverage of Donald Trump-related investigations, go to https://apnews.com/hub/trump-investigations.
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| 2022-09-21T13:43:09Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department says classified documents were “likely concealed and removed” from a storage room at former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate as part of an effort to obstruct the federal investigation into the discovery of the government records.
The FBI also seized boxes and containers holding more than 100 classified records during its Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago and found classified documents stashed in Trump’s office, according to a filing late Tuesday that lays out the most detailed chronology to date of months of strained interactions between Justice Department officials and Trump representatives over the discovery of government secrets.
The filing offers yet another indication of the sheer volume of classified records retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida. It shows how investigators conducting a criminal probe have focused not just on why the records were improperly stored there but also on the question of whether the Trump team intentionally misled them about the continued, and unlawful, presence of the top secret documents.
The timeline laid out by the Justice Department made clear that the extraordinary search of Mar-a-Lago came only after other efforts to retrieve the records had failed and that it resulted from law enforcement suspicion that additional documents remained inside the property despite assurances by Trump representatives that a “diligent search” had accounted for all of the material.
It also included a picture of some of the seized documents with colored cover sheets indicating their classified status, perhaps as a way to rebut suggestions that whoever packed them or handled them at Mar-a-Lago could have easily failed to appreciate their sensitive nature.
The photo shows the cover pages of a smattering of paperclip-bound classified documents — some marked as “TOP SECRET//SCI” with bright yellow borders and one marked as “SECRET//SCI” with a rust-colored border — along with whited-out pages, splayed out on a carpet at Mar-a-Lago. Beside them sits a cardboard box filled with gold-framed pictures, including a Time magazine cover.
Though it contains significant new details on the investigation, the Justice Department filing does not resolve a core question that has driven public fascination with the investigation — why Trump held onto the documents after he left the White House and why he and his team resisted repeated efforts to give them back. In fact, it suggests officials may not have received an answer.
During a June 3 visit to Mar-a-Lago by FBI and Justice Department officials, the document states, “Counsel for the former President offered no explanation as to why boxes of government records, including 38 documents with classification markings, remained at the Premises nearly five months after the production of the Fifteen Boxes and nearly one-and-a-half years after the end of the Administration.”
That visit, which came weeks after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records, receives substantial attention in the document and appears to be a key investigative focus.
Though Trump insisted again Wednesday that he had declassified the documents at Mar-a-Lago, his lawyers did not suggest that during the visit and instead “handled them in a manner that suggested counsel believed that the documents were classified,” the Justice Department said.
FBI agents who went there to receive additional materials were given “a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, containing the documents,” the filing states.
That envelope, according to the FBI, contained 38 unique documents with classification markings, including 16 documents marked secret and 17 marked top secret.
The investigators were permitted to visit the storage room but were not allowed to open or look inside any of the boxes, “giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained,” the Justice Department says.
During that visit, the document says, Trump’s lawyers told investigators that all the records that had come from the White House were stored in one location — a Mar-a-Lago storage room — and that “there were no other records stored in any private office space or other location at the Premises and that all available boxes were searched.”
After that, though, the department, which had subpoenaed video footage for the property, “developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.” The filing does not identify the individuals who may have relocated the boxes.
In their August search, agents found classified documents both in the storage room as well as in the former president’s office — including three classified documents found not in boxes, but in office desks.
“That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter,” the document states.
It says, “In some instances, even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys conducting the review required additional clearances before they were permitted to review certain documents.”
The investigation began from a referral from the National Archives and Records Administration, which recovered 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago in January that were found to contain 184 documents with classified markings, including top secret information.
The purpose of the Tuesday night filing was to oppose a request from the Trump legal team for a special master to review the documents seized during this month’s search and to return to him certain seized property. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is set to hear arguments on the matter on Thursday.
Cannon on Saturday said it was her “preliminary intent” to appoint such a person but also gave the Justice Department an opportunity to respond.
On Monday, the department said it had already completed its review of potentially privileged documents and identified a “limited set of materials that potentially contain attorney-client privileged information.” It said Tuesday that a special master was therefore “unnecessary” and that the presidential records that were taken from the home do not belong to Trump.
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Colvin and Balsamo reported from New York.
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More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump
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HALF MOON BAY, Calif. (KRON) — A whale washed up on shore near Half Moon Bay on Sunday, according to the California Academy of Sciences.
The whale was reportedly stranded on Manhattan Beach. A video of the animal shows that it does not appear to be moving and is being carried along by the waves.
CalAcademy reports that a necropsy was completed on the whale Monday morning in partnership with the Marine Mammal Center. More details about the death of the whale are expected to be released later Monday afternoon.
KRON On is streaming now
This is a developing story. Please stick with KRON for updates.
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| 2022-09-21T13:43:46Z
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WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) – Student loan forgiveness is stirring up intense debate. Critics say the Biden administration isn’t allowed to do what it’s promising and have threatened lawsuits.
President Joe Biden’s announcement about student loans last week came with a lot of questions. One of them was whether the plan is legally sound.
The Biden administration says the 2003 Heroes Act gives the Secretary of Education the power to cancel student debt during a national emergency. They argue the pandemic is just that.
“Congress gave the Secretary of Education in the HEROES Act the authority to do this,” White House Policy Advisor Susan Rice said.
Legal challenges to the plan are still expected.
“It’s going to be up to the courts to decide whether those are valid claims or not. But we believe that we’re on very strong legal ground,” White House Economic Advisor Bharat Ramamurti said.
Those legal threats have some concerned the debt relief could be delayed by lawsuits.
Alan Morrison, an associate dean at George Washington Law School, says he doesn’t think borrowers should be too worried about that.
“I just don’t think it’s likely to happen,” Morrison said.
While Morrison says there are legitimate legal questions about whether the Biden Administration has the authority to carry out their plan, there are also practical considerations.
“The real question is whether anybody can go to court and challenge it,” Morrison said.
He says past precedent makes it unlikely that anyone would have the required legal standing.
“The Supreme Court has traditionally been very willing to say no, this is one of those things that you have to work out in the political area,” Morrison said.
Beyond that, he argues once the loans are forgiven, most courts would be hesitant to undo it.
“I wouldn’t be too worried about you losing that, once you get that piece of paper in your hand,” Morrison said.
So what’s his advice to borrowers who qualify for the relief?
“I wouldn’t think about the legal questions, I would think about what you’re going to do with the money,” Morrison said.
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| 2022-09-21T13:43:54Z
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The small northwest Iowa city of Sheldon planned to make the opening of a time capsule one of the centerpiece events of its 150th anniversary this weekend, but it ran into a slight problem.
No one is sure where the time capsule is buried.
“We’re trying to find instructions on exactly where it’s at before we just start digging,” said Sheldon Chamber of Commerce Director Ashley Nordahl. “We think we know where it is, but to dig up concrete in the park when we have such a big event going on, we’re just postponing that to a little bit later in the year.”
The time capsule was buried 50 years ago during Sheldon’s centennial celebration and over time its specific location became a bit fuzzy. Event organizers had planned to open the time capsule during a town birthday celebration Friday morning featuring birthday cake and coffee. They then planned to place new items inside the capsule and rebury it.
The other events will go on as planned, with the time capsule unveiling delayed until workers can find it. To do that, the city will hire a company with an underground radar system that helped the nearby city of Sibley find its time capsule earlier this year.
“We still have every intention of finding it and digging it up,” Nordahl said. “It’s just a little more involved than what we originally had planned.”
Sheldon, a city of 5,178 people about 160 miles northwest of Des Moines, was founded in 1872.
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Which Fresh Step cat litters are best?
Whether you have an outdoor or indoor cat, you must deal with the litter at some point. Outdoor cats typically use a litter pan or tray less often, as they spend much of their day exploring the neighborhood.
But owners of indoor cats will attest that even after one use, a litter tray can quickly produce an odor that’s strong enough to alert the state’s hazardous materials removal team. However, cat litter isn’t just about containing the smell. There are several other aspects to consider, and most importantly, the comfort of your cat.
Clumping clay vs. crystals
There are several types of cat litter, but you’ll generally find the most common types in a cat owner’s house are clay or crystals.
- Clay: With a gray appearance, clay is an effective way of keeping cat waste contained. Within the clay category, there are clumping and nonclumping options. As the name implies, clumping is easier to clean, as the litter sticks together around the waste. You only have to scoop out the clumps to keep the tray odor-free. Nonclumping litter is easier for cats to kick off, potentially scattering litter outside the tray.
- Crystals: Whether scented or natural, crystal cat litter is often made from silica. The material is excellent at absorbing waste and liquids but is typically more expensive than clay. Even though crystals are dust-free, they can pose a hazard to cats if ingested frequently.
- Other litter options: While clay and crystals are the most common, cat owners have other options. The environmentally-conscience can opt for using biodegradable corn, wheat or soy. Cat litter can also be made from recycled pine wood scraps or recycled paper formed into pellets or granules.
Best Fresh Step cat litter
Fresh Step Multi-Cat Scented Clumping Clay
This 25-pound box of cat litter is the perfect size for a household with multiple cats and several litter trays. It is 99.9% dust-free, so tiny particles don’t fly away after use. The clumping clay is treated with Febreze scent and ammonia-block technology, dramatically reducing the smell of waste.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Fresh Scented Non-Clumping Crystals
With premium silica crystals, this 8-pound bag has Fresh Step’s 30 days of odor control guarantee. For one cat, this back should last around two months. It is non-clumping, so you must take care to scoop up solid and liquid waste completely.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Triple Action Scented Clumping Clay
This 42-pound pack is perfect for several months or multiple cats in your house. The clumping litter includes activated charcoal, ammonia-block technology and plant extracts to trap and eliminate odors and bacteria for up to 10 days.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Lightweight Febreze-Scented Clumping Clay
Treated with Febreze scents, this clumping litter is best suited for cats that don’t need to go often or have smaller movements. It still uses Fresh Step’s extra-strength formula to help eliminate odors and easily clumps together for quick waste removal.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Simply Unscented Clumping Clay
This unscented litter is best if your cat prefers to do business in a natural-smelling tray. It has no added fragrances or dyes and is 99.9% dust-free. The high-quality clay clumps quickly, making removal easy.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Extreme Odor Control Febreze-Scented Clumping Clay
For the times when you need extreme odor control, this mountain spring-scented litter clumps quickly and efficiently. Fresh Step guarantees that it will block the smell of ammonia for up to 10 days. The 11-pound box is good for one cat for about two weeks.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Clean Paws Multi-Cat Scented Clumping Clay
More cats mean more litter, but this box of four 9.4-pound bags is all you need. The clumping clay leaves behind a fresh scent and can’t easily be tracked throughout your house.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Outstretch Concentrated Clumping Clay
This is an excellent option if you need to make your clumping clay litter last. With six times more activated carbon than other Fresh Step litters, it will last around 50% longer, meaning you’ll need to change it less often. It comes with a 15-day odor control guarantee.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Summer Breeze Cat Litter Deodorizing Crystals
If you use crystal litter, these deodorizing crystals help to block unwanted odors. Simply sprinkle it on the litter in the tray or soiled area, and it contains the smell. You should always remove solid waste first before sprinkling.
Sold by Chewy
Fresh Step Soothing Lavender Litter Box Deodorizing Gel Beads
With the scent of soothing lavender, these deodorizing gel beads help combat the odor from a litter tray. Instead of pouring the beads into the litter, you simply place it close by. The 12-ounce jar should last for a few weeks.
Sold by Chewy
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Charlie Fripp writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-21T13:44:14Z
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Which platform bird feeder is best?
A platform bird feeder attracts all kinds of birds, large and small, to your yard. Not only does this give you the pleasure of watching birds in your own outdoor space, but it’s also great for local wildlife.
You’ll need to consider your garden setup and determine what platform feeder is most suitable. If you have a pole or tree to hang it from, the Woodlink Going Green Platform Bird Feeder is an excellent option.
What to know before you buy a platform bird feeder
Types of platform bird feeders
Not all platform bird feeders are the same. You’ll find four main types: hanging, freestanding, ground and mountable.
- Hanging: Hanging platform feeders have cables attached to all four corners. These cables meet at the top, and you can hang them from a bird feeder stand or a suitable branch. This type of feeder is readily available and reasonably priced.
- Freestanding: Freestanding feeders have their own stands and sit around 3-4 feet off the ground. They’re usually made from wood and can have roofs.
- Ground: Ground platform feeders sit close to the ground. They’re great for attracting ground-feeding birds, such as cardinals and doves. However, they’re not the safest choice for birds if you have cats or other predators that frequent your yard.
- Mountable: Mountable feeders have a bracket that you can affix to a deck railing or a similar piece of fencing. These brackets fix in place without using tools, so they’re easy to install, but they’re only a good option if you have fencing or railings to attach them to.
Materials
Most feeders are made from either wood, plastic or metal. Each option has its pros and cons.
- Wood: Wooden feeders look good and have some natural weather resistance, but they will rot and warp over time.
- Plastic: Plastic feeders are often designed to look like wood. They’re weather-resistant, but many buyers prefer to avoid plastic.
- Metal: Metal platform feeders are usually made from mesh, which drains easily but isn’t highly durable.
What to look for in a quality platform bird feeder
Roof
Some feeders feature a large platform covered by a roof. This type is sometimes called a fly-through feeder. While it still features a large, flat feeding area, some don’t consider it a true platform feeder because it’s covered. It still gives all but the largest birds access to seed and keeps rainwater out.
Mesh base
The mesh base allows water to drain from the platform. Without this, it will become waterlogged when it rains.
Color
Some birds are attracted to bright colors, but others prefer feeders with a natural hue so that they’re more camouflaged with their surroundings. You’ll usually attract a greater range of birds with a natural-colored feeder.
How much you can expect to spend on a platform bird feeder
Standard platform feeders start at around $10-$20, while large and elaborate feeders can cost over $100. That said, most cost under $50.
Platform bird feeder FAQ
What kinds of birds come to a platform feeder?
A. The beauty of a platform feeder is that it attracts all kinds of birds, from tits and finches to big birds, such as crows and wood pigeons. As such, you’ll often see a greater range of birds on this feeder than on a smaller tube or hopper feeder.
However, this can pose a problem if larger birds start overrunning the feeder, blocking smaller birds. Some people choose to remedy this by placing various feeder types or choosing platform feeders with roofs.
If you want to attract a particular type of bird, consider putting out food they’re drawn to. For instance, goldfinches love Nyjer seeds, while peanuts will attract woodpeckers and northern mockingbirds.
How do you clean a bird feeder?
A. Regularly cleaning your bird feeder is essential to fight the buildup of bacteria and make sure you aren’t providing a breeding ground for bird diseases. While you can clean it with hot, soapy water, it’s better to use a solution of one part household bleach to nine parts water.
Scrub the feeder with a stiff-bristled brush and your cleaning solution. Pay particular attention to the corners of the platform surface, which can be overlooked and harbor bacteria and rotting food.
What’s the best platform bird feeder to buy?
Top platform bird feeder
Woodlink Going Green Platform Bird Feeder
What you need to know: This durable hanging feeder is made from recycled plastic.
What you’ll love: It’s easier to clean and is better at withstanding the elements than wooden feeders. The base is made from a metal screen, so water doesn’t pool. It’s simple to hang from a tree or a pole.
What you should consider: The coating of the metal screen can peel over time.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top platform bird feeder for the money
Wild Wings Cedar Tray Bird Feeder
What you need to know: This hanging platform feeder is naturally weather-resistant as it’s made from cedar.
What you’ll love: The perforated screen base allows water to drain and is removable to facilitate cleaning. The hanging cables are strong and secure. It holds up to 1.5 quarts of bird seed.
What you should consider: The holes in the screen are large enough for very small seeds to become stuck in or fall through.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Gray Bunny Ground Bird Feeder Tray
What you need to know: The compact platform feeder is perfect for birds who live to feed on the ground.
What you’ll love: It’s made from a wire mesh, so water drains easily, and you can hose it down. The legs keep it balanced and raise it slightly off the ground so it won’t get waterlogged.
What you should consider: It’s smaller than some buyers imagine, so check the dimensions to avoid disappointment.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Lauren Corona writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-21T13:44:21Z
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Which quarter-zip sweatshirt is best?
A quarter-zip sweatshirt is an excellent compromise between a zip-up and a traditional pullover. It lets you maintain the ventilating benefits of zip-up without removing the option of a front pouch pocket to keep your hands warm. They also come with a wide variety of necklines and styles. The best ones look stylish and are built to last.
The Carhartt Women’s Clarksburg Half-Zip Hooded Sweatshirt is a top pick because it maintains an excellent combination of design, functionality and durability.
What to know before you buy a quarter-zip sweatshirt
What is a quarter-zip sweatshirt?
Quarter-zip sweatshirts have various silhouettes and necklines. They are much like a classic pullover but have a zipper at the front of the neck.
Instead of zipping down to the bottom, the zipper can only be lowered to the center of your chest. They are also commonly referred to as half-zip sweatshirts.
Sweatshirt vs. sweater
While sweatshirts and sweaters have similar shapes, they are made differently and serve different purposes.
A sweatshirt is a thick shirt that comes in various lengths and styles. Due to their durable, tight-knit and relaxed aesthetic, they are ideal for casual wear. They are great for the gym or anywhere that doesn’t have a dress code.
While a sweater can also be considered a type of thick shirt that comes in various lengths and styles, they are made from a looser knit or crocheted material that is far more fragile than a sweatshirt.
Due to their craftsmanship and the more delicate materials used to construct them, they are typically considered dressier than sweatshirts. Thus, they can be worn to work or more formal events when paired with other dressier pieces.
Sweatshirt materials
Quarter-zip sweatshirts are usually found in fleece and terry knits. Most are made from cotton, polyester or a blend of both with some added stretch from spandex or modal.
What to look for in a quality a quarter-zip sweatshirt
The right neckline
Quarter-zip sweatshirts come with various necklines. To get the one you want, you should know what styles exist. There are five common considerations:
- Hoodie: This style has a hood attached to the back of the neck.
- Collar: This has a loose neckline that lands high on the neck when zipped up and a wide lapel when zipped down.
- Cowl neck: This features a loose neckline that drapes around the neck and shoulders whether it is zipped up or not.
- Turtleneck: This has a tight collar that lands high on the neck and opens to a wide lapel.
- Mock neck: This neckline lands on the middle of the neck. When unzipped, it opens to a small lapel.
The right silhouette
Quarter-zip sweatshirts come in several styles that have various shapes. There are five standard silhouettes to consider:
- Pullover: This classic style is loose through your midsection and lands at your hips.
- Oversized: This silhouette is like a pullover but much larger for a cozier look and feel.
- Cropped: This youthful design is much like a regular pullover, but its bottom hem can land anywhere between your low chest and your navel.
- Fitted: This design hugs your body and shows off your shape. It is an excellent option for those who want the warmth of a traditional sweatshirt but don’t want the added bulk.
- Tunic: This silhouette resembles a classic sweatshirt, but its bottom hem lands at your hips or high on your thighs.
Pockets or a pouch
Pockets can make your life easier. They let you take your essentials, such as your keys and wallet, on the go without needing a bag. You can typically find pockets at the hips or on the front in the shape of a pouch. The best quarter-zip sweatshirts have a separate pocket for your phone to keep your device safe and secure.
How much you can expect to spend on a quarter-zip sweatshirt
Depending on the brand, style and details added to the sweatshirt, prices range from $15-$100.
Quarter-zip sweatshirt FAQ
What is the best way to wash your quarter-zip sweatshirt?
A. It is always good to check with your sweatshirt’s wash instructions on the label first. However, when you wash your clothes inside out with like colors on a delicate cycle and dry them on low heat, they tend to last longer.
Can you get rid of pilling on your sweatshirts?
A. Yes. Consider investing in a fabric shaver that quickly and efficiently removes excess fuzz, lint and pilling.
What’s the best quarter-zip sweatshirt to buy?
Top quarter-zip sweatshirt
Carhartt Women’s Clarksburg Half-Zip Hooded Sweatshirt
What you need to know: This is a well-made sweatshirt that is comfortable and built to last.
What you’ll love: It’s made from heavyweight fleece to keep you warm. It has a pouch pocket in the front and a hidden media pocket to secure your phone. It comes in three colors and sizes XS to 2XL.
What you should consider: This sweatshirt might be a little too pricey for some people.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top quarter-zip sweatshirt for the money
Daily Ritual Women’s Relaxed-Fit Quarter-Zip Sweatshirt
What you need to know: This is a classic, comfortable zipped pullover with a flattering fit.
What you’ll love: This is a slightly flowy but classic-fit sweatshirt with a mock neck. It’s made of a soft terry knit, and its hem lands at the hip. The zipper is durable, and it has pockets at the sides. It also comes in six colors and sizes XS to 2XL.
What you should consider: The material might be a little too thin to keep you warm in cooler months.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Carhartt Men’s Quarter-Zip Mock-Neck Sweatshirt
What you need to know: This smart sweatshirt isn’t just for looks; it’s also ultradurable.
What you’ll love: This traditional pullover has a mock neck with inner ribbing. It is made with sweat-wicking material to keep you cool and dry. It is also stain resistant, has a front pouch pocket and comes in sizes S to 4XL in three colors.
What you should consider: Some might prefer a sweatshirt that has individual pockets placed at the hips.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Ella Scott writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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What is Ulta’s 21 Days of Beauty sale?
Beauty lovers rejoice, because Ulta’s biannual 21 Days of Beauty sale is officially here. From Aug. 28 through Sept. 17, you’ll be able to snag cult-favorite products from trendy brands for 50% off, including Anastasia Beverly Hills and Urban Decay. Ulta posts its steals daily, so you’ll want to act quickly. Whether you’re stocking up on must-haves for fall or trying something new, here are the top products from Ulta’s 21 Days of Beauty sale.
In this article: Urban Decay All Nighter Long-Lasting Makeup Setting Spray, Anastasia Beverly Hills Dipbrow and Forea Luna Mini 3.
Ulta 21 Day of Beauty sales
Beauty steals Aug. 28-Sept. 3
Anastasia Beverly Hills Luminous Foundation
With 50 shades to choose from in three undertones, anyone will be able to find their perfect match. This foundation is water-resistant and long-wearing, so it will last from breakfast to after-dinner drinks. Plus, it’s cruelty-free. Sold by Ulta Beauty
First Aid Beauty Pure Skin Face Cleanser
Not only is this cleanser fragrance-free, but it’s also pH balanced. This helps to maintain the skin’s natural acidity, making it ideal for sensitive skin. As part of Ulta’s conscious beauty, it’s vegan, cruelty-free and packaged in sustainable materials. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Smashbox X Becca Under Eye Brightening Corrector
Say goodbye to dark circles with this brightening corrector. It’s not a concealer but instead deflects the light away from dark under-eye circles. It comes in four shades that neutralize blue tones. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Use the Foreo at home or throw it in your bag to ensure a clean face anytime. The powerful T-sonic pulsations and soft points work together to remove up to 99.5% of all dirt and oil that accumulate after a long day or sleeping all night. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Benefit Cosmetics Precisely, My Brow Pencil
Made with clean ingredients, this brow pencil works to transform shapeless brows and give them precise definition. It comes in 12 shades that are waterproof, blendable and tested to last 12 hours. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Beauty steals Sept. 4-10
Beauty Blender Bio Pure Makeup Sponge
Makeup artists around the world use Beauty Blender makeup sponges for a good reason. While this sponge has that same blending power, it’s formulated with a 60% plant base. It’s also gluten-free and comes in recyclable packaging. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Kate Somerville ExfoliKate Cleanser Daily Foaming Wash
This foaming face wash gently works to cleanse away makeup, oil and dirt to reveal smooth, soft and glowing skin. It contains glycolic acid and lactic acid to refine the appearance of pores and exfoliate the skin’s surface. Sold by Ulta Beauty
It Cosmetics Bye Bye Foundation Full Coverage Moisturizer
Not only is this product a full-coverage foundation, but it’s also a color-infused moisturizer that utilizes flexible pure-color pigments to smooth out lines. Plus, it’s also an SPF 50+ broad-spectrum physical sunscreen. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Beauty steals Sept. 11-17
Urban Decay All Nighter Long-Lasting Makeup Setting Spray
With just a few sprays of the microfine mist, this setting spray is designed to lock in makeup for up to 16 hours and prevent it from settling into lines or fading. It’s also oil-free, making it suitable for all skin types. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Anastasia Beverly Hills Dipbrow
For a long-wearing, smudge-resistant brow product, opt for this creamy pomade that comes in over 10 shades. Instead of sitting on top of the brows, it adheres to the hairs, giving the look of full brows. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Peter Thomas Roth Potent-C Power Serum
This serum is packed with 20% THD ascorbate vitamin C, which is a stable ingredient 50 times more potent than traditional vitamin C. Its efficacy is also boosted by vitamin E and ferulic acid, which are powerful antioxidants. Sold by Ulta Beauty
Give the cheeks, eyes or even nose a natural-looking hint of color with this powder blush. It’s designed to apply evenly and adhere to the skin for lasting color. It’s also dermatologist-tested and non-acnegenic, making it ideal for a variety of skin types. Sold by Ulta Beauty
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Bre Richey writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-21T13:44:36Z
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Which storage basket with lid is best?
Professional organizers know storage baskets are a great way to reduce clutter. Baskets with lids keep everything out of sight but close at hand for when you need them. While many are strictly utilitarian, well-designed and well-crafted storage baskets with lids add warmth and character to any room.
Every room and every set of items that need to be stored is different, so think about what you want to store and where you want to store it before shopping. If you’re looking for a set of storage baskets for keeping smaller items organized, take a look at the Areyzin Set of Six Plastic Storage Baskets with Lids.
What to know before you buy a storage basket with lid
From large storage
ottomans to small clear food storage bins, boxes and containers, we have many ways to store things. A basket is a lightweight container made of interwoven material, usually strong, flexible grasses.
What do you want to store in your basket?
Choose the sizes best suited for the things you want to store.
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Small baskets are the choice for storing a few small items such as socks, toiletries, sewing materials and trinkets. They are small and light enough to hold in one hand.
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Medium baskets are good for magazines, books, end pillows and board games. The lid should open easily because you’ll use it often. This size needs two hands, but can be moved about with ease.
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Large baskets are so big that you rarely move them. Larger sizes are good for bulky items such as blankets, towels and bed linens.
Materials
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Wicker is lightweight and great for holding items that like to breathe, such as towels, linens and clothing.
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Jute is a long, soft fiber that can be spun into coarse, strong threads and is often used to make rope.
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Fabric storage baskets are the lightest and flimsiest of all and usually fold for easy shipping. They have very thin walls and are used to store things such as pillows, scarves and gloves.
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Plastic baskets are often made to appear as if they were woven from natural fibers.
What to look for in a quality storage basket with lid
Lids
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Mount type: Some lids are separate pieces while others are hinged on the back side. Look for hinged lids that are attached securely and separate lids that fit snugly.
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Fit: Hinged lids should open and close easily. Separate lids should cover the entire top of the basket and be easy to remove.
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Closure: Most baskets with hinged lids close with a simple loop and toggle. If you choose round baskets, make sure the handle at the top is easy to grasp and comfortable in your hand.
Handles
You may not plan to move your storage baskets around much, but handles are always welcome for the times you do. Make sure they are firmly attached to the storage basket or to the frame underneath it, if it has one. Handles should be strong enough to support your basket’s weight when it’s full.
Stackability
Square and rectangular storage baskets lend themselves to stacking only if they have metal frames inside or if the side panels are made of rigid material. Avoid flimsy and irregularly shaped baskets that won’t stack properly.
How much you can expect to spend on a storage basket with lid
Small- and medium-sized baskets with lids cost $5-$20 each and often come in sets of two, three and four. Large ones cost $20-$60 each.
Storage basket with lid FAQ
What is a basket weave?
A. It is the interlacing of horizontal and vertical strands to form a checkered or diamond pattern. The first basket weavers used reeds found along the river and wove them together to make strong but lightweight baskets they used to carry and store things.
Why would I want a lid?
A. You want to keep what’s inside close at hand, but you want it to stay out of sight until you need it. You may want to keep dust and dirt away from what’s inside. You might also want to stack your storage baskets on top of each other.
What’s the best storage basket with lid to buy?
Top storage basket with lid
Areyzin Set of Six Plastic Storage Baskets with Lids
What you need to know: These ventilated baskets with lids are perfect for organizing closets and home offices.
What you’ll love: Made of food-grade plastic, these baskets measure 10.6 by 7.5 by 5.1 inches. This size is great for organizing and storing small items in the kitchen and bath or as containers for arts and crafts projects for the kids.
What you should consider: The lids do not fit snugly.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top storage basket with lid for the money
Denja Set of Two Round Jute Baskets with Lids
What you need to know: Made from natural jute rope, this pair of storage baskets is attractive enough to be displayed anywhere.
What you’ll love: Jute is a fiber spun into coarse, strong threads that are woven together to make rope. The baskets and lids are lightweight and sturdy, and the wide leather tab handle is easy to use and lies flat when not in use. The larger basket is 11 by 6.5 inches and the smaller one is 9.2 by 5 inches.
What you should consider: These soft-sided baskets have no interior frame.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Yangqihome Set of Four Woven Natural Seagrass Storage Baskets with Lids
What you need to know: These handcrafted rectangular baskets are made in four sizes that are stackable and nest inside each other, too.
What you’ll love: The seagrass surfaces are mounted on iron frames that keep their shape and are sturdy enough to stack one on the other even when they are full. These baskets are 9, 10, 12 and 14 inches long and have proportionally sized tops hinged at the back.
What you should consider: Only store dry items in these baskets. Avoid moisture.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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David Allan Van writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
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| 2022-09-21T13:44:44Z
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Which camping toilet is best?
A crucial question you must tackle when planning a camping trip is knowing where and how your group will go to the restroom. While some people are comfortable fully roughing it, others prefer at least a small amount of normalcy while they camp. This is where a camping toilet can help, and a wide variety is available.
If you are looking for a reliable, portable and simple design that takes care of business when you need to, the Blika Upgraded Portable Toilet for Camping is a good choice.
What to know before you buy a camping toilet
Types of toilets
- Foldable: Foldable or collapsible toilets work well when storage space is minimal, on the road or at home. These may come with a toilet seat or be a plain platform. You can use them over a pit toilet or a bucket.
- Buckets: Bucket toilets utilize composting to break down human waste. Sometimes, a toilet seat is attached to a bucket that collects deposits. You may add an absorbent material such as cedar pet bedding or newspaper. It is important to use compostable liners for bucket camping toilets.
- Chemical flush: Chemical flush toilets seal waste inside the toilet and use added chemicals to break it down. These still require disposal and handling, but some prefer a more sanitized version of waste. These can also be safely emptied at RV disposal stations.
Toilet height
Little kids might be able to squat anywhere, but people with aching knees and backs might prefer a taller toilet. Anything shorter than a foot will be challenging for older outdoor enthusiasts to use comfortably.
Capacity
Camping toilets need to be emptied when they are full. How often this happens depends on how many people are using the toilet and how much it can hold. If you prefer fewer trips to the dump, choose a larger capacity camping toilet.
What to look for in a quality camping toilet
Compostable bags included
For composting bucket toilets, you’ll need special bags that break down in a landfill or pit toilet. Look for toilets that include compostable bags sized to fit.
Easy to empty
All of that waste has to go somewhere. If it doesn’t go into a bag you can tie off and throw out, make sure the receptacle is leak-proof and easy to carry.
Solid construction
The last thing you want is your toilet to be wobbly when sitting on it. Look for solid construction and well-crafted design, regardless of what kind of materials were used to make your toilet.
How much you can expect to spend on a camping toilet
The price varies depending on the type of toilet you purchase and how elaborate it is. Expect to spend $250-$150.
Camping toilet FAQ
Do you have to buy a camping toilet for outdoor adventures?
A. No. Some campers are perfectly content to dig a hole in the woods. However, there are some big advantages of camping toilets over squatting in the wilderness.
- It’s easier on the joints: If your knees aren’t as flexible as they used to be, a comfortable camping toilet makes it easier to use the bathroom.
- It feels like home: Even if you love camping off-grid far away from people, it’s nice to bring a little civilization with you. A camping toilet can make even the most desolate place more comfortable.
- It’s not public: Public outhouses and restrooms at campsites can be less than desirable. It’s a crapshoot as to whether or not they are clean and well-stocked. Bring your own toilet wherever you go, and you can avoid rolling the dice.
Where do you dispose of waste from a camping toilet?
A. The best place to dispose of waste is at a dumping station that services RVs. Waste can also be disposed of in a pit toilet, but only if it has been collected in a compostable bag.
Some local laws permit dumping waste in a landfill in special areas. Make sure this is legal before you make the trip.
What’s the best camping toilet to buy?
Top camping toilet
Blika Upgraded Portable Toilet for Camping
What you need to know: This foldable toilet is perfect over a pit, a bucket or a bag.
What you’ll love: This stainless steel camping toilet sits at a regular chair height for comfort. It weighs 4.4 pounds for easy packing and holds 350 pounds. Toilet bags can attach directly to the chair or be positioned over a receptacle. It comes with a carrying bag and toilet paper holder. Try it out for a month and return it for your money back if it does not work for you.
What you should consider: The toilet paper holder is not sturdy. Most people choose not to use it.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top camping toilet for the money
Camco Bucket Toilet Seat With Lid and Waste Bags
What you need to know: This converts any 5-gallon bucket to a backcountry camping toilet.
What you’ll love: The seat snaps securely on most standard 5-gallon buckets. It is made of polypropylene. The kit also comes with three leak-proof bucket bags.
What you should consider: This is just the toilet seat and the waste bags. The bucket is not included.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
What you need to know: If you need a portable toilet that functions most like a conventional, in-home toilet, this one’s for you.
What you’ll love: This works both indoors and out. It uses water with a 360-degree spray and flush to keep the bowl clean. It works for 50 flushes before it needs to be emptied. It has a 5.3-gallon waste tank and a 3.2-gallon water tank. It comes with a carrying and storage case.
What you should consider: It is expensive and requires a little more setup than other options.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Suzannah Kolbeck writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
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| 2022-09-21T13:44:51Z
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What’s the best gaming computer?
There are plenty of people who enjoy playing video games, but they don’t have the time or inclination to build their own system. That usually involves a lot of research and planning, and you must also make sure the parts are compatible.
The easier — and sometimes cheaper — way is to buy a gaming computer that’s already assembled. You’ll need to do nothing else except turn it on and install your favorite games. If that sounds like a dream, then the 2022 HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop PC is an excellent option.
What to know before you buy a gaming computer
Consider what games you’ll play most
What you can do and how well you can do it depends on the PC’s internal components. A gaming computer should be strong enough to play the latest titles, but consider what else you’ll use it for. If you do occasional graphic design, you’ll greatly benefit from more memory and a faster graphics card. Remember, you don’t need the latest and greatest components to enjoy top-tier games, so there’s no need to go over budget.
Additional components might be necessary but tricky
A pre-built computer uses the manufacturer’s components as well as some third-party parts. While that ensures compatibility, it’s not always the best. For example, a computer with a powerful graphics card needs more cooling or ventilation inside a stock PC case. So consider installing a liquid cooling system or adding more extraction fans. This can get tricky, as you must ensure the case is large enough and the components remain compatible.
You must have your own accessories
A pre-built computer is all the components assembled in the case, so it’s ready to play games straight out of the box. But it doesn’t come with any accessories or peripherals. If a pre-built machine is your first PC, you must also buy a gaming monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. For sound, you have a couple of options, but most gamers prefer to use a wired headset unless the motherboard has built-in Bluetooth — then, you can use a wireless headset.
What to look for in a quality gaming computer
Central processing unit
The CPU is at the heart of any computer, responsible for sending instructions to the other components. Depending on the motherboard, the CPU will either be made by Intel or AMD. The CPU is less crucial for gaming in terms of graphical quality but nonetheless important. A good-quality computer has at least an Intel Core i5 or an AMD Ryzen 5 CPU.
Random access memory
The RAM is the computer’s memory and stores all the short-term data required to execute tasks. The more RAM you have, the faster a PC can get things done without slowing down. A good-quality gaming PC has at least 8 gigabytes of RAM, but 16GB is becoming the norm as video games become more resource-demanding.
Graphics card
When it comes to video games, the graphics card plays an integral role. It’s the main component that determines visual quality. Most gamers go for an Nvidia graphics card, with the RTX 30 series being the latest. Others prefer AMD’s cards, with the Radeon RX 6000 series as the newest model.
How much you can expect to spend on a gaming computer
This largely depends on the manufacturer and the quality of the internal components. An entry-level gaming computer with 32GB of RAM and an Intel Core i5 CPU costs $1,000-$1,200. However, a more powerful PC with a high-end graphics card runs $2,000-$3,000.
Gaming computer FAQ
Can you use any mouse and keyboard?
A. Yes, you can use whatever mouse or keyboard brand you want. It will work as long as the accessory connects wirelessly or through a USB port. Your accessories are not dependent on the PC’s internal components.
How do you add storage space?
A. To add hard drive space, you have a few options. Depending on the motherboard’s configuration, you can easily add another SSD or hard drive. If there isn’t enough space in the case, you can always connect an external hard drive through a USB port.
What’s the best gaming computer to buy?
Top gaming computer
2022 HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop PC
What you need to know: This computer has enough RAM and hard drive space to power through the most demanding tasks.
What you’ll love: Shipped in an elegant HP case with subtle green lighting on the front, this pre-built computer has 32GB of RAM, a 1 terabyte solid-state hard drive and a 2TB traditional hard drive. The CPU is an Intel Core i5 with a maximum clock speed of 4.3 gigahertz, and the graphics card is a powerful Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB. It comes with a wired mouse and keyboard.
What you should consider: The case doesn’t have a lot of ventilation holes, so installing an after-market liquid cooler is best.
Where to buy: Sold by HP and Amazon
Top gaming computer for the money
Asus ROG Strix G10 Gaming Desktop PC
What you need to know: With a high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, this affordable computer is a great choice for any gamer.
What you’ll love: Powered by an Intel Core i7 CPU, it has 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1TB solid-state hard drive and comes with Windows 11 installed. The case features a tempered glass window, customizable Aura Sync lighting and two isolated air chambers for better ventilation.
What you should consider: Some users said the case’s open design makes the system noisy when switched on.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Alienware Aurora R13 Gaming Desktop
What you need to know: If you have some serious extra cash, this beast of a gaming machine is all you need for the next few years.
What you’ll love: Packing a powerful Intel Core i9 with a maximum clock speed of 5.2 gigahertz, there will be very few games it can’t handle on the best settings. It comes with 32GB of RAM (expandable up to 128GB), a 1TB M.2 solid-state hard drive and an Nvidia RTX 3080Ti 8GB graphics card.
What you should consider: The PC case is in Alienware’s distinct futuristic shape, which might not be a look for everyone.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Charlie Fripp writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-21T13:45:07Z
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Audio quality matters
Audio quality matters whether you are listening to music or watching your favorite show. Many assume audio quality can only be influenced by the device used to stream, but the service you use makes a huge difference. We sat down with our tech expert, Jaime Vazquez, to learn more about which streaming service sounds the best and what products can help you get the most out of the service you use.
Everything you need to know about streaming service audio quality
Does lossless audio matter?
Most music streaming services use MP3 files to stream audio. MP3s are a type of compressed audio file that save space and bandwidth. Compressed files require some data to be discarded, resulting in a lower-quality audio file. On the other hand, lossless audio files are compressed to maintain the original quality of the file.
An MP3 file is around 80% smaller than the original uncompressed song. Lossless file types such as FLAC and ALAC are around half the original file size. Although you may not notice the compression if you are used to listening to lossy files, you’ll hear a massive difference after listening to your favorite songs in a lossless format. High-and-low-end sounds, such as basslines and high hats, will sound completely different when streaming lossless files.
When asked about lossless audio, Vazquez said, “Lossless audio is similar to the difference between SD video and 4K. When you see something in 4K, you’ll see way more detail than in standard definition. Plus, the experience is exponentially better. The same can be said for lossless audio versus compressed audio. You’ll hear instruments you may not have noticed before.”
Which music streaming services offer lossless audio?
Tidal was one of the first streaming services to offer lossless audio. The service offers three subscription tiers, including a free option with regular audio quality, a midrange option that streams lossless FLAC files and a high-end option that claims to make music sound “as flawless as it sounded in the mastering suite.”
Apple Music is one of the only services that allows existing subscribers to stream lossless audio at no extra cost. You can enable lossless audio in your device’s settings if you’re an Apple Music subscriber.
Amazon Music HD has lossless and high-resolution lossless audio. Amazon’s high-resolution lossless audio sounds even better than traditional lossless. This service is one of the most affordable ways to listen to high-resolution audio, especially if you’re a Prime member.
Spotify announced it would release lossless audio in 2021, but it ultimately never released the service.
Video streaming services
Dolby Atmos is arguably the leader in at-home audio quality. Luckily, numerous services offer Dolby Atmos audio. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus support it. Still, you’ll need a home theater system or sound bar-compatible device with Dolby Atmos to use it. Most services default to two-channel stereo audio if you rely on your TV’s speakers.
Audio quality FAQ
Is there a particular type of TV that offers the best audio?
A. According to Vazquez, “TVs historically haven’t had great audio. Often, TV manufacturers expect a sound bar or home theater system to do the heavy lifting. However, OLED TVs have impressive speakers, specifically those made by Sony and LG. Still, it’s best to buy a TV with great picture quality in most cases, then buy a budget sound bar to handle the audio.”
Are there particular sound bars or surround-sound systems offering the best audio quality?
A. Sound bars and home theater systems can significantly boost your video streaming service’s audio quality. Per Vazquez, “Sound bars are ideal for those with space constraints. Home theater systems are sometimes a multi-thousand-dollar investment, but they will almost always sound better than a sound bar. Consider a ‘home-theater-system-in-a-box’ if you’re looking for great audio on a budget. Sony and LG make great “in-a-box” systems, and Vizio has always been a budget leader.”
Are there particular headphones that offer the best audio for streaming services?
A. When asked about headphones, Vazquez said, “Wireless equals lossy. Some audiophiles say true listening happens with wired headphones. However, Bluetooth headphones have gotten so good that most of us can’t tell the difference. The most important considerations are to have the experience you want in mind, stick with the brands you know and trust your ears.”
Best products to enhance your streaming service’s audio quality
Headphones our expert recommends
Audio-Technica ATH-M50X Professional Studio Monitor Headphones
These affordable headphones have strong bass capabilities and a closed-back design that helps block noise. They are ideal for mixing and mastering or enjoying lossless audio. They fold down, making them easy to take on the go.
Sold by Amazon
Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Premium Noise-Canceling Overhead Headphones
Although they are wireless, the sound quality is top-notch. They include an audio cable if you’d rather listen to lossless audio with wired headphones. The noise-cancellation features are impressive.
Sold by Amazon
TVs our expert recommends
This features a vibrant 4K display and voice-assistant capabilities. The contrast between light and dark colors is top-notch. It integrates seamlessly with most home theater systems.
Sold by Amazon
LG OLED C1 Series 55-inch 4K Smart TV
This OLED display looks fantastic and the built-in speakers are impressive. It’s compatible with Dolby Atmos and features a slim design. It’s available in five screen sizes and has voice-assistant capabilities.
Sold by Amazon
Home theater systems our expert recommends
Sony CS-Series Speakers Bundle
This Dolby-Atmos-compatible system has everything you need to transform your home theater setup. The subwoofer sounds excellent. It’s easy to set up, and you can arrange it in a variety of options.
Sold by Amazon
Vizio M-Series 5.1 Premium Sound Bar
This system is compact compared to other home theater systems. It is compatible with Dolby Atmos. You can connect your phone via Bluetooth. This system is significantly cheaper than most others.
Sold by Amazon
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Cody Stewart writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-21T13:45:14Z
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Privacy screen protectors for your laptop
Whether you use your laptop for work or entertainment, a privacy screen protector is essential for hiding your screen from prying eyes. Even if you don’t have sensitive or confidential information on the screen, this accessory can give you extra security and privacy. Plus, similar to a standard screen protector, it can also cut down on glare and help prevent eye strain while using your computer.
How to use a privacy screen protector
Privacy screen protectors for laptops are similar to smartphone screen protectors in many ways. They’re designed to cover the main display and act as a physical filter to keep others from easily seeing what you have on the screen.
In terms of application methods, there are two main options:
- Attach it directly to the physical screen. Be sure to apply it evenly and carefully to avoid damaging the display.
- Position it on the frame and bezels of the laptop. If you’re concerned about messing with the display, apply the screen protector to the frame instead.
Some privacy screen protectors have an adhesive quality that lets you apply them without any tools or equipment. Others require strips along the borders or strategically placed suction cups. A few use clips or magnets are especially useful if you only want to remove the screen protector occasionally.
How privacy screen protectors for laptops work
Privacy screen protectors use the same technology found in polarized glasses. It keeps your computer’s screen hidden from nearby visual hackers.
The screen protector starts preventing visibility at around a 30-degree angle. This means you can still see whatever is on the screen while sitting in front of your laptop. However, anyone sitting nearby or beside you won’t be able to read the display.
Screen size and measuring
Laptops range in size, and so do privacy screen protectors. Before getting one, make sure it’s the right size, or it might not fit or work properly.
If you’re not sure what size to get, measure the height and width of your screen. Then, compare these dimensions with the screen protector you want. Some manufacturers also use diagonal measurements, so measure that, too.
Many laptops have raised bezels around the main display. Avoid including these in the measurement, as most screen protectors can’t be applied to them. Some laptops have very thin bezels, which can be included in the measurement as they add to the total viewable display area.
Common privacy screen protector sizes for laptops are:
- 13.3 inches
- 14 inches
- 15.6 inches
- 17.3 inches
Some manufacturers measure screen protectors by their aspect ratio instead of in inches. The most common aspect ratio for laptops is 16:9. Make sure to cross-reference this when determining the right size for your screen.
Construction
Most privacy screen protectors are made from thin, durable plastic such as polyethylene terephthalate. A few use tempered glass. If you plan to remove and reattach it repeatedly, go with a thicker one that can withstand handling. Otherwise, a thinner one blends in more easily with the computer screen.
Other main benefits
Besides keeping away unwanted eyes, here are the other main benefits of privacy screen protectors:
- Anti-glare: Many screen protectors have a coating that keeps environmental light from reflecting on the display. This is especially useful if your laptop is positioned near bright indoor lights or in the sunlight.
- Blue light protection: Blue light can cause blurred vision, eye strain and negatively affect sleep quality. Unfortunately, it’s prominent in many digital devices and certain types of light bulbs. Privacy screen protectors can often cut down on blue light exposure.
- Scratch-resistance: Having any kind of screen protector on your laptop or monitor can protect the display from scratches. Some screen protectors indicate how hard they are on the Moh scale, which ranges from 1 to 10. Most screen protectors are around 9H, meaning they’re durable and unlikely to tear.
- Smudge-resistance: Some privacy screen covers have a hydrophobic coating that makes them resistant to smudges or oils. This is helpful for those who use a touchscreen display, as it can keep marks from appearing on the screen and improve the image’s crispness.
Disadvantages
Privacy screen protectors are mostly beneficial, but they’re not meant for everyone. Here are the main disadvantages:
- They can slightly reduce the visual clarity or brightness of whatever is on the screen, especially if you don’t apply it correctly.
- Using one in a coworking space could be tricky if your colleagues need to view the screen next to you.
- They can get dirty, which can further affect the laptop’s display.
- Some are difficult to remove or may leave a slight residue.
Cleaning the privacy screen protector
Before cleaning the screen protector, carefully remove it from the laptop. Then, use a lint-free or microfiber cloth with some glass cleaner to wipe it down. Make sure the cleaner doesn’t have ammonia. Let it fully dry before reapplying.
Longevity
High-quality privacy screen protectors will last as long as your laptop does. Some should be replaced more often, though, especially if they have scratches or smudges you can’t remove.
8 best privacy screen protectors for laptops
This privacy screen protector is compatible with six different widescreen sizes, from 13.3 to 27 inches. It can shield the display from passersby while reducing blue light by up to 65%. It’s easy to attach to the display or the screen’s outer edges using double-sided tape.
Sold by Amazon
ProCase Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 and 1 12.4-Inch Privacy Screen Protector
Compatible with the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 12.4-inch and the Surface Laptop Go 12.4-inch displays, this tempered glass screen protector has a 9H surface hardness and is highly durable. It’s also resistant to oils and scratches. It’s only .2 millimeters thick, so you can open and close the laptop while it’s on.
Sold by Amazon
SightPro 14-Inch Laptop Privacy Screen Filter
This filter comes in 14 sizes, ranging from 13.3 to 27 inches. It’s compatible with many laptop brands, including Lenovo, Dell and Asus. It offers protection against glare and blue light to reduce eye strain. It’s easy to apply with either double-sided adhesive or mount tabs.
Sold by Amazon
Kensington MP13 MacBook Magnetic Privacy Screen
Made for 13.3-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air systems, this magnetic privacy screen protector is effective and easy to apply. It has one glossy side and one matte side. It can filter rays up to 22%, preventing headaches and easing eye strain.
Sold by Amazon
High Clarity Laptop Privacy Screen Filter for Widescreen Laptop Monitors
This filter is perfect for laptops ranging from 13.3 to 17.3 inches. It’s scratch-resistant, offers UV protection, filters out blue light and doesn’t have any pixelation. It can also prevent others from seeing the screen at around 30 degrees and beyond.
Sold by Amazon
Kensington MagPro 15.6-Inch Laptop Privacy Screen
Compatible with 12.5-, 13.3-, 14- and 15.6-inch laptop screens, this filter is easy to attach and remove with magnetic strips. It can reduce glare and prevent up to 22% of blue light. It’s also reversible and scratch-resistant.
Sold by Dell
Stary Laptop Privacy Screen 14-Inch Widescreen Display Privacy Screen for Laptop
Resistant to scratches and glare, this screen protector comes in 14- and 15.6-inch sizes. It’s made from durable polyethylene terephthalate. It’s great for busy workplaces and can keep your display private at a 60-degree viewing angle.
Sold by Amazon
14-Inch Privacy Screen Filter for Widescreen Laptop
This privacy screen protector can reduce eye strain, keep your information safe from passersby and it cuts down on glare. It uses attachment strips and slide-mount tabs that are easy to apply and remove.
Sold by Amazon
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Angela Watson writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
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| 2022-09-21T13:45:22Z
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State Theatre in New Brunswick offers $10 tickets thanks to new program
State Theatre New Jersey has launched the new DiscoveryTix program — and those enrolled can get a ticket for less than the cost of a cocktail at the concession stand.
The program, which was launched with the support of Bank of America, allocates a set number of $10 tickets to every State Theatre-presented performance during the 2022-2023 season for those in the Families First Discovery Program.
“State Theatre is a cultural resource that enriches the lives of people from all backgrounds in New Jersey,” said Sarah K. Chaplin, State Theatre New Jersey president and CEO in a release. “The DiscoveryTix Program opens the diverse slate of live performances to our community — uniting people in experiences that help form life-long associations with the performing arts.”
To redeem their $10 ticket, Families First cardholders should visit State Theatre Guest Services in-person at 15 Livingston Ave. in New Brunswick, and bring their Families First branded electronic benefits transfer card or an eWIC card (WIC branded electronic benefits transfer or EBT card).
Guest Services is open for in-person purchases from noon to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays. Seating is subject to availability at the time of purchase. Other restrictions may apply.
The program launch comes on the heels of the theater's 100th anniversary and renovation, both of which were celebrated in December. Visitors will find renovated lobbies, new restrooms, upgraded HVAC systems, a new elevator for access to all levels, and new theater seats at Central Jersey's largest performing arts center.
Since 1988, more than 6 million people have watched a State Theatre show, some of whom have attended other free and subsidized programs, such as Performances for Schools; the children's music and storytelling series Milk & Cookies; and artist residencies.
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Things to do:Italian native returns to his roots with a new winery in Lambertville
New Jersey’s Families First Discovery Pass program was launched three years ago by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Department of Health, and the New Jersey Department of Human Services. The free program available to Families First card holders and WIC recipients provides free or highly discounted admissions to arts and history organizations, venues and programs.
Residents who receive benefits through SNAP, WFNJ, Child Care Subsidy and/or WIC are eligible for free or steeply discounted cultural programs throughout the state.
Staff Reporter Jenna Intersimone: JIntersimone@MyCentralJersey.com
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Which Adidas backpack is best?
Adidas backpacks are popular with athletes and students in school and college, and they are great for everyday use as well. Their practicality and casual style make them appealingly versatile.
To help find the right one for you, think about what type of backpack you might like and how much you need to fit in it. If you’re looking for a great all-rounder for school, college, work, sports or general use, the Adidas 5-Star Backpack is a top choice.
What to know before you buy an Adidas backpack
Backpack types
Adidas backpacks fall into several loose categories, but there can be crossover between them.
- School backpacks: These must be roomy enough to fit as many books and folders as necessary. However, you’ll find them in different sizes, as elementary schoolers don’t need bags as big as college students do.
- Everyday backpacks: These versatile bags are stylish enough to take almost anywhere. They are also practical enough to give you easy access to all your day-to-day essentials.
- Sports backpacks: Backpacks designed for carrying sporting gear or taking to the gym may have handy extra features, such as ventilation or compartments for carrying shoes or balls.
- Mini backpacks: If you don’t need a full-size backpack but still like the convenience of a bag you can carry on your back hands-free, a miniature version is ideal.
Compartments
The number, size and location of compartments can make or break a backpack. Thankfully, Adidas often gets it right where pockets and compartments are concerned.
- Side pockets: These are elasticated and designed to hold water bottles.
- Front pockets: Zippered front pockets are great for items you need easy access to or don’t want to lose in the depths of your main compartment, such as earbuds and keys.
- Laptop sleeve: A padded interior sleeve is perfect for protecting your laptop if you need to take it to work or school.
- Internal pockets: Small internal pockets toward the top of the main compartment are great for phones, earbuds, keys and other small items that could easily get lost.
- Cooler pockets: Great for school backpacks, cooler pockets help keep drinks cool and lunches fresh.
What to look for in a quality Adidas backpack
Color
Adidas makes backpacks in a wide choice of both solid colors and prints, so there’s no shortage of options.
Logo
If you’re buying a name-brand backpack, you probably want the logo to show. However, some people prefer a subtler logo than others. You’ll find some with the classic Adidas three stripes design and others with the trefoil logo.
Padding
Padding in the straps and the back wall of the main compartment make backpacks more comfortable to carry.
Recycled content
Most of Adidas’s polyester backpacks are now made using recycled content as part of its commitment to end plastic waste.
How much you can expect to spend on an Adidas backpack
Most cost $25-$75, but you can occasionally find versions that cost well over $100, such as those made in collaboration with top designers.
Adidas backpack FAQ
Are Adidas backpacks washable?
A. In most cases, you can simply spot clean a backpack, but occasionally, nothing but a machine wash will do the trick. Adidas’s standard polyester backpacks are machine-washable, but you should take some precautions to protect them during the cycle.
Ideally, you should turn the backpack inside out and wash it inside a laundry bag or pillowcase to protect the hardware. Next, you should wash it using your machine’s delicate cycle with just a small quantity of a gentle detergent. Once it’s clean, it’s best to air-dry your backpack to avoid damage caused by the heat of a tumble dryer.
Are Adidas backpacks waterproof?
A. While a handful of its backpacks are waterproof or water-resistant, most aren’t. So, unless stated otherwise, it’s safe to assume that the contents of your backpack will get wet in the rain.
Are Adidas backpacks good for school?
A. Some are better for school than others. Those with large capacities, laptop sleeves and several pockets and compartments to help with organization are generally best for school or college. You’ll need to think about how much you or the student you’re buying for needs to carry on an average day and check the bag accommodates that amount.
What’s the best Adidas backpack to buy?
Top Adidas backpack
What you need to know: This roomy backpack is a great choice for school or sporting use.
What you’ll love: It has several handy compartments, including a laptop sleeve and an insulated compartment for drinks and lunch. The main compartment is ventilated to air out sports uniforms. It comes in nine colors, including dark green and collegiate purple.
What you should consider: Some users report defects appearing after just a few months, but it does come with a lifetime warranty.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top Adidas backpack for the money
Adidas Back to School Creator Backpack
What you need to know: Since it’s midsized, this is a great choice for older elementary schoolers, middle schoolers or adults who want a not-too-large backpack.
What you’ll love: It has three zippered exterior pockets to help stay organized and two side pockets for water bottles. You can choose from 10 solid colors and prints, such as stonewash rainbow and versions with all-over Adidas logo designs.
What you should consider: There’s no laptop sleeve, which can be an issue for older students.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Adidas Originals National 2.0 Backpack
What you need to know: With a simple, retro-inspired design, this backpack is a stylish choice for school or everyday use.
What you’ll love: The interior laptop sleeve holds a 15- to 17-inch computer, while the large front pockets are great for items you need easy access to. There’s a small storage pocket for wireless earbuds and chargers.
What you should consider: Some found it smaller than expected, so it’s a good idea to check the measurements.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Lauren Corona writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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ArtYard partners with new studio for disabled artists in Frenchtown
Artists rejoiced when ArtYard, a Frenchtown haven of theater, music, dance and poetry, became an epicenter five years ago in this eclectic river town.
And soon ArtYard will be able to help nurture artists who are disabled, too.
In October, Studio Route 29 will begin accepting applications on a first-come, first-serve basis for those with development and intellectual disabilities. It will provide space, materials and support to explore, create and develop an artistic practice, and the opportunity to engage with the wider arts community. Studio Route 29 will maintain exhibition spaces at ArtYard, as well as in its own building at 62A Trenton Ave., the former homeof ArtYard before it moved to its now 21,000-square-foot space down the road.
“Because we’re so close to them, we will be able to go to dress rehearsals, artist talks and invite their artists-in-residency to see our performances, screenings and the work we’re doing,” said Kathleen Henderson, co-founder of Studio Route 29. “In many ways, I haven’t seen anything like it in the country — an opportunity for artists with disabilities to work so closely with and around artists without.”
Curtain up!ArtYard's McDonnell Theater opens in Frenchtown
At Studio Route 29, people can sign up for facilitated open work time during morning or afternoon sessions, which are available four days per week. The studio, which will also have a youth program, will host art clubs, screenings, parties and other events.
About 20 people per day will be able to work at Studio Route 29. Session costs have not yet been determined.
“One of the things I’ve learned since coming to town is that there’s a really robust support system [for those with disabilities] in the Frenchtown community in public school, but once folks are no longer in public school, that support system kind of drops out,” Henderson said. “Having the opportunity to make and show your art and communicate on your own level is something that everybody should be able to do, so that’s what we’re going to do.”
Frenchtown:The best small town for shopping in America is in Central Jersey, says USA TODAY
Artists will have access to drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media, weaving, rug making, installation, sound art and music, performance, fashion, video, and poetry. No prior art experience is required. Studio Route 29 artists can also choose to sell their work for a 50% commission.
Henderson hails from Creative Growth in Oakland, Calif., the country’s largest and oldest art studio for people with disabilities. After working there as a special projects manager for a decade, she was approached by Jill Kearney, the founder and executive director of ArtYard, with the idea to start a studio for disabled artists in Frenchtown.
“Often, folks with disabilities are marginalized and siloed, but progressive art studios are places where people can be celebrated for who they are as opposed to limited to the perceptions of their diagnosis,” Henderson said. “It’s like art utopia.”
Go: 62A Trenton Ave., Frenchtown; 908-248-2438, studioroute29.org.
Jenna Intersimone has been a staff member at the USA Today Network New Jersey since 2014, after becoming a blogger-turned-reporter following the creation of her award-winning travel blog. To get unlimited access to her stories about food, drink and fun, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Contact: JIntersimone@Gannett.com or @JIntersimone.
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Essentials for hosting the best Sunday Night Football gathering
Hosting a party is hard work, but it’s worth it if everyone enjoys themselves. However,
if you want to host a Sunday Night Football gathering, there are a few essentials you’ll need to ensure that it’s a success.
Football has some of the most rabid fans in all sports, so it’s best to avoid upsetting them. Whether it’s Week 1 or the Super Bowl, the host must be well-prepared and determined to provide an unforgettable experience.
What do I need to host Sunday Night Football?
Food and drinks
Some people actually care more about the social aspects of a football gathering than the game itself, so it’s crucial to stock up on plenty of food and drinks for your guests. The most popular foods for football gatherings are often finger foods and appetizers such as buffalo wings, nachos, jalapeño poppers, mozzarella sticks, cocktail shrimp and vegetables and dip.
For drinks, you should have a few options for alcoholic beverages, and if you want to spice things up a bit, you can look into getting a bartender or cocktail mixing set. Also, it’s a good idea to have plenty of water and other non-alcoholic beverages for mixing or for guests who don’t drink alcohol.
Decorations
You don’t have to go overboard with the decorations, but showing your support for your favorite team is acceptable by having a banner or flag hanging around. You can also get general football-themed decorations such as football field tablecloths and yellow penalty flag napkins.
Big-screen TV
Once you’ve covered the food and drinks, you must ensure your guests will have an enjoyable viewing experience. That usually means having a large screen to watch the game. If you live in a small apartment, a TV in the 43- to 55-inch range will suffice. However, if you have the space, your guests might expect you to have a big-screen TV.
Big-screen TVs are usually 55 to 85 inches wide. An 85-inch TV might be overkill, not to mention expensive, so it’s best to go with one in the 55- to 75-inch range. Also, shop for value, as plenty of big-screen TVs are available at affordable prices.
Sound bar
A sound bar isn’t necessary for you and your guests to enjoy the game, but if you want to impress your guests and have the best experience possible, it goes a long way. Built-in TV speakers offer mediocre sound quality, and if you have a lot of guests in your house, it can be noisy, and it might be difficult to hear what’s going on in the game. A sound bar is excellent for ramping up the volume and lets viewers hear the TV more clearly.
12 must-haves for hosting a successful Sunday Night Football gathering
Food and drink essentials and decorations
NFL Football Mini Pennant Banner Flag Complete Set
Do you have a favorite NFL team? If you do, this set has a mini banner flag measuring 4 inches by 9 inches of every NFL team so that you can show your support on game day. Sold by Amazon
US Acrylic Avant Plastic 3-Section Stackable Serving Tray
This party tray measures 15 inches by 10 inches, and it is divided into three segments, making it perfect for serving appetizers, snacks and dips. It’s shatterproof, made with lightweight plastic and has a contemporary design. Sold by Amazon
JTWKING 24-Set Light Up Shot Glasses
If you’re one of those hosts who doesn’t get too immersed in the game, you can spice things up with a fun drinking game. These light-up shot glasses flash in various dazzling colors and have a long-lasting service life. Sold by Amazon
Island Genius Football-Themed Party Supplies and Decorations
This set has all the necessary decorations to give your Sunday Night Football gathering an appropriate theme. It comes with 24 yellow penalty flag napkins, a rectangular football field table cloth and disposable touchdown dinner plates and cups. Sold by Amazon
Cresimo Large Cocktail Shaker 12-Piece Set
Fix your guests a margarita or a martini with this premium shaker set. It has a high-quality bamboo stand and stainless steel tools for mixing the perfect cocktail. Plus, it’s dishwasher-safe and comes with a bonus recipe guide. Sold by Amazon
Miusco 12-Inch Chip and Dip Serving Set
This handcrafted, 12-inch plate with a sauce bowl in the center is excellent for chips and dip but also works great for buffalo wings, cocktail shrimp, nachos and vegetables. It’s made with natural acacia wood. Sold by Amazon
Big-screen TVs
Samsung 60-inch Class Crystal TU7000 Series 4K UHD Smart TV
This TV has an ultra-fast processor and HDR technology for reproducing impressive clarity and stunning visuals. The smart functions are powered by Tizen, which offers access to the best streaming apps and services. Sold by Amazon
Amazon Fire TV 65-inch Omni Series 4K UHD Smart TV
This TV has Dolby Vision and Dolby Digital Plus for an immersive viewing experience. It has HDR technology for improved clarity, brightness and contrast and built-in microphones so users can access Alexa hands-free. Sold by Amazon
TCL 65-inch Class 4-Series 4K UHD HDR Smart Roku TV
This TV is a great bargain pick and offers vivid colors and a lifelike picture. Users can access thousands of streaming channels and personalize the home screen with their favorite apps. Plus, it supports Google Assistant and Alexa. Sold by Amazon
LG 75-inch Class UQ9000 Series 4K Smart TV
This TV is loaded with premium features such as Active HDR and HDR Dynamic Tone Mapping for reproducing a crisp image. The Magic Remote lets users point and scroll to navigate the menus, and the Game Optimizer mode reduces input lag. Sold by Amazon
Sound bars
Crank up the sound during the game with this high-end voice-control sound bar. It has a sleek design, two upward-firing dipole speakers for rich sound, and it supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect for wireless streaming. Sold by Amazon
You don’t need to break the bank to get a sound upgrade for your TV. This affordable sound bar has a Bass Reflex speaker for deep sound, and setup is easy with HDMI ARC. Also, it has a voice enhancement feature for hearing dialogue more clearly. Sold by Amazon
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Kevin Luna writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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Looking to work in marijuana industry? Cannabis job fair returns to RVCC
Raritan Valley Community College will host a free job fair and information session for those interested in exploring career opportunities in the emerging cannabis industry.
The two-hour event begins at 4 p.m. Oct. 5 in the college’s Conference Center – Room 102 – at 118 Lamington Road in Branchburg. There will be a general information session from 4 to 5 p.m., followed by breakout rooms for on-site interviews with Valley Wellness and assistance with signing up for a medical marijuana card with Premier MD's Dr. David Boguslavsky.
PremierMD is a medical practice specializing in traditional and alternative patient care methods, including assisting patients with qualifying medical conditions for the New Jersey Medical Marijuana Program.
There will also be a raffle, and three scholarships valued at $500 each to NJ Cannabis Certified. This 15-hour certificate course is taught live on Zoom and is designed for those interested in working in the cannabis industry or anyone simply looking to learn more about cannabis.
This event is in partnership between Valley Wellness, Premier MD, and the Greater Raritan Workforce Development Board.
"We worked hard this year to get Valley Wellness ready to open this November; now we're excited to get into the community and provide employment opportunities to area residents," said Valley Wellness CEO Sarah Trent.
Also see:Raritan Borough approves medical marijuana dispensary
Valley Wellness, in Raritan, will be hiring lead patient care associates, patient care associates (retail floor attendants) and receptionists. Bring your resume and those interested in securing an onsite interview on the day of the event should pre-register at forrns.office.com/gLjbb9smAXYH. Space permitting, walk-ins will also be given interviews.
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Which pencil grip is best?
Pencil grips are small attachments that help people grasp and use pencils easily, properly and with comfort. Writing by hand is an important fine motor skill and when developed properly, it ensures a functional grasp on the pencil.
Pencil grips are particularly useful for people with small hands, young children in the early stages of developing fine motor skills, and people who spend hours each day writing and drawing. If you are looking for an assortment of pencil grips as a way to find which is best for your needs, take a look at the The Pencil Grip Premium Assortment 12-Pack .
What to know before you buy a pencil grip
Pencil grips are learning tools for young children and comfortable add-ons that reduce fatigue for adults, especially those with arthritis. To keep your pencil grips organized along with your pencils, a pencil case or pencil holder always comes in handy.
Types of pencil grips
- The original pencil grip: The first pencil grip was designed to aid in the proper placement of the fingers for both left- and right-handed writers. Grips come in mini, standard and jumbo sizes.
- Crossover grip: This grip has a wing on the front that prevents the thumb and fingers from wrapping over the pencil shaft, giving more control and increasing the writer’s comfort.
- Grotto grip: This version also has a wing, but in addition, has molded slots for the thumb and index finger and an indentation of the bottom that rests the grip on the middle finger. It decreases pencil pressure and hand fatigue.
- The claw grip: This design from the Center for Learning and Writing has three finger cups that can be used by both right- and left-handed writers and comes in three sizes. Claw grips eliminate the typical stress on joints and muscles, greatly reducing joint pressure and muscle fatigue. Another bonus is that this pencil grip works not only with pencils, but also with crayons, markers and paint brushes.
- Firesara grip: This design has two finger cups and in place of the third on the claw grip, it has a ring for proper placement of the middle finger. Learners place their index finger and thumb in the cups and insert their middle finger in the ring. It helps the three primary writing fingers stay firmly connected to the pencil shaft.
- Traditional triangle: The flat triangular sides make it easy to position the fingers properly and have the added benefit of not rolling off the desktop.
Although pencil grips were originally designed to teach young children how to hold a pencil properly, many adults like them because they are more comfortable to use than just a pencil alone. Some types are especially useful for arthritic fingers and people seeking comfort:
- Classic foam: These simple tubes are cushioned to relieve pressure and add comfort.
- Ergo: These are simple grips that make pencils and pens easy to handle because wider writing instruments are easier to hold for people with stiff joints.
- Comfort: These simple circular grips are made of super-soft foam that reduce gripping discomfort.
- Write right stylus: This one is a tablet stylus with the gripper built in. It is symmetrical and so can be used by left- and right-handed writers.
What to look for in a quality pencil grip
Design
Look for pencil grips designed by doctors, kinesiologists, occupational therapists and educators who work with children day in and day out.
Materials
The best pencil grips are comfortable to use, so look for grips made of soft materials such as gels and foams that have no ridges or sharp edges.
Colors
Little kids will sometimes balk at using pencil grips because they feel uncomfortable at first. Your children will be likelier to use pencil grips if they are colorful and eye-catching.
Sizes
Most pencil grips are made to fit snugly around the barrel of a standard-width pencil. Take a closer look at pencil grips that can be used with pens, crayons, markers and all the instruments you and your children write and draw with.
Assortments
Every pencil grip does not work equally well for every child and adult. If you choose an assortments of pencil grips, you will be able to experiment and find the ones best suited for you and your kids.
How much you can expect to spend on a pencil grip
Because they’re so small, most pencil grips come in sets, and the number of grips in the set is the main factor in their pricing. Expect to pay anywhere from $5-$35 for a set.
Pencil grip FAQ
What if my child says a pencil grip is uncomfortable?
A. Pencil grips are only uncomfortable because the child has been using their hand and finger muscles improperly. Learning to use the correct muscles in the correct way has a learning curve, but a short period of discomfort will pay off in many years of writing success. Kids don’t understand deferred gratification like adults do, so the best strategy is to be patient and encouraging. It also helps if you set an example by using them yourself.
How do I know which pencil grip to buy for my child?
A. Short of working with a pediatric kinesiologist, start with buying a selection that includes different designs. Encourage your child to play with the different shapes and colors as part of an adventure.
What’s the best pencil grip to buy?
Top pencil grip
The Pencil Grip Premium Assortment 12-Pack
What you need to know: These pencil grips were designed by a doctor to be used at home, in classrooms and in therapeutic sessions.
What you’ll love: You get two each of six designs: original, crossover, pinch, claw, bumpy and groovy. All are squishy grips for comfort and control, excellent for both righties and lefties and fit pencils, pens, crayons, markers and styluses.
What you should consider: They would be easier to keep track of if they were color coded.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top pencil grip for the money
The Pencil Grip Pinch Grip Ergonomic Writing Aid
What you need to know: This grip fills the gap between grips that are highly structured and grips that provide more freedom.
What you’ll love: The open cups guide the fingers into the proper writing position and the center ridges prevent the fingers from crossing over. These grips train the muscles so that a proper grip is not only comfortable, but quickly becomes second nature.
What you should consider: These grips are made to work with regular pencils only.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Chrome Cherry Omni Grip Six Premium Pen and Pencil Grips
What you need to know: These silicone grips are designed specifically for those who do a lot of writing with pens and pencils.
What you’ll love: The tapered ergonomic grip has a rolling triangle for effortless handling, is textured for precise control and reverses to suit any style. The cushion prevents calluses and blisters and is easy for arthritic fingers to grasp and hold.
What you should consider: These grips fit most pens, but not all.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Sign up here to receive the BestReviews weekly newsletter for useful advice on new products and noteworthy deals.
David Allan Van writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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7 Middlesex, Somerset gang members indicted on RICO charges, feds announce
NEWARK – Seven members of a New Jersey gang associated with the Bounty Hunter Bloods, all from Somerset and Middlesex counties, have been indicted on Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) conspiracy charges in connection with multiple homicides and other violent crimes, announced U.S. Attorney District of New Jersey Philip R. Sellinger.
Walter Boyd, 34, who is known as Walt and Walt Daddy; Isiah Daniels, 33, known as Ice; Joel Lyons, 21, known as Jayski; Gede Maccelus, 21, known as G Baby; Armando Ortez, 24, known as Mando; Malik Stringer, 24, known as Rambo and Kimani Wanyoike, 21, known as Ki, have been charged with racketeering conspiracy including multiple murders, fraud schemes and narcotics distribution, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.
Lyons, Daniels and other gang members were allegedly involved in the Sept. 13, 2020 Delafield Street shooting in New Brunswick in which two people were killed and seven others injured.
Daniels and Wanyoike are in federal custody on earlier related federal charges. Lyons and Ortiz are currently serving time in state prison. Boyd, Maccelus and Stringer are currently in state custody related to the charges filed Tuesday. All have initial court appearances to be scheduled, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The charges stem from a long-running investigation, coordinated between the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office, the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office, the New Brunswick Police Department, and the Franklin Township Police Department.
According to court documents, Boyd, Daniels, Lyons, Maccelus, Ortiz, Stringer and Wanyoike were allegedly members and associates of the Bounty Hunter Bloods, who operated under the umbrella of the neighborhood street gangs known as “Parkside” in Somerset and “The Ville” in New Brunswick.
Gang members, including the defendants, are alleged to have engaged in assaults, shootings and murders, some of which targeted rival gang members and involved 17 victims, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The U.S. Attorney's Office said the incidents include:
Around June 12, 2020, Daniels, along with other gang members, drove at least two cars to a gathering to pay homage to a purported rival gang member who had died. At the gathering, members of the Bounty Hunter Bloods got out of their cars and allegedly shot into a vehicle in the area of Churchill Avenue in Franklin.
Then around Aug. 1, 2020, Maccelus, Wanyoike and other gang members, allegedly at Ortiz’s direction, drove to the area of the Hope Manor housing complex in the “Down Bottom” area of New Brunswick in a stolen vehicle. Upon arriving, Wanyoike and another gang member exited the vehicle and allegedly shot one person who was an alleged gang rival, as well as two other people.
Around Sept. 13, 2020, Lyons, Daniels and other gang members used a stolen car to allegedly commit a shooting in New Brunswick that caused the deaths of one person believed to be a gang rival, another person and resulted in injuries to seven other people.
Although the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not identify the victims, Lionel Macauley, 28, of Somerset, and Anthony Robinson, 23, of New Brunswick, were both fatally injured when gunshots rang out at Delafield Street, New Brunswick house party near Rutgers University on Sept. 13, 2020 in which seven other people were injured.
Around July 19, 2021, Wanyoike possessed a firearm that allegedly was used in a shooting on or about April 30, 2021, in North Brunswick where at least seven rounds of .40-caliber ammunition were discharged from a red Hyundai as it chased an alleged rival of the Bounty Hunter Bloods.
The month before, around June 18, 2021, Boyd and other gang members gathered outside a hospital in New Brunswick to support and pay homage to a high-ranking member of the Bounty Hunter Bloods, who was allegedly shot by rivals hours earlier. Upon seeing a white Jeep they believed was occupied by rivals, Boyd and two other gang members followed the vehicle to the area of Easton Avenue in New Brunswick and after stopping, one of the gang members allegedly shot into the Jeep, killing one person and injuring another.
Around July 24, 2021, Stringer, while gathered with other gang members, possessed a firearm and allegedly attempted to fire it at a purported rival gang member in New Brunswick.
On Jan. 9, 2022, Stringer, while with another gang member in New Brunswick, got into a confrontation about narcotics distribution with purported rival gang members and allegedly shot at them, killing one person and injuring another person.
And on Jan. 20, 2022, Maccelus, while with another gang member in Franklin, allegedly possessed a loaded firearm that was allegedly used in a New Brunswick shooting that same day.
In addition, Bounty Hunter Bloods members, including the defendants, are alleged to have routinely distributed narcotics in and around the gang’s turf in both New Brunswick and Somerset, as well as engaged in various wire and bank fraud schemes to enrich themselves and fellow gang members, including schemes to defraud the federal Paycheck Protection Program, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Boyd, Daniels, Lyons and Stringer each face a maximum sentence of life in prison for the racketeering conspiracy, while Maccelus, Ortiz and Wanyoike each face a maximum sentence of 20 years behind bars. All the defendants face a maximum fine of $250,000, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.
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Which black Puma shoes are best?
Black shoes have a sleek, stylish look that can go with almost anything. Puma has a wide selection of black shoes for athletics and casual wear.
Founded in Germany in 1948, Puma has emerged as the world’s third-largest sports manufacturer. It makes shoes for multiple sports while it focuses on creating environmentally sustainable products. The best is the Smash 2 Sneaker. It’s comfortable, and the simple design makes it a versatile shoe that can be worn with almost anything.
What to know before you buy black Puma shoes
Why wear black shoes?
Black shoes can work well with casual and semiformal attire. They have a heavy, bold look that often goes best with a simple outfit. You want to wear black shoes with dark pants, and avoid wearing them with clashing colors, such as beige.
There are different variations of black Puma shoes. You can purchase all black or black with a white sole or Puma insignia. And just because a shoe is black, that doesn’t mean it conceals dirt, so you need to care for and clean them as you would lighter-colored shoes.
Sport
Some black Pumas are excellent everyday casual shoes, but Puma also makes shoes for basketball, training and motor sports.
Puma makes golf shoes and soccer cleats, while their running shoes are designed for three types of runners: frequent, casual and competitive.
Type of shoe
There are three main types of black Puma shoes.
- Low-top: Cut below the ankle, low-tops are more common with tennis, running, casual and some basketball shoes.
- High-top: These run higher to provide more ankle support and are common with basketball shoes and some casual shoes.
- Mid-top: These are the best of both worlds. They provide support but aren’t restrictive. Puma has basketball and casual shoes in mid-top.
What to look for in quality black Puma shoes
Vegan
This innovative Puma shoe line is made with sustainable materials, such as recycled polyester. These are a great alternative to leather shoes because they are less harmful to the environment.
SoftFoam
This is Puma’s patented dual-density insole. The layers of cushion in the sole make these shoes more comfortable and durable. This technology is found in numerous athletic and casual black Puma shoes
Xetic
This new foam cushioning technology was designed to improve the comfort and performance of certain Puma running shoes. It’s structured to support pressure points on the foot.
Lycra
This synthetic fiber is elastic and breathable, so it’s used to make the uppers in some Puma shoes more comfortable.
How much can you expect to spend on black Puma shoes
Pricing varies depending on size, material, and type of shoe. High-end black Pumas cost $350, but basic lifestyle shoes cost around $40. You can find children’s shoes and sandals for under $20.
Black Puma shoes FAQ
Does Puma make wide-width shoes?
A. Yes, Puma does make some wide shoes, but most Pumas tend to run narrow and smaller than some other brands. The classic Pumas tend to fit those with wide feet the best, but each shoe is different, and some can mold to fit your foot.
How can I clean my black leather or vegan Puma shoes?
A. First, use a dry brush or toothbrush to remove any excess dirt. Then, mix a delicate cleaning solution, such as mild laundry detergent or dish soap, in the sink and soak the shoes. Make sure you air dry them and don’t put them in a dryer because that can loosen the glue holding the shoes together.
How long do Puma shoes last?
A. The general rule of thumb with any pair of sneakers you wear regularly is to replace them every eight to 12 months or after 500 miles of use.
What are the best black Puma shoes to buy?
Top black Puma shoes
What you need to know: These sneakers are a modern take on the classic tennis-inspired design. They are made with top-quality leather uppers and come with a new and improved fit.
What you’ll love: The soles have a premium grip, while the all-black design creates a clean look. They are also durable, so they can last.
What you should consider: This shoe has a narrow fit, so if you have a wider foot, consider sizing up. This style only comes in men’s sizing, so women should size down 1.5 sizes.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top black Puma shoes for the money
What you need to know: These light training shoes from the archive are a throwback to the 1968 style.
What you’ll love: These vegan leather shoes are designed with a compression-molded midsole and a bootie construction. To enhance comfort, support and mobility, this style offers a rubber outsole to create a firm grip, no matter the terrain. The lace closure helps maintain a firm but comfortable fit.
What you should consider: This style of shoe only comes in men’s sizes, so women should size down 1.5 sizes.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
What you need to know: Inspired by a look made popular in California beach towns during the 1980s, this is a sturdy shoe with a simple design.
What you’ll love: Built for style and comfort, these shoes have a sock liner, which provides additional cushioning. They come in other black and white color combinations. These shoes are perfect for long days on your feet and can go with almost any outfit.
What you should consider: The SoftFoam technology can take up extra space in the shoe, so consider ordering a half size larger than your typical size.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Edison to fix more than 100 township roads. Is yours on the list?
EDISON – More than 100 township roads, totaling 19 miles, are slated for paving as part of a $7 million investment aimed at updating Edison's infrastructure.
The list includes about 100 roads and a handful of publicly owned parking lots, including the Midtown Softball and Edison Boys’ Baseball lots. Middlesex County and PSE&G are also working with the township to pave two dozen additional roads.
“Our roads have long been neglected,” Mayor Sam Joshi said in a news release. “It’s my administration’s job to fill those potholes, and take care of our roads. The engineering department examined every township road and gave it a rating based on its condition and the number of drivers using the road. The roads on this list were identified as most in need of repaving.”
The list includes some heavily traveled roads such as parts of Amboy, Farmhaven and Harding avenues, Ellis Parkway and several streets in the neighborhood off Grandview Avenue near James Monroe Elementary School. Middlesex County plans to repave parts of Plainfield Road and Woodbridge Avenue.
Local:Edison residents call for public advocate in planning, zoning issues
The list of roads slated for paving is at bit.ly/3C4fyw9.
The work will start this year and continue through early next year if needed.
“This is just the beginning,” Joshi said. “Every year we have the opportunity to improve our infrastructure even more.”
Email: srussell@gannettnj.com
Suzanne Russell is a breaking news reporter for MyCentralJersey.com covering crime, courts and other mayhem. To get unlimited access, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
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Somerset County looks to increase local police diversity with new scholarships
SOMERVILLE – The Somerset County Board of Commissioners have created a scholarship program that will focus on helping local police forces diversify to ensure they reflect their communities.
The scholarships of up to $500,000, funded by the American Rescue Plan and overseen by the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office, will help county residents attend the police academy with guaranteed employment at a local law enforcement department upon successful completion of the program.
“For many young people, the expense and time involved in becoming a police officer make their dream of serving and protecting the public unreachable,” said Commissioner Director Shanel Y. Robinson. “By removing time and financial impediments to law enforcement employment, we hope to help local departments build diverse, qualified forces that not only reflect their community but with officers who live in the community.”
Local police departments that have committed to two years of employment for candidates who successfully complete training are Bridgewater, Bound Brook, Far Hills, Hillsborough and North Plainfield.
Residents applying for the scholarships must be 21 years old, an American citizen, a resident of Somerset County, speak and write in English, have earned at least an associate’s degree or 60 college credits and able to pass a written, physical and medical exam administered by the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office.
“This program was not created to fulfill a consent decree or due to bad publicity, but because of the commissioners’ firm commitment that Somerset County law enforcement accurately reflect the makeup of our citizens and residents,” Somerset County Prosecutor John P. McDonald said. “We are going to place young police officers in five of our great towns in Somerset County, and I look forward to continuing this work with the commissioners’ tremendous support.”
Also see:Here's how Bridgewater was trying to improve police-community relations before viral mall fight
Also see:Racial, gender makeup of NJ's police still well short of mirroring state's population
The program is based on a model developed by Somerset County Sheriff Darrin Russo, who has transformed the sheriff’s office over the past three years into a highly diverse force that connects with every facet of Somerset County, county officials said.
Somerset County’s scholarship program will not only cover the cost of tuition and materials, but also provide qualified applicants with a stipend for personal expenses so they will not require outside employment.
“It was Sheriff Russo’s rapid success in creating a vibrant, talented and responsive office that gave us the idea for this law enforcement scholarship program,” Director Robinson said. “Being able to use this model to support local police departments expands our commitment to rebuild the vital trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”
Applications are being accepted through the month of September and can be downloaded online at soconj.gov/policescholarship or requested at becomeasomersetcountypdcop@co.somerset.nj.us.
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| 2022-09-21T13:45:59Z
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Which Fisher-Price toys are best?
Traditional toys may appear to be taking a back seat to technology like tablets and smartphones, but they’re much more practical in developing cognitive and motor skills. Fisher-Price is a top toy brand, offering a broad range of fun learning toys.
You can find a Fisher-Price toy of nearly any design, but there are some things to consider before buying your child a new toy.
What to consider before buying a Fisher-Price toy
Your child’s age
Most Fisher-Price toys are geared toward younger children, usually under 8 years old. If your child is any older, they may find them dull or uninspiring. Fisher-Price toys are designed to help children learn and develop essential cognitive and motor skills, so they’re often very simplistic. To determine whether a toy is appropriate for your child, check the product description for an age range.
Playsets vs. plush toys
Playsets are excellent for children ages 2 to 8 as they provide a fun way to learn. However, playsets have many removable parts, so they’re typically unsuitable for younger toddlers.
Plush toys don’t offer as many learning modes, but they make for great nighttime companions. They can comfort your child and engage a baby’s senses with colorful designs and textured surfaces.
Your child’s favorite activities
Fisher-Price makes many playsets with a specific theme. For example, there are cooking, sports, hairdressing and farming playsets. If your little one likes to pretend to cook and make meals, a kitchen play set is a suitable set, so it’s best to determine what they’re into before buying a toy.
What to look for in a quality Fisher-Price toy
Lights, sounds and phrases
Lights, sounds and phrases can help engage your child’s senses and make learning fun. Many toys have built-in parts that deliver catchy phrases, play music and fun sounds. It’s an interactive way for children to engage with their toys while simultaneously learning.
Durability
Fisher-Price is a trusted brand, but it’s best to ensure that any toy you buy for your child can withstand hard impacts and offer at least minimal resistance to spills and splashes. Most Fisher-Price toys are made of plastic, making them safe to use near water. However, some toys with internal electrical parts shouldn’t be used near water and are suitable for older children only.
The best Fisher-Price toys
Best toys under $30
Fisher-Price Laugh and Learn Slice of Learning Pizza
This learning pizza is an excellent toy to help young children learn counting, opposites and shapes. It has a spinning function and built-in lights and sounds, making learning fun for any child.
Sold by Amazon
Fisher-Price Cuddle and Snuggle Hedgehog Plush Toy
This super-soft and cuddly hedgehog makes for an adorable bedtime companion for your baby. It has eight different textures, a squeaky nose, loops for attaching other plush toys and jingles with music tones when shaken.
Sold by Amazon
Fisher-Price Thomas and Friends TrackMaster Motorized Toy Train
Inspired by the classic children’s series, this Thomas and Friends toy has a built-in motor and is compatible with other TrackMaster train sets. The switch on top of the train activates the engine and sends it on its way down the tracks.
Sold by Kohl’s
Fisher-Price Laugh and Learn Smart Stages Tablet
Instead of handing your phone over to your toddler, this tablet is durable and helps them learn through three smart levels. It has over 100 songs and 28 app buttons for activating multicolored lights, sounds and phrases.
Sold by Amazon
Fisher-Price Drillin’ Action Tool Set
Your little one will love this drilling tool set that can help them develop motor and early engineering skills. It comes with a toolbox, a drill, three drill bits, three screws and two toy pieces of toy wood that children can put together.
Sold by Kohl’s
Best toys $30-$60
Fisher-Price Little People Sit and Stand Skyway
This play set can be set up as a small town or a skyway where cars can zip down spiral ramps. It has a multicolored palette, stands just over 34 inches tall and comes with two Wheelie cars.
Sold by Amazon
Fisher-Price B.B. Hoopster Motorized Electronic Basketball Goal
Help your little one develop into a young basketball star early on with this motorized basketball goal. It has four interactive play modes, and any time a basket is made, it lights up and delivers announcer-style phrases.
Sold by Amazon
Fisher-Price Little People Surprise and Sounds Home
Full of several learning activities for developing motor skills, this playhouse has a cute pink and white exterior and can deliver over 50 songs, sounds and phrases. Kids can open the oven or flush the toilet to hear fun and silly sounds.
Sold by Amazon
Fisher-Price Deluxe Kick and Play Piano Gym
This piano gym offers four fun ways for your child to learn as they grow from a baby to a toddler. It has three smart stage learning levels, a bonus piano play mode with authentic music notes and five light-up keys.
Sold by Amazon
Fisher-Price Laugh and Learn Grow-the-Fun Garden to Kitchen
This two-sided interactive play set has 30 play pieces, colorful light and fun music. It’s suitable for children between 18 and 36 months and has adapting smart stages for learning the alphabet, shapes, colors and more.
Sold by Amazon
Best toys over $90
Fisher-Price Laugh and Learn Servin’ Up Fun Food Truck
If your little one has the makings of a future chef, they’ll love this toy food truck featuring an interactive food prep area and over 20 removable parts. It’s toddler-friendly and has a music playlist of fun learning songs.
Sold by Amazon
Fisher-Price Power Wheels Jurassic Park Jeep Wrangler Ride-On Vehicle
This ride-on car can go up to 5 miles per hour and has a stylish paint job inspired by the Jurassic Park films. It has dinosaur sounds, chase sound effects and a light bar with a spacious storage area.
Sold by Kohl’s
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Kevin Luna writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
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Westfield's Rialto gets $5 million boost for arts center transformation
WESTFIELD – The Center for Creativity at the Rialto has received a $5 million donation to kickstart long-term plans for the historic landmark and address critical short-term repairs.
The gift, announced last week, was made by a town resident who wishes to remain anonymous.
The funds will be used to finalize plans to transform the building into a multidisciplinary, community-focused arts center, while also kicking off a planned capital fundraising campaign. Some funds will be used for repairs that will allow limited interim programming, said Center for Creativity officials.
Earlier this year the Center for Creativity at the Rialto began working with Webb Mgmt., an arts planning firm, and will be creating a strategic plan for the building's renovations and programming to raise the level of the arts in Westfield.
Webb Mgmt. was selected after the Center for Creativity sought proposals to help create a multi-year strategic plan and comprehensive fundraising plan to make the vision of a regional destination for arts and culture come to life. The center is looking to create an inclusive and collaborative community space that highlights the arts through creation, exhibition and education, according to Center for Creativity officials.
“This donation is a game-changer for our ability to bring the beloved Rialto back to life and turbo-charge the arts scene in Westfield,” said Beth Cassie, Center for Creativity board president. “We are deeply grateful for the incredible generosity of this donor, and we hope it will inspire others to join our fundraising efforts when we share our plans with the community so that we can all bring our vision for the Rialto to life.”
Also see:State Theatre in New Brunswick offers $10 tickets thanks to new program
Also see:ArtYard partners with new studio for disabled artists in Frenchtown
"I’m always amazed by the generosity of our residents, and look forward to seeing this beloved Westfield landmark reopen as an anchor for our emerging arts scene," said Mayor Shelley Brindle in a Facebook post.
The Rialto, a downtown landmark that opened 100 years ago, closed unexpectedly in August 2019. Last year a group of Westfield residents, who had been in the process of creating a "makerspace" in the central business district, organized a nonprofit corporation and entered a contract with the theater’s owners to purchase the East Broad Street building.
The Westfield Arts Collective, a nonprofit, operates the Center for Creativity at the Rialto.
According to Center for Creativity officials, the closing on the purchase of the Rialto building was delayed several months following a January 2022 flood in the building's basement. While necessary repairs were being addressed, the Center’s team continued to plan for interim uses for the building, including an anticipated partnership with local artist Ricardo Roig.
“I’m excited about being a part of the Rialto’s future, and I envision activating unused portions of the building to feature visually-dynamic artists creating, teaching, and exhibiting their art for the public,” said Roig.
As immediate repair work continues on the building, the Center for Creativity also plans to host limited programming in the lobby and theater, including some upcoming AddamsFest events.
Additionally, the Westfield Public Arts Commission recently accepted community submissions for Artist Alley at the Rialto, which will transform the pedestrian alley between East Broad Street and the parking lot into a permanent public mural installation.
Anyone interested in learning more and seeing how to get involved with the Center for Creativity can obtain information at www.centerforcreativity.art.
Email: srussell@gannettnj.com
Suzanne Russell is a breaking news reporter for MyCentralJersey.com covering crime, courts and other mayhem. To get unlimited access, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
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PHOENIX (AP) — Major League Baseball Players Association head Tony Clark is confident that at least 30% of minor league players will sign recently distributed union authorization cards in the coming days and weeks, paving the way for thousands more players to potentially join the organization.
“There was tremendous response,” Clark told the AP on Tuesday. “That’s probably not surprising.”
Signed cards from 30% of minor leaguers in the bargaining unit would allow the union to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking for a union authorization election, which would be decided by majority vote. Minor league players would have a separate bargaining unit from their big league counterparts.
While the average major league salary is above $4 million, players with minor league contracts earn as little as $400 a week during the six-month season.
Clark said that while there’s been a lot of action over the past two days, the efforts to push forward with minor league unionization have been in the works for a few years. Clark, who played 15 years in the major leagues, credited the minor league players for “finding their voice.”
“This is the right time, because they say it is,” Clark said.
“I think we’re early in the process, albeit a lot of progress has been made in a short time,” he added. “Oftentimes, these drives are anything but a straight line. We’ll navigate accordingly.”
MLB estimates that there are 5,000 to 6,500 U.S.-based minor leaguers at any given time, with the number increasing when new players sign each summer. It’s a diverse group of players that includes teenagers and others in their 30s at the higher levels.
Simon Rosenblum-Larson — who pitched in the minors for four seasons with the Tampa Bay Rays before being released in June — is the cofounder and program director for More Than Baseball, which has worked to improve working conditions for minor league players.
“Part of me believed this would never happen,” Rosenblum-Larson said of the union drive. “But there’s also a part of me that can’t believe it didn’t happen 30 years ago or 40 years ago.
“I’ve talked to several players over the last 48 hours and they’re curious, excited and ready to move.”
The 1,200 players on major league contracts are already represented by the union, which since the 1981 strike settlement also has negotiated terms for those on option to the minor leagues. Clark stressed that if the minor league players decide to form a bargaining unit, it wouldn’t siphon resources from the union’s major league staff.
“We’d be looking at this as one big tent, if you will, with two different tables,” he said.
MLB raised weekly minimum salaries for minor leaguers in 2021 to $400 at rookie and short-season levels, $500 at Class A, $600 at Double-A and $700 at Triple-A. For players on option, the minimum is $57,200 per season for a first big league contract and $114,100 for later big league contracts.
In addition, MLB this year began requiring teams to provide housing for most minor leaguers.
Clark said that if the minor leaguers decide to unionize, dues “will be minimal at most,” acknowledging their current low compensation. The MLBPA declined to say how much it was spending on the drive. Clark said in an earlier statement that the cost was an “investment in the future of our game and our Player fraternity.”
The big league union had long declined to represent minor leaguers, though its labor contract specifies terms for the amateur draft and signing bonuses for amateur players. There were 128 draft picks this year who agreed to signing bonuses of $500,000 and up, including 82 for at least $1 million.
___
AP Baseball Writer Ronald Blum contributed to this report.
___
More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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'It could have been us': POW/MIA service members remembered in Metuchen
METUCHEN – Al Miller turned the podium behind which he was standing on Saturday morning at Memorial Park into a pulpit.
Delivering final remarks to about three dozen attendees during the closing ceremony of the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 233 of New Jersey’s National POW/MIA Recognition Day Vigil, Miller wondered why the crowd was sparse.
“Not too many people this year,” said Miller, a U.S. Navy veteran who as chairman of the annual event has been running the vigil for more than three decades. “(Turnout) was very slim. We don’t know what it is. We put flyers up and everything and still nobody shows. Maybe next year it will be a little better. Who knows? But anyway, thanks everybody for showing up and doing what you’re doing.”
The simple message was a subtle plea for others to join the diminutive but undeterred group of impassioned veterans, who will continue to use their collective voices to heighten awareness about service members who remain missing in action.
“As long as I’m alive and we’re alive we are going to remember these people,” said Jim Hixon, co-chair of the 24-hour vigil and a U.S. Air Force veteran who was stationed in Vietnam in the mid ‘60s. “We were there, and it could have been us. It’s hard to explain without getting emotional. I could have never come home. I’ll never forget that.”
The military veterans who organized and participated in the event honor and remember those service members who remain unaccounted for through powerful stories and emotional speeches, all delivered in front of a fitting backdrop of photos, plaques, flags, flowers and memorabilia.
“We try to make as much of a splash as we can, so to speak,” said Chapter 233 President Ed Marczak, a U.S. Navy veteran who was also stationed in Vietnam. “It’s to try to get people to realize that there’s still a lot of service members from the first war, the second war, Korea and Vietnam (and other conflicts since 1991) that were never brought home. Our government sends them over and to their credit they are still looking but not hard enough all the time. Parents pass away, brothers and sisters pass away and no closure. The big thing is closure.”
According to the National League of POW/MIA Families, 40 of the nation’s current 1,584 missing and unaccounted for members of national armed forces who served in Vietnam are from the Garden State. Citing discrepancies of hometowns, Chapter 233 recognizes 42 such New Jersey residents.
Among the most moving moments of Friday afternoon’s opening ceremonies was the reading of names along with rank, town, birthdate, and date reported missing of those New Jersey service members who never returned home. Each was honored with the lighting of a candle, the ringing of a bell and the tethering of a custom-made oversized dog tag to a bamboo cage such as that which the North Vietnamese used to imprison service members.
“Those service members gave their lives so that we can stand here today and be part of the greatest country on the face of the earth,” said Sen. Patrick Diegnan, who delivered remarks at the opening and closing ceremonies. “It’s incomprehensible to think of the sacrifices of POWs and MIAs and their families. What you are doing here today and what you do every year is so important to give recognition to those folks that made beyond the ultimate sacrifice.”
Other dignitaries who spoke during the event included Middlesex County Commissioner Director Ronald Rios, Metuchen Mayor Jonathan Busch, retired Superior Court Judge and Vietnam Veteran Roger Daly, and New Jersey Reentry Corporation Director of Veterans Services Sharon McGreevey.
McGreevey presented a Joint Legislative Resolution from the Senate and General Assembly to Chapter 233 on behalf of Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, Senator Joseph Vitale, Assemblywoman Yvonne Lopez and Diegnan.
“This solemn occasion is marked with formal ceremonies across the nation to ensure that America remembers its responsibility to stand behind those who serve and do everything possible to account for those who do not return,” the resolution read in part, noting 83,114 heroes who fought with valor from World War II through today are still classified as missing and have not returned.
The resolution thanked and praised members of Chapter 233, who along with their family members and friends collaborate to bring the annual event to life, ensuring prisoners of war and service members missing in action are never forgotten.
This year’s ceremony featured the reading of poems, the singing of songs including a rendition of “Amazing Grace,” and poignant remembrances of fellow service members. A group of United States Naval Sea Cadets from the NWS Earle Division participated in the ceremony, providing an infusion of youth that included the playing of the National Anthem on guitar and of taps on bugle. Veterans from John Basilone Detachment 190 and Central Jersey Leathernecks of the Marine Corps League also made a profound impact.
Motorists navigating the Essex Avenue stretch of Route 27 in Metuchen likely saw the oversized black POW-MIA banner and accompanying American flag that waved proudly on the perimeter of Memorial Park, where dozens of trees adorning yellow ribbons and veterans donning military garb reflected a solemn ceremony was taking place.
Miller recalled Diegnan driving past the park several years ago. His curiosity piqued, the senator pulled over his car.
“He did not know what was going on,” Miller recalled. “But he stopped in to find out what we were doing and ever since then he’s been coming to the vigil.”
Just as McGreevey, in a grass-roots effort, was distributing flyers regarding the myriad ways her organization can provide resources and assistance to veterans in need, Miller similarly hopes increased outreach can boost attendance and support for future Chapter 233 National POW/MIA Recognition Day vigils.
Former U.S. Navy Commander and Chaplain the Rev. Hazel Shue, who delivered the invocation and benediction, closed the vigil with a prayer encouraging attendees and participants to help others, to seek help if needed and reminding them they are not alone.
“Go be the people of freedom,” the Rev. Shue said. “Go and lend a hand to a veteran, to a family, to a neighbor. Go into your normal life knowing this life is never normal. Go and know that you have God’s blessing wherever you go.”
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https://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/military/2022/09/21/pow-mia-service-members-nj/69506040007/
| 2022-09-21T13:46:11Z
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https://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/military/2022/09/21/pow-mia-service-members-nj/69506040007/
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