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JACKSON HOLE, Wyoming (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell delivered a stark message Friday: The Fed will likely impose more large interest rate hikes in coming months and is resolutely focused on taming the highest inflation in four decades.
Powell also warned more explicitly than he has in the past that the Fed’s continued tightening of credit will cause pain for many households and businesses as its higher rates further slow the economy and potentially lead to job losses.
“These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation,” he said in a high-profile speech at the Fed’s annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole. “But a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain.”
Investors had been hoping for a signal that the Fed might soon moderate its rate increases later this year if inflation were to show further signs of easing. But the Fed chair indicated that that time may not be near.
After hiking its key short term rate by three-quarters of a point at each of its past two meetings — part of the Fed’s fastest series of rate increases since the early 1980s — Powell said the Fed might ease up on that pace “at some point” — suggesting that any such slowing isn’t near.
Powell said the size of the Fed’s rate increase at its next meeting in late September — whether one-half or three-quarters of a percentage point — will depend on inflation and jobs data. An increase of either size, though, would exceed the Fed’s traditional quarter-point hike, a reflection of how severe inflation has become.
The Fed chair said that while lower inflation readings that have been reported for July have been “welcome,” “a single month’s improvement falls far short of what the Committee will need to see before we are confident that inflation is moving down.”
He noted that the history of high inflation in the 1970s, when the central bank sought to counter high prices with only intermittent rate hikes, shows that the Fed must stay focused.
“The historical record cautions strongly against prematurely” lowering interest rates, he said. “We must keep at it until the job is done.”
Powell’s speech is the marquee event of the the Fed’s annual economic symposium at Jackson Hole, the first time the conference of central bankers is being held in person since 2019, after it went virtual for two years during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since March, the Fed has implemented its fastest pace of rate increases in decades to try to curbinflation, which has punished households with soaring costs for food, gas, rent and other necessities. The central bank has lifted its benchmark rate by 2 full percentage points in just four meetings, to a range of 2.25% to 2.5%.
Those hikes have led to higher costs for mortgages, car loans and other consumer and business borrowing. Home sales have been plunging since the Fed first signaled it would raise borrowing costs.
In June, the Fed’s policymakers signaled that they expected their key rate to end 2022 in a range of 3.25% to 3.5% and then to rise further next year to between 3.75% and 4%. If rates reached their projected level at the end of this year, they would be at the highest point since 2008.
Powell is betting that he can engineer a high-risk outcome: Slow the economy enough to ease inflation pressures yet not so much as to trigger a recession.
His task has been complicated by the economy’s cloudy picture: On Thursday, the government said the economy shrank at a 0.6% annual rate in the April-June period, the second straight quarter of contraction. Yet employers are still hiring rapidly, and the number of people seeking unemployment aid, a measure of layoffs, remains relatively low.
At the same time, inflation is still crushingly high, though it has shown some signs of easing, notably in the form of declining gas prices.
At its meeting in July, Fed policymakers expressed two competing concerns that highlighted their delicate task.
According to minutes from that meeting, the officials — who aren’t identified by name — have prioritized their inflation fight. Still, some officials said there was a risk that the Fed would raise borrowing costs more than necessary, risking a recession. If inflation were to fall closer to the Fed’s 2% target and the economy weakened further, those diverging views could become hard to reconcile.
At last year’s Jackson Hole symposium, Powell listed five reasons why he thought inflation would be “transitory.” Yet instead it has persisted, and many economists have noted that those remarks haven’t aged well.
Powell indirectly acknowledged that history at the outset of his remarks Friday, when he said that, “at past Jackson Hole conferences, I have discussed broad topics such as the ever-changing structure of the economy and the challenges of conducting monetary policy.”
“Today,” he said, “my remarks will be shorter, my focus narrower and my message more direct.”
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/business/ap-powells-jackson-hole-speech-will-stir-speculation-on-rates/
| 2022-09-21T14:42:52Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. and China have reached a tentative agreement to allow U.S. regulators to inspect the audits of Chinese companies whose stocks are traded on U.S. exchanges. In a long-festering dispute, U.S. regulators have threatened to boot a number of Chinese companies off the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq if China doesn’t permit inspections.
The deal announced Friday by market regulators in the U.S. and China is preliminary. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said, “The proof will be in the pudding.”
“While important, this framework is merely a step in the process,” Gensler said in a prepared statement. “This agreement will be meaningful only if (U.S. regulators) actually can inspect and investigate completely audit firms in China. If (they) cannot, roughly 200 China-based issuers will face prohibitions on trading of their securities in the U.S. if they continue to use those audit firms.”
An agreement would mean that U.S. investors will maintain access to shares of important Chinese companies while at the same time being protected by the integrity of company audits.
“This is unequivocally positive news and a major step toward averting mass delisting of Chinese companies in the U.S.,” analyst Tobin Marcus at Evercore ISI said in a note to clients. However, he said, “a deal is only the first step toward avoiding delisting. What ultimately needs to happen is that (U.S.) Inspectors need to show up and complete inspections.” He said the inspections could take months.
The U.S. regulators plan to have inspection teams on the ground in China by mid-September. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is due to determine by year’s end whether the Chinese government is continuing to block access to the audit books. A negative finding could result in U.S. actions such as stock trading bans.
Although it’s preliminary, the agreement is a rare instance of accord at a time when relations between the U.S. and China are fraught by sparring over trade, the war in Ukraine and human rights. The tension was ratcheted higher by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip to Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its territory. The Chinese responded to the visit by Pelosi, second in line to the U.S. presidency, with military drills around the island.
U.S. regulators had warned that without an agreement, some 200 companies including Alibaba Group, the world’s biggest e-commerce competitor, might be ejected from U.S. exchanges or face trading restrictions. The Americans said that other governments have agreed to allow such audit reviews, which are required by U.S. law, and that China and Hong Kong are the only holdouts.
Three of China’s biggest state-owned companies announced this month they would remove their shares from the New York Stock Exchange but gave no indication that the action was related to the audit dispute. PetroChina Ltd., China Life Insurance Ltd. and China Petroleum & Chemical Co. cited the small volume of trading of their shares in the New York market and the expense of complying with regulations in a foreign market. The companies said their shares still would be traded in Hong Kong, which is Chinese territory but open to non-Chinese investors.
The dispute over audits of Chinese companies dates back more than a decade. Scores of Chinese companies were suspended or kicked off U.S. exchanges, most of them for failing to file timely financial reports. At least two dozen were hit with SEC fraud or accounting charges, but investigations stalled because the companies’ audit papers were in China — beyond the SEC’s reach.
Under terms of the new agreement, U.S. accounting inspectors in the PCAOB would have independent discretion to select any Chinese company audit for inspection or investigation, and they would get direct access to interview all personnel of the audit firms whose work is being inspected. The inspectors could see complete audit work papers with no redactions.
In Beijing, the China Securities Regulatory Commission called the agreement an important step in “resolving the issue of common concern of audit and regulatory cooperation.” Investors and companies on both sides will benefit from keeping Chinese shares trading on U.S. exchanges, the commission said.
The terms the commission outlined would give Chinese officials a role in any possible investigations. China won the right to conduct similar reviews of U.S. audit firms where relevant, according to the Chinese regulators, allowing Beijing to portray the agreement as mutually positive rather than an instance of China giving in to American pressure. China has yet to express any need to carry out such reviews of its own.
Chinese regulators also would be allowed to participate in interviews with audit personnel.
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McDonald reported from Beijing.
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Follow Marcy Gordon at https://twitter.com/mgordonap
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/business/ap-us-china-reach-deal-in-dispute-over-chinese-company-audits/
| 2022-09-21T14:42:59Z
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As a child, Wendy Schmidt didn’t think about how the ocean intersected with human life. It was a nice place to go swimming, but it was mostly a murky, unknowable realm that didn’t have much to do with her day-to-day life.
That outlook changed 15 years ago when she started sailing and learned to scuba dive. Now the health of the world’s oceans looms large in Schmidt’s thinking about the planet’s future and in her giving.
“People commonly encounter the ocean from the shore, the deck of a ferry boat, or from an airplane. It’s historically been a place of mythology, sea creatures, and scary stuff. In some ways, you could say it’s your worst nightmare, and yet, ironically, it’s also the source of all life. It’s 71% of the earth’s surface,” Schmidt says. “Suddenly you see that’s a different planet than you thought you lived in. It’s mostly ocean and the life in the ocean, and we’re just a small player here with a really outsized footprint.”
Schmidt leads a collection of philanthropies through which she and her husband, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, work to help protect the planet. They give to support clean energy, marine science and ocean conservation, and efforts to address climate change, plastic pollution, and food insecurity. The couple have also built programs that support and connect young leaders, scientists, and others working to solve an array of global problems.
The Schmidts have poured nearly $2.2 billion into their philanthropies since 2019 and during that time have pledged and given away more than $1.4 billion.
Since 2009, the couple have given more than $360 million to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which operates a research ship that it makes available free to scientists worldwide. It also helped develop SuBastian, an underwater robotic vehicle scientists use to conduct deep-sea research experiments.
While they are not the largest contributors to ocean conservation and marine science, their insistence that the institute share its findings with scientists and the public is important, says Ashley Enrici, an assistant professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, who studies philanthropy’s role in marine conservation.
“That knowledge can be used for policy decisions by the government and to support public awareness and education campaigns,” Enrici says. “It has the potential to fill lots of different gaps.”
Another Schmidt effort, the 11th Hour Project, seeks to fight the further development of fossil fuels, create renewable energy, clean air and water systems, and expand sustainable food programs. The project grew out of Wendy Schmidt’s years-long support of efforts to oppose fossil-fuel extraction in California and New York.
Environmentalism and a global outlook weren’t a feature of Wendy Schmidt’s formative years. She grew up in a big Irish Catholic family in Short Hills, New Jersey, the second oldest of five children and the only girl. Curiosity and adventure were not encouraged, but she was endlessly inquisitive.
“I was the little one who was always annoying everybody by asking, ‘How come? How come?’ about everything,” Schmidt recalls.
After earning a dual degree in sociology and anthropology from Smith College in 1977, Schmidt attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a master’s degree in journalism and met her future husband, who was working on a Ph.D. in computer science.
She says her worldview expanded at Berkeley, where she was exposed to people from other cultures, to new information, and even to new cuisines.
“Suddenly everything just opened up. Chinese food wasn’t Chun King from a can anymore,” she says. “It was real Chinese food.”
The couple married in 1980. After she graduated, she took a marketing job at Plexus Computers and was recruited by Sun Microsystems, a burgeoning Silicon Valley computer company, in 1982. (Eric joined Sun in 1983 and later became its chief technology officer.) She left Sun in 1985 when the company went public.
Wendy Schmidt’s focus on environmentalism took hold in the early 2000s. She started donating large sums when Google went public and the Schmidts’ fortune skyrocketed.
Schmidt soon learned that to solve global warming, you have to examine agricultural practices, land use, and human rights, so she focused on connecting nonprofit leaders working in those areas, especially those from overlooked backgrounds and Indigenous groups.
“I knew nothing at all about Indigenous communities in the United States,” Schmidt says. “I’m absolutely amazed that I could reach this stage in my life and not have realized all along that every inch of land that we occupy here in the United States was occupied by someone else who doesn’t have it now.”
A-dae Romero-Briones, director of programs in Native Agriculture and Food Systems at First Nations Development Institute, and a lawyer with expertise in food and agriculture law, first met Schmidt in January 2018 when she spoke at the Schmidt Family Foundation’s staff book club.
Romero-Briones says she was struck by Schmidt’s curiosity. Schmidt asked a lot of questions about Indigenous communities’ needs and she invited Romero-Briones to spend several days with 11th Hour Project staff so they could learn more. Romero-Briones, in turn, suggested that they visit tribal communities in central California so they could hear from Native American people directly.
“Wendy made no hesitation. Not about finances, not about logistics, not about time crunch,” Romero-Briones says. “That doesn’t happen in the philanthropic world. It was one of the funnest things I’ve ever done in my job is take all of these people to see all the people I wanted them to meet. It was very affirming.”
Schmidt and her husband see strong networks as the key to building a better world. They’re using their considerable wealth — which Forbes pegs at about $20 billion — to build connections between people and organizations that are working to solve pressing global problems.
“I really do believe in the power of the network,” she says. “It’s not about how big you are but how well connected you are.”
The couple started Schmidt Futures to back the development of new technologies and to support young leaders in science and public service through two programs that seek to connect tomorrow’s leaders: RISE and the Schmidt Science Fellows, both run jointly with the Rhodes Trust.
RISE connects 15- to 17-year-olds who want to dedicate their careers to public service and could do more to help others if they had access to networks of like-minded people.
Schmidt Science Fellows places Ph.D. science graduates in labs that are in a different scientific field than their core area of study for a year so they can work collaboratively across disciplines and build long-term connections with other scientists.
Schmidt says she and her husband do not spend a lot of time thinking about precise plans for their future philanthropy. The only definite plan, she says, is to spend down their giving vehicles during their lifetimes.
“I’m not a person who makes five- or 10-year plans,” she says. “I’m very much in the mind-set that I’m in when I’m sailing or diving. Your attention is on everything around you at that moment — where the wind is, the conditions of the water, adjusting the sails, how you’re making progress towards the goals.”
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This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Maria Di Mento is a senior reporter at the Chronicle. Email: maria.dimento@philanthropy.com. The AP and the Chronicle receive support from the Lilly Endowment for coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The AP and the Chronicle are solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
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| 2022-09-21T14:43:07Z
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Disclaimer: All persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
TEXARKANA, Ark. (KTAL/KMSS) — A Texarkana man is behind bars after a shooting outside a gas station Sunday morning.
The Texarkana Arkansas Police Department arrested 22-year-old Timothy Noble of Texarkana on Thursday just after 5:00 p.m. on a felony warrant in connection with a shooting on the morning of August 21.
The arrest came after one victim was shot outside of a Raceway gas station on Stateline Ave. just after 4:00 a.m. on Sunday. First responders brought the victim to the hospital to treat non-life threatening injuries.
Noble is held in the Miller County Jail, awaiting a court appearance. He was charged with aggravated assault, terroristic acts, criminal mischief in the first degree, and possession of a firearm by certain persons.
The investigation is ongoing, and police expect other arrests in the case.
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| 2022-09-21T14:43:14Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – A lockdown at Byrd High School was lifted Thursday night after a standoff and officer-involved shooting.
Shreveport police responded to a disturbance on King’s Hwy. near Creswell Ave. around 8:20 p.m. Twenty-four units responded to the scene where officers say a man with a machete was attempting to commit suicide by cop. Byrd High School was locked down while police tried to de-escalate the situation. The school was holding their Jamboree at the time.
Police say the man charged at the officers. They fired at him and struck him three times in the lower body.
He was taken to the hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. No police officers were hurt during the incident.
The lockdown was lifted just after 10:30 p.m., and students parked on campus were allowed to leave.
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| 2022-09-21T14:43:22Z
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ACADIA PARISH (KLFY) — An Estherwood woman was arrested for the hit-and-run death of a man reported missing.
According to the Acadia Parish Sheriff’s Office, deputies began an investigation into a reported missing person filed on August 16. The missing person, Eric Simar, was found dead on August 24 on Estherwood Hwy. just north of Egan Highway.
During their investigation, deputies discovered that Simar was hit by a vehicle which led to his death. Deputies were able to find the suspect vehicle involved in this case and confirmed that fragments of the vehicle found at the scene matched the vehicle.
Tina Kibodeaux, 46, of Estherwood, was charged with one count of hit-and-run resulting in death or serious bodily injury. Kibodeaux was booked into the Acadia Parish Jail.
Disclaimer: All persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/missing-person-case-ends-with-hit-and-run-arrest-of-louisiana-woman/
| 2022-09-21T14:43:29Z
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(NBC) — Friday on “Dateline,” Chacey Poynter calls 911 to report her husband, Bob, has been shot on a country road in Texas and the dramatic police footage from the scene could end up being key in the investigation.
Here is a preview of Josh Mankiewicz’s report:
Bob married young and had two kids. After 19 years, that marriage fell apart, expensively. Then Bob met Chacey Morman who was much younger.
CANDY HABERSACK: I think it was an infatuation and he thought it was somebody 22 years old, you know, li– liking him and he’s in his 40s, you know. And–
JOSH MANKIEWICZ: A fling.
CANDY HABERSACK: A fling, basically, yeah.
It wasn’t a fling. Bob married Chacey.
ASHLEY: I mean, she just had a heart of gold. I mean, she loved everybody.
Ashley met Chacey in middle school. Ashley got to know Chacey’s husband — Bob.
JOSH MANKIEWICZ: What’d she say about Robert?
ASHLEY: He was never there. He always worked.
JOSH MANKIEWICZ: Well, he was a fire captain.
ASHLEY: Right.
JOSH MANKIEWICZ: And he worked a lotta shifts.
ASHLEY: Yes, he did.
JOSH MANKIEWICZ: That was a problem.
ASHLEY: Yes.
You can watch “Dateline: Out of the Darkness” on NBC4 Friday at 10 p.m.
About ‘Dateline’
“Dateline NBC” is the longest-running series in NBC primetime history and is in its 30th season. Dateline is anchored by Lester Holt and features correspondents Andrea Canning, Josh Mankiewicz, Natalie Morales, Keith Morrison and Dennis Murphy.
Dateline is the #1 Friday newsmagazine and reaches more than 17 million people every week through its broadcast, and millions more through its social media platforms and podcasts.
The stories range from compelling mysteries to powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. When major news breaks, they go to the scene, putting the pieces together to bring the viewer the full picture. And in every story they tell, they help the real people who lived the events share their journeys with the viewer.
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| 2022-09-21T14:43:37Z
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BANGKOK, Sept. 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Focused on helping enterprises unlock the power of their data, Huawei provided a range of storage products and solutions featuring scenario-specific technologies for different industries, at Huawei Connect 2022. The vision behind the storage portfolio, explained by Dr. Peter Zhou, President of Huawei IT Product Line, is "to build a data-centric, trustworthy storage foundation for diverse applications" in scenarios like production and transactions, data analytics, and data protection.
Huawei believes data storage in the digital era faces four major changes:
1. New data applications are continuously created, from conventional databases to distributed database, big data, and AI applications.
2. Data is getting hotter and hotter, requiring much faster real-time data analytics and processing.
3. Natural disasters and human-caused errors are frequent, resulting in enormous losses. Therefore, enterprises' digital resilience needs urgent improvement.
4. Energy-efficient data storage is a major industry direction and becoming the new normal.
Huawei actively embraces these changes, with a series of premium storage products and solutions for different industry scenarios.
Production and transactions
OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage provides SAN and NAS capabilities with leading reliability and performance, especially for the financial core baking and Hospital Information Systems (HIS) scenarios. NAS and SAN both take advantage of FlashLink disk-controller collaboration algorithms and SmartMatrix full-mesh architecture. In addition, the OceanStor Dorado provides the industry's only active-active NAS solution, ensuring the file service continuity.
Data analytics
OceanStor Pacific Scale-Out Storage breaks down the performance, protocols, and capacity bottlenecks of data analytics using technical architecture breakthroughs, such as data flow that adapts to large and small I/Os, ultra-high-density hardware, and Erasure Coding (EC) algorithms, improving the data analysis processing efficiency by over 30%.
Data protection
Huawei Storage provides comprehensive data protection against natural disasters or man-made mistakes. In terms of disaster recovery (DR), Huawei provides multiple DR solutions, such as local HA, intra-city A-A, and geo-redundant 3DC. To back up service data, OceanProtect delivers 3x higher backup bandwidth and 5x higher recovery bandwidth than peer products, along with an ultimate 72:1 data reduction ratio. Huawei ransomware protection storage solution covers primary storage and backup storage, and uses machine learning models to detect ransomware, with a detection rate of 99%.
Automatic management
Speaking of O&M, the traditional mode is time-consumed and labor-intensive. Huawei DME enables full-lifecycle automation across planning, deployment, O&M, and optimization; predicts disk faults 14 days in advance, and capacity 90 days in advance; and frees O&M personnel from complicated tasks so that they can focus on more innovative tasks.
Container storage
Nowadays, the container technology is gaining more popularity, especially in Internet and finance sectors. OceanStor Dorado NAS decouples containerized applications from storage so that application and storage resources can be expanded on demand; provides cross-node data sharing; and improves resource scheduling efficiency by 30% compared with industry benchmarks.
Multi-cloud
A combination of public and private multi-clouds is proven the best choice for cloud transformation. Centralized data storage sharing and cross-cloud application deployment are the optimal multi-cloud architecture for enterprises. Storage vendors can deploy professional storage on public cloud platforms in software-hardware integrated or software-only mode to help facilitate cross-cloud evolution. Huawei Storage is endeavoring in such innovative practice.
Peter Zhou noted that, "we are in an era of data explosion and data applications are booming. Huawei Data Storage is committed to building a data-centric, trustworthy storage foundation for diverse applications to unleash the power of data-driven productivity."
View original content to download multimedia:
SOURCE Huawei
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https://www.wave3.com/prnewswire/2022/09/21/huawei-launches-storage-portfolio-find-right-technology-right-scenario/
| 2022-09-21T14:43:39Z
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RUSTON, La. (KTVE/KARD) — Ruston police are investigating a shooting that happened Wednesday after a gunshot victim showed up at the hospital for treatment.
On August 24, 2022, the Ruston Police Department was dispatched to the Nothern Louisiana Medical Center in reference to a shooting victim. As officers arrived at the medical center, they found Lakeesha Thurman suffering from a gunshot wound to her head.
According to authorities, Thurman was driven to the hospital and left in the emergency room. Officers later determined that the initial shooting occurred at Thurman’s residence on Watertank Road.
Detectives went to the residence and began their investigation. A person of interest was then identified as 33-year-old Lee Crew of Ruston, La. Police discovered that Crew was Thurman’s boyfriend.
Crew was located at a hotel in Calhoun, La., and was taken into custody with the assistance of the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office. He was then transported to the Lincoln Parish Sheriff’s Office for questioning.
Crew was charged with Attempted Second-Degree Murder, Possession of a Firearm, and two counts of Possession with Intent to Distribute a Controlled Dangerous Substance. He is being held at the Lincoln Parish Detention Center on a $986,500 bond.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/ruston-man-allegedly-shoots-girlfriend-and-leaves-her-at-the-emergency-room-arrested/
| 2022-09-21T14:43:45Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Shreveport police are asking the public to identify a person they believe committed the armed robbery of a convenience store.
Police say they responded to an armed robbery call on August 2 at 3:55 a.m. at a convenience store in the 7700 block of Pines Road.
When officers arrived, they were told a male entered the store and demanded money from the clerk while showing a gun.
Police were able to get surveillance footage of the person suspected of committing the robbery, they are releasing images of the man now in hopes of identifying him.
Anyone with information that could help solve this case, please contact Shreveport Police at 318-673-7300 #3. Supply information anonymously by contacting Caddo Crime Stoppers at 318-673-7373. Remember, Crime Stoppers only wants your information, not your name.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/shreveport-police-seek-to-identify-convenience-store-armed-robber/
| 2022-09-21T14:43:53Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – The Shreveport Police Department is looking for two men wanted in connection with a shooting that injured a woman Sunday.
Police were called to the 2600 block of Myrtle Avenue to investigate a shooting. When they arrived, they found a 32-year-old female suffering from a gunshot wound to the neck.
According to police, they were able to determine that multiple suspects were involved in the shooting and obtained security camera footage in hopes that the public can identify an unnamed who is a potential suspect.
One of the suspects was identified as 40-year-old Deshawn Kemp and secured an arrest warrant charging him with one count of illegal use of a firearm.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/spd-looking-for-suspects-in-myrtle-street-shooting/
| 2022-09-21T14:44:00Z
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WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) — The White House Monkeypox Response Team held a briefing today to discuss the latest developments around the disease and the administration’s efforts to combat it.
“There have been nearly 17,000 cases of monkeypox identified across all 50 states,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said.
The Biden administration updated its approach to the monkeypox outbreak as the U.S becomes the global leader in infections.
“While we continue to deliver as much vaccines to states and jurisdictions as possible, our focus has to be getting those shots into arms,” White House Monkeypox Response Coordinator, Bob Fenton said.
So far the administration has rolled out more than one million vials of the vaccine as part of a four-part strategy.
“By the end of phase four, we will have provided enough vials to states and jurisdictions to provide more than three million doses of vaccines,” Preparedness and Response Assistant Secretary Dawn O’Connell said.
Still, the administration says some communities aren’t doing enough to take advantage of the available supply.
“With supply of vaccines increasing, I think we have a new opportunity and strategy which is bringing vaccines to people as opposed to trying to have people find vaccines,” White House Deputy Monkeypox Response Coordinator Dr. Demetre Daskalakis said.
The outbreak is showing signs of cooling down in hot spots like New York City and Chicago. However, health officials say there is reason to remain vigilant.
“Week over week, our numbers are still increasing, though the rate of rise is lower, but we are still seeing increases and we are of course a very diverse country and things are not even across the country,” Walensky said.
So far no one has died from monkeypox in the U.S, but deaths have been reported outside the country.
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| 2022-09-21T14:44:06Z
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(NEXSTAR) — In addition to announcing widespread student loan forgiveness, the Biden administration says it is working to reform the way borrowers will repay their loans going forward.
As part of this, the Biden administration is proposing a rule that would create a new income-driven repayment plan intended to “substantially reduce future monthly payments for lower- and middle-income borrowers.”
There are four income-driven repayment plans: Pay as You Earn, Revised Pay as You Earn, Income-Based, and Income-Contingent. All four have monthly payments set at a level “intended to be affordable based on your income and family size,” according to the U.S. Department of Education.
For each plan, your payment is based on a different percentage of your discretionary income (the difference between your annual income and a certain percentage of the poverty guidelines based on your family size and where you live).
The newly proposed income-driven repayment (IDR) plan would drastically differ from the aforementioned plans.
According to data from the White House, borrowers would be required to pay no more than 5% of their discretionary income on undergraduate loans, down from the 10% rates available on the current IDR plans.
The amount of income considered non-discretionary income would also rise, meaning no borrowers earning under 225% of the federal poverty level ($30,577.50 for a single borrower) would owe a monthly payment.
Borrowers below that threshold could see payments as low as $0.
If, for example, you are making $44,000 a year, a current IDR plan could require you to make monthly payments of $197. Under the new plan, that would drop to $56 a month, saving you almost $1,700.
If you were making slightly less — let’s say $35,000 — your monthly payment would drop from the roughly $122 you’d pay under a current plan to $19. With an income of $77,000 a year, your payment drops from $294 to $61.
Here’s how you can calculate what your payment would be under the proposed plan:
- Determine your federal poverty guideline based on state and family size using this chart.
- Multiple that by 2.25. (This is the 225% rate mentioned above.)
- Subtract that number from your income.
- Multiple that by 0.05. (This is the 5% of your discretionary income mentioned above.)
- Divide that number by 12 for your monthly payment.
According to the White House, “no borrower’s loan balance will grow as long as they make their monthly payments—even when that monthly payment is $0 because their income is low.” This is not currently the case with other IDR plans.
Additionally, after 10 years of payments, borrowers with an initial loan balance of $12,000 or less will have their remaining debt forgiven.
Like other aspects of President Joe Biden’s Wednesday announcement, further details about this plan haven’t yet been released. We do know that monthly payments could change, primarily because of a change in your income or household size, and that there could be certain requirements you would have to meet to qualify for this plan.
The Education Department says the proposed regulation will be published soon on the Federal Register and the public will be invited to common on the draft rule for 30 days.
In addition to proposing a new income-driven repayment plan, the Biden administration announced widespread federal student loan forgiveness and proposed long-term changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
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| 2022-09-21T14:44:14Z
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(The Hill) — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week told popular podcaster Joe Rogan that Facebook did limit stories on the newsfeed related to the New York Post story about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his laptop after warnings from the FBI but defended the law enforcement agency as a “legitimate institution.”
Zuckerberg said on an episode of Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” that was uploaded on Thursday, that the FBI reached out to his company ahead of the 2020 presidential election to warn them to take note of potentially polarizing content. This warning came after Russia used social media platforms, including Facebook, to post content intended to be polarizing ahead of the 2016 election.
Zuckerberg said he took the warning seriously. He said the social media platform did not ban people from sharing the Post’s story, but it took action to limit how often the story appeared on feeds.
The Post reported shortly before the 2020 election that the FBI obtained a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden as part of a federal investigation into him.
Former President Trump and some of his allies seized on the report at the time as showing evidence that Hunter was involved in questionable business dealings while his father served as vice president. Some of the emails on the laptop have since been confirmed as authentic, but no wrongdoing from the president or his son has been confirmed.
The investigation into Hunter Biden reached a critical juncture last month as prosecutors weigh whether to bring any charges, CNN reported.
Zuckerberg said he did not remember if the FBI specifically mentioned the Post’s story in its warning.
He said he does not want Facebook to be the “ministry of truth” in deciding what is considered misinformation.
His defense of the FBI as “legitimate” comes as many conservatives have criticized the agency for conducting a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Florida earlier this month. Some Trump allies have called for defunding the FBI as a result.
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| 2022-09-21T14:44:21Z
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Monkeypox case numbers in Arkansas continue to climb, and with it two new counties are added to the list of those housing someone infected with the virus.
In its Friday update, the Arkansas Department of Health has added Desha and Crittenden counties to its list of counties with at least one reported infection of the 30 currently reported across the state. A week ago, Aug. 19, the state had 23 cases of the virus.
The first case of monkeypox in Arkansas was reported on July 3.
Desha and Crittenden counties each have one case. Pulaski County remains as having the greatest number of infections, now at 17, up from last week’s 12 cases. Other counties remain unhung from last week, with Faulkner and Washington counties both reporting three cases. Benton, Pope, Saline, Lonoke, and Cross counties each report a single case.
The department of health is now providing demographic information on the disease, showing that of the cases in the state, 96.7% of the infected are male, and 56.7% of the infected are African American. The largest age demographic of infected is 35-44 years old, followed closely by the 25-34 years old group.
Vaccination is recommended if one of three conditions are met:
- People who have been identified by public health officials as contact with someone who has monkeypox
- People who are aware that one of their sexual partners in the past two weeks has been diagnosed with monkeypox
- People who had multiple sexual partners in the past two weeks in an area with known monkeypox
Vaccines are available in 14 of the 75 Arkansas counties, with the locations mapped on the health department’s updated monkeypox web page.
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| 2022-09-21T14:44:29Z
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Helping a terrorist group in the western Asian country of Yemen ended with prison for a man from east Arkansas.
The United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas announced Tuesday that Bilal Al-Rayanni, a 31-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Helena-West Helena, was sentenced to federal prison for providing material support to a terrorist organization.
Al-Rayanni was sentenced to 65 months in prison, followed by 10 years supervised release.
In July 2014, Al-Rayanni left the U.S. to visit family in Yemen, where he stayed through Jan. 2015. He later admitted to federal agents that while in-country, he had driven a vehicle in an armed convoy for a terrorist group recruiting mission. The group, Ansar al-Sharira, is the name for Al Qa’ida in the southern Arabian Peninsula.
Other than his admission, other evidence of Al-Rayanni participating with Ansar al-Sharira are pictures of him posing with an ISIS flag, and a second of him posing in front of a convoy while weapons and ammunition was nearby.
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| 2022-09-21T14:44:36Z
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GARLAND CO. Ark. — Deputies in Garland County captured an alleged multi-state bank robber early Friday afternoon after a brief chase.
At 11:25 a.m. Friday, investigators with the Garland County Sheriff’s office received information from the FBI about a vehicle suspected of being in the county. The vehicle, officers were told, had been involved in bank robberies in Illinois and Kentucky. Deputies on patrol spotted the vehicle at 1:13 p.m. on a rural road about half-way between Hot Springs and Hot Springs Village.
Deputies followed the vehicle until it was confirmed it was the same vehicle on the FBI request. Once that was confirmed deputies moved to stop the vehicle, but it sped away.
A pursuit was undertaken by members of the Garland County sheriff’s patrol and criminal investigation division as well as the Arkansas State Police. The group was able to stop the vehicle and conduct a high-risk traffic stop. The driver, apparently the only person in the vehicle, was taken into custody.
Deputies were able to confirm the driver was John Earl Hall, 58, of Little Rock. Hall had an active warrant in Indiana for Unlawful Possession of a Firearm by a Violent Offender
Hall was also suspected by the FBI in a bank robbery in Illinois and a second bank robbery in Kentucky.
Hall was taken into custody and charged by Garland County Sheriff’s investigators with fleeing, as well as being held for the Indiana warrant. He is currently being held without bond as the FBI prepares two warrants against him for bank robbery.
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| 2022-09-21T14:44:44Z
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BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) – The Louisiana State University Police Department (LSUPD) is investigating a second kidnapping attempt on campus.
The police say the attempted kidnapping happened Thursday near Acadian Hall when the victim ordered food from a delivery service. The encounter with the delivery person led to an attempted kidnapping and simple assault. The delivery driver is being identified, according to the police.
LSUPD reminds students that when using a rideshare or delivery service, they should confirm the name of the driver, make of the vehicle, and use these services with others present.
LSUPD says this incident is unrelated to the second-degree kidnapping that was reported earlier this week.
This is an open investigation. If anyone has information related to the incident, contact LSUPD anonymously call directly at 225-578-3231.
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| 2022-09-21T14:44:52Z
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NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — A petition was filed Friday to recall New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell by a former city employee and former mayoral candidate.
The two sponsors of the petition are Belden Batiste and Eileen Carter, listed as chair and vice chair of the motion, respectively. The two say filing the petition isn’t something they want to do, but rather something they feel like they have to do.
In a press conference outside city hall, the two said the ‘city is on fire,’ saying Cantrell hasn’t put New Orleans first and failed to execute the position of mayor. Watch the full press conference in the reader below.
“The mayor she should put the city of New Orleans first,” Batiste told media at a press conference outside City Hall. “She has neglected her duties and there’s a number of issues going on. For instance, look at crime, look at infrastructure. I don’t hate the mayor but at the end, do your job!”
Carter listed 14 reasons they believe the mayor has failed, which included:
- Code enforcement failures.
- Police staffing
- Revenue and tax collection failure
- Issues with water bill prices
- Giving up money through the Wisner Trust
- 911 Software procurement failure
- Smart Cities contract issues
- Waste management problems
- Blight Remediation
- Capital contraction projects
- French Quarter security plan
- City hall relocation
- Target announcement prematurely
- Taking a side in carjacking suspect case
It’s important to note that Batiste ran against then-incumbent Cantrell in the last mayoral race. Carter previously worked with Cantrell and is the sister of former Louisiana state senator Karen Carter-Peterson. During the April 2021 election, Carter-Peterson and Cantrell both endorsed each other in their respective races.
The petition came after several complaints from New Orleanians about the mayor’s travels, court appearances in support of juvenile offenders, and continued sanitation and public safety issues. The Mayor defended these decisions in a press conference earlier this week.
Beldon Batiste was listed on the petition as the chairman, along with Eileen Carter as vice chair. The petition was endorsed by the Secretary of State Friday. The Cantrell Administration declined to comment on the petition.
Before a recall can happen, there are a few requirements necessary:
- All signatures must be handwritten.
- Signatures must be from 20% of the voting population in New Orleans (about 53,000 people)
- Must be completed within 180 days
Once the signatures are collected and rectified, the document will then go to the desk of Governor Edwards for approval. From there, a recall election is ordered.
Batiste and Carter say they are confident the requirements are met, claiming they’ve had overwhelming support from the public. When asked if they have a replacement candidate in mind for mayor, they said they wanted to focus on the recall first. We’re told more information is expected to come after Labor Day.
PRESS CONFERENCE
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| 2022-09-21T14:44:59Z
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DISCLAIMER: All persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
PLAQUEMINES PARISH, La. (WGNO)— The family of a 12-year-old boy who was arrested in February is calling for the termination and investigation of two Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Deputies who took him into custody.
A statement released late Wednesday night by family representative Dr. Ashonta Wyatt claims the juvenile’s constitutional rights were violated by the deputies involved, specifically two sergeants in the department.
The arrest dates back to around 6:45 p.m. on February 19 when the PPSO responded to a report of a group riding four ATVs and a dirtbike who were driving recklessly into oncoming traffic on Woodland Highway in Belle Chasse. Detectives say the drivers had no headlights, were speeding, driving on sidewalks, and passing through oncoming traffic.
Three of the five drivers escaped the parish, however, the other two were arrested that night. First, 20-year-old Jaiques Wilson of New Orleans was taken into custody after crashing an ATV head-on inside the Belle Chasse tunnel, sustaining minor injuries.
The second arrest was the juvenile, who the PPSO says was driving the dirtbike. This is where claims made by the sheriff’s office and the child’s family contradict each other.
In a Facebook post, the sheriff’s office says that the 12-year-old, who was wearing a full-face helmet and was taller than most of the responding deputies, refused to get off his dirtbike that had become inoperable. The juvenile reportedly refused any demands to get off his bike, leading to a struggle with deputies while trying to avoid being handcuffed.
However, the family’s attorney says the pre-teen was non-resistant. In dash cam footage from that night, deputies are reportedly seen snatching the juvenile off the bike and slamming him on the ground. The video also shows one deputy kicking the suspect while another kneels on top of the suspect. Watch the video below.
DASHCAM FOOTAGE: Deputy appears to kick 12-year-old suspect during Plaquemines Parish arrest (Video courtesy: Ashonta Wyatt)
The family’s legal team also says the deputies endangered the life of the 12-year-old, who was left with a concussion and a fractured left arm. But, the PPSO reports the child, who was later released to a parent, didn’t complain of any injuries and wasn’t treated. Even more, the sheriff’s office says the case video shows the child displaying normal behavior prior to his release, and there had since been no complaints by the family regarding his injuries.
The juvenile was charged with two felonies and two misdemeanors including resisting arrest. With the case still being in the adjudication process, the PPSO says detectives are limited on what can be released, however, a statement from the sheriff’s office claims that the appropriate use of force was made to take the suspect into custody.
Additionally, the sheriff’s office says that the family’s legal team is also representing Reginald Hamilton, a teenager who was also arrested in Plaquemines Parish on similar charges in May. Last week, Hamilton was released after posting a bond that was reduced from $500,000 to $152,000.
“After recently retaining the services of the same legal counsel as Reginald Hamilton, it is clear these allegations are an attempt to present edited, contextualized content to inflame the public’s perception of the facts of these incidents. All the facts of these cases will be presented in a court of law and we are confident the truth will be presented and justice will be served in both cases.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:45:07Z
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BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) – A Baton Rouge woman and her attorneys are calling on the state legislature to hold a special session to clarify the abortion trigger laws. Nancy Davis’ doctors denied her an abortion despite her baby’s condition falling under the exemptions in the abortion ban.
Davis’ fetus was diagnosed with acrania at 10 weeks. She was told by her doctors they wouldn’t be able to perform an abortion despite her baby not being born with a skull and it wouldn’t last very long after being born. They told her she would have to go to another state for the procedure because they feared the criminal penalties in the new law.
“Basically they said I had to carry my baby to bury my baby. They seemed confused about the law and afraid of what would happen to them,” Davis said.
Lawmakers who supported the newest abortion trigger law in the last session wrote a letter saying the hospital misinterpreted the law and said the exemptions are clear. The letter signed by 36 legislators said, “Although many of us share a faith which would compel us to carry this child to full term believing that throughout the pregnancy the child’s vital organs will form, we voted for this exception and therefore recognize it as law” despite that being medically improbable with such a diagnosis.
“We say that’s hypocrisy. This is exactly the outcome that many believe they sought to put such a chilling effect on doctors that they would refuse to perform abortions in any and all circumstances,” Attorney Ben Crump said.
Many have called the trigger law into question stating the term “medically futile” is too vague for doctors to determine.
“By imposing themselves between Mrs. Davis and her doctors, Louisiana lawmakers inflict the unspeakable pain, emotional damage, and physical risk upon this beautiful mother,” Crump said.
The Louisiana Department of Health has a running list of conditions that would classify as an exception to the ban – but they said the list would not be able to encompass every possible diagnosis that would meet the definition of “medically futile.” Acrania will be added to it. There will be public hearings to help also add to the list before a final rule is established.
Davis’ attorney is calling Governor John Bel Edwards and the legislature to hold a special session to clarify the law. Crump said he has gotten dozens of calls from women in similar situations since Davis went public with her story. He fears many more will have this problem before the next session begins in April 2023.
To read the full letter from legislators in support of the current law, click here.
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| 2022-09-21T14:45:15Z
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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Uvalde families gathered in Austin Saturday morning for a March For Our Lives rally to demand Gov. Greg Abbott take action toward gun safety.
“You have to be 21 to buy a case of beer. But an 18 year old bought a gun to kill kids. That does not make sense,” Kaitlyn Gonzales, a student in Robb Elementary School the day of the shooting, said.
Parents from Uvalde started their protest outside the governor’s mansion before 6 a.m. Several families of victims played audio of their children’s voices and laughter that had been recorded prior to their deaths.
This comes after the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, about an hour and a half west of San Antonio, where an 18-year-old gunman killed two teachers and 19 children.
Uvalde’s parents and families met alongside March For Our Lives, a youth-led organization created in the wake of another school shooting, the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School attack in Parkland, Florida.
The group also included survivors from the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting, where 10 Texans were killed.
Rally organizers said they are urging Abbott to call a special session to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 to 21.
“It is time to stop using mental issues as an excuse for these mass shootings. When reality it’s making easy access for teens for teens to purchase ARs,” Berlinda Arreola, the grandmother of Amerie Jo Garza, a victim of the Uvalde shooting, said.
Just this week, a federal court in Fort Worth ruled Texas can’t ban 18 to 20-year-olds from carrying handguns, the Texas Tribune reported. In the state, handguns can only legally be purchased at 21. U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman wrote the Second Amendment does not specify an age limit and protects adults under 21 years old, the Texas Tribune wrote.
The March For Our Lives rally beings Saturday at 11 a.m. on the south steps of the Texas State Capitol.
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| 2022-09-21T14:45:22Z
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(NewsNation) — Teachers in 2021 earned 23.5% less than comparable college graduates, a new record, according to new data.
The Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, has been tracking teacher wage trends over the past 18 years, and its analysis of 2021 data concludes that teacher pay has remained relatively flat since 1996. Moreover, teachers make considerably less than peers working in other industries.
The report released this month further adds to conversations surrounding teacher pay and overall classroom funding. Just this week, educators in the largest school district in Ohio went on strike over disagreements about pay and learning conditions.
The EPI data, pulled from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that the average weekly wages of public school teachers was $1,348 in 2021, slightly higher than $1,319 in 1996. By comparison, other college graduates brought in, on average, $2,009 a week in 2021.
The report’s author, Sylvia Allegretto, wrote that the disparity highlights the stagnation of teacher pay over the last quarter-century.
“The wages of nonteacher college graduates jumped by 13.5% from 1996 to 2002 during an unusual time of exceptional wage growth among low-, middle-, and high-wage earners,” Allegretto said. “But inflation-adjusted wages of teachers did not grow strongly during this period, in part because teacher pay is often set by long-term contracts, and public-sector wages are not as volatile as private-sector wages.”
The Institute also analyzed what it calls a teacher “wage penalty,” which measures how much less teachers are paid relative to other college graduates. In 2021, the penalty hit a record-high 23.5%, meaning that, on average, teachers earned 76.5 cents on the dollar compared with other college grads working in other professions.
“Generally, the teacher wage penalty has been on a worsening trajectory since the mid-1990s,” Allegretto wrote.
In 1979, women teachers actually earned a “premium,” making on average 6.5% more in weekly wages than their nonteacher peers. The wage penalty is worst among men, who made 35% less than their nonteacher peers in 2021.
The disparities exist nationwide. A teacher wage penalty is present in each state, with the largest gap in Colorado, where teachers make 35.9% less than nonteachers. The smallest wage penalty is in Rhode Island at 3.4%.
“The picture that continues to emerge is one of a long-steep relative erosion of teacher wages,” Allegretto wrote. “Among those students who would like to dedicate their careers to teaching, many are undoubtedly choosing to forgo a public school teaching career in lieu of a better-paying career choice.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:45:30Z
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LAS VEGAS (AP) — As parts of rural Nevada plan to count ballots by hand amid misinformation about voting machines, the Nevada secretary of state’s office on Friday approved regulations for counties to hand count votes starting as soon as this fall’s midterm elections.
But the revised regulations will no longer apply to the one county that has been at the forefront of the drive to count by hand.
That’s because Nye County, in the desert between Las Vegas and Reno, will also use a parallel tabulation process alongside its hand count, using the same machines that are typically used to count mail-in ballots. All ballots in Nye County will resemble mail-in ballots, interim Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf said in an interview earlier this month.
Nye County is one of the first jurisdictions nationwide to act on election conspiracies related to mistrust in voting machines. Nevada’s least populous county, Esmeralda, used hand-counting to certify June’s primary results, when officials spent more than seven hours counting 317 ballots cast.
The long-time Nye County clerk resigned in July after election conspiracies led to a successful push to hand count votes.
Kampf, her replacement, has falsely claimed that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. He has vowed to bring hand counting to the rural county of about 50,000, alongside the parallel tabulation process using machines.
The Nevada secretary of state’s office changed the hand counting regulations after Kampf and others criticized them during an Aug. 12 feedback session. The state officials changed the definition of “hand count” to apply only when it is the only method of counting ballots.
The rules require bipartisan teams of at least four people to count the votes, mandate spacing between tables and require room for observers, among many other provisions. State officials originally said the teams could count batches of 20 votes at a time but increased the number to 50. Kampf had criticized the lower number of votes per batch, saying it would be more efficient for the teams to count 50-vote batches.
“I think this represents a good partnership with the secretary of state’s office in refining these procedures,” Kampf said Friday.
The regulations take effect Oct. 1 and will last until November 2023, though officials hope to adopt them permanently.
Four voting groups — Brennan Center, All Voting is Local, ACLU Nevada and Silver State Voices — had previously urged the secretary of state’s office to drop the regulations and instead ban hand counting altogether, saying that hand counting leads to more mistakes than machine voting and takes longer.
Several showed up on Friday to again speak against the changes.
Voting rights attorney Sadmira Ramic of ACLU’s Nevada chapter called adopting the regulations “a slippery slope that will have dire consequences for the state,” creating more room for election errors and tampering.
“The secretary of state’s office, by passing these regulations, is condoning the use of hand counting while ignoring the urgency of the issues that such procedures will produce,” she said.
She also criticized a lack of enforcement or consequences for counties that don’t follow the rules.
Deputy Secretary for Elections Mark Wlaschin previously acknowledged in an interview earlier this month that there is no enforcement mechanism outlined in the regulations.
He said his office has considered “a number of contingencies” for noncompliance. Part of ensuring compliance falls on the secretary of state’s office, he said, and part of that role falls on county clerks.
Hand counting supporters have described the old-fashioned method as a way to address distrust in elections, especially unproven claims that voting machines are prone to hacking and are untrustworthy. Experts have said hand-counting is far more time consuming and exposes the process to more errors.
Wlaschin has said the rules will help counties that opt to switch to hand-counting systems, preventing clerks from having to draw up rules from scratch. They would also create a uniform structure so the state can ensure the counting is valid.
But questions remain about the implementation of the regulations and how they will unfold in counties that vary in population, size and differing political leanings.
Humboldt County Clerk Tami Rae Spero said in an interview it would be difficult to follow the guidelines that require finding bipartisan vote counters and the physical space that will be needed for observation of the hand counts.
At a hearing earlier this month, Wlaschin asked Kampf if Nye County planned to eventually phase out the parallel tabulation process, leading to an all-hand count.
Kampf responded: “I hope we can prove to you and to those who are doubting and have significant doubts that it can work, that you’d make that decision at that point in time.”
Some Nevada state lawmakers will discuss next week whether to rein in efforts by rural counties to count votes by hand.
At an interim legislation session Monday for the committee on legislative operations and elections, lawmakers are scheduled to deliberate whether to draft a bill requiring counties that discontinue using voting machines to return state funds given to them for the machines.
The bill would not be voted on until at least February, when Nevada’s next legislative session begins.
The hearing for the hand counting regulations on Friday came as several Nevada Republicans in key races have repeatedly questioned the results of the 2020 election without evidence.
Senate candidate Adam Laxalt led former president Donald Trump’s campaign in Nevada and filed paperwork in an attempt to overturn the state’s 2020 result.
Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant has made election distrust central to his platform and has repeatedly denied the results of the 2020 election.
In February, he told voters that “your vote hasn’t counted in decades.”
He also worked with Kampf to design the hand-counting plan in Nye County and hopes to spread it across the country.
___
Stern 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 undercovered issues. Follow Stern on Twitter @gabestern326.
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| 2022-09-21T14:45:37Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Some 150 artworks from the collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen will be auctioned at Christie’s in New York this fall and are expected to bring in more than $1 billion in total, Christie’s and Allen’s estate announced Friday.
The works to be auctioned span 500 years of art history from Old Masters to the giants of modern art, Christie’s said, adding that all proceeds will go to philanthropy.
Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2018. In his lifetime he gave more than $2 billion to causes including ocean health, homelessness and advancing scientific research.
Highlights of the upcoming sale include Paul Cézanne’s “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire,” completed in 1890 and estimated to sell for more than $100 million, and Jasper Johns’ “Small False Start” from 1960, estimated at $50 million. Other details of the artworks to be auctioned were not released.
Guillaume Cerutti, Christie’s chief executive officer, said in a statement, “The inspirational figure of Paul Allen, the extraordinary quality and diversity of works, and the dedication of all proceeds to philanthropy, create a unique combination that will make the sale of the Paul G. Allen Collection an event of unprecedented magnitude.”
Jody Allen, Allen’s sister and the executor of his estate, said, “These works mean so much to so many, and I know that Christie’s will ensure their respectful dispersal to generate tremendous value for philanthropic pursuits in accordance with Paul’s wishes.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:45:44Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Treasury Department is facing pushback from the cryptocurrency industry over sanctions imposed on a firm accused of helping to launder billions of dollars — with some funds going to North Korean hackers.
Earlier this month, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the virtual currency mixing firm, Tornado Cash, which allegedly helped to launder more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since its creation in 2019.
Mixing services combine various digital assets, including potentially illegally and legitimately obtained funds, to keep the origins of the funds secret, including money that has been stolen.
In the weeks after the sanctions were announced, crypto firms, lobbyists and at least one lawmaker have come to the firm’s defense, saying the sanctions open the door to limiting Americans’ usage of privacy software.
Coin Center, a nonprofit crypto advocacy firm, says Treasury’s financial crimes enforcement arm “overstepped its legal authority” through its sanctions, which “potentially violates constitutional rights to due process and free speech.”
One cryptocurrency firm, Tether, has said it would not freeze its accounts tied to Tornado Cash and intends to keep them open. And Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who has received at least $50,000 in contributions from the executive director of the Blockchain Association this year, wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen this week asking for the rationale for sanctioning Tornado Cash, saying the sanctions “impact not only our national security, but the right to privacy of every American citizen.”
He told The Associated Press the sanctions punish Americans who use the firm’s software for legitimate purposes. “My government has no business sanctioning my ability to use a software that protects my anonymity, especially when I’m using it for legitimate purposes,” he said.
The defense of the firm comes as a Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was arrested by Dutch authorities in early August, days after U.S. sanctions were imposed, for allegedly facilitating money laundering.
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control says Tornado Cash’s systems were used, among other things, to launder more than $96 million drawn from the June Harmony blockchain bridge theft and August Nomad crypto firm heist.
A Treasury spokesperson said that the agency is focused on disrupting criminal behavior and will use its sanctions authorities to protect the U.S. financial system from illicit activity like cyber theft, money laundering, and weapons proliferation financing.
Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association, said the sanctions impact law abiding users of crypto mixing technology.
“If you are paid in cryptocurrency, transactions on most blockchains are transparent,” she said, adding that mixers are used by those who don’t want their transactions viewable on a public ledger.
“I think we do need to have a conversation around privacy and empower law enforcement without undermining people’s ability to have private transactions,” Smith said.
This is not the first set of sanctions on a digital asset mixing firm.
In May, the U.S. announced sanctions against North Korean digital currency mixing firm Blender.io, accused of helping Lazarus Group, the sanctioned North Korean cyber hacking group, carry out a $600 million digital currency heist in March.
Since the Tornado Cash sanctions, crypto experts have speculated on whether expected regulations would result in a ban on mixing services.
The Biden administration issued an executive order on digital assets in March that calls, in part, for regulations on the industry.
“This may be the end,” Smith said “but we wont know until we see the regulations.”
This story has been corrected to show that the executive director of Blockchain Association, not the association, contributed to Emmer.
Find more on cryptocurrency: https://apnews.com/hub/cryptocurrency
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| 2022-09-21T14:45:52Z
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PODGORICA, Montenegro (AP) — Montenegro’s security agency warned Friday that hackers from Russia have launched a massive, coordinated cyberattack against the small nation’s government and its services.
The Agency for National Security, or ANB, said Montenegro is “under a hybrid war at the moment.”
The Adriatic Sea state, once considered a strong Russian ally, in 2017 joined NATO despite strong opposition from Moscow. It has also joined Western sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
In addition to most European countries, Russia has added Montenegro to its list of “enemy states” for acting against Kremlin’s interests.
The Montenegrin government earlier this week reported first in series of cyberattacks on its servers, but said it managed to prevent any damage. However, the attack seems to be ongoing.
“Coordinated Russian services are behind the cyber attack,” the ANB said in a statement. “This kind of attack was carried out for the first time in Montenegro and it has been prepared for a long period of time.”
Dusan Polovic, a government official, said “I can say with certainty that this attack that Montenegro is experiencing these days comes directly from Russia.”
The U.S. embassy in Montenegro warned its citizens in the Balkan state to be aware of a “persistent and ongoing cyberattack that is in process.”
“The attack may include disruptions to the public utility, transportation (including border crossings and airport), and telecommunication sectors,” it said.
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Follow all AP stories on developments from the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.
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| 2022-09-21T14:45:59Z
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Manufacturer reduces customer maintenance costs, identifies problems using IoT analytics
CARY, N.C., Sept. 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Manufacturer Iveco Group digitally transformed itself to enhance responsiveness to stressed trucking industry customers. One of the keys to transformation success was improving the company's remote diagnostic capabilities to quickly maximize uptime in its global truck fleet.
Iveco Group chose industry-leading SAS® Viya® to ensure its analytics are agile and always on so customers' revenue and satisfaction levels remain high. The patterns SAS Viya uncovers help Iveco Group reduce recalls by proactively fixing customer issues before they become major problems.
Learn more about scaling artificial intelligence (AI) in manufacturing by downloading the free e-book Data driven digital transformation in enterprise manufacturing.
Iveco Group, based in Italy, operates 29 manufacturing plants and 31 research and development centers around the world. The growing prominence of connected vehicles and the complex data they generate propelled the manufacturer's need for transformation to remain competitive. Iveco Group initially saw success with SAS Analytics for IoT in its quality department, so expanding SAS across the enterprise was a logical progression.
"SAS allows our people to integrate the data autonomously so they can find precisely what they're looking for without having to ask data analysts to intervene every time," said Stefano Rozzi, Telematics Quality and Field Analysis Manager at Iveco Group. "It speeds up our ability to understand and react to anything and make quicker and more effective decisions."
Analytics in the cloud keeps trucks on the road
Rozzi classifies the company's work with SAS as an innovative Internet of Things (IoT) telematics project. He said being able to reduce customer maintenance costs with remote diagnostics allows designers and analysts to speak the same language, which he said, "was unthinkable a few years ago."
Iveco Group chose SAS Viya because:
- SAS is easy to use whether you're a data scientist or an automotive designer.
- SAS helps drive the business by quickly collecting and analyzing vehicle-use data for designers.
- SAS provides a shared tool to bring data together in one place for all Iveco Group facilities globally.
- SAS ensures straightforward cross-enterprise data sharing to support confident decisions.
"IoT, advanced analytics and AI enable us to understand vehicle behavior even if the trucks are scattered all over the world," said Rozzi. "This is possible because the data from each vehicle flows into our SAS Viya platform, which enables real-time analysis."
About SAS
SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative software and services, SAS empowers and inspires customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW®.
SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2022 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
Editorial Contact:
Mike Nemecek
mike.nemecek@sas.com
919-531-5140
sas.com/news
View original content to download multimedia:
SOURCE SAS
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX and T-Mobile are teaming up in an attempt to connect mobile devices through a network of satellites, providing coverage to even the most isolated places.
Under the plan, T-Mobile’s wireless network would be routed through SpaceX Starlink satellites that are in low Earth orbit.
T-Mobile said that the vast majority of smartphones already on its network will be compatible with the new service using the device’s existing radio.
The companies are looking to provide text coverage, including SMS, MMS and participating messaging apps, nearly everywhere in the continental U.S., Hawaii, parts of Alaska, Puerto Rico and territorial waters starting with a beta in select areas by the end of next year. They want to add voice and data coverage at a later time.
T-Mobile and SpaceX say they are ready to partner with other carriers to help expand the service worldwide.
“The important thing about this is that it means there’s no dead zones anywhere in the world for your cellphone,” Elon Musk said during a live event at a SpaceX facility in Texas on Thursday.
The billionaire and Tesla CEO who is engaged in a legal battle with Twitter, emphasized that one of the key benefits of the service will be that it can help people who are in life threatening situations in remote areas, potentially saving lives.
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| 2022-09-21T14:46:06Z
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MADRID (AP) — Spanish financial authorities are planning to keep a close eye on a major cryptocurrency metaverse event being organized in Madrid this weekend.
The CNMV stock market regulator this week warned that neither the organizers of the event, Mundocrypto, nor the sponsors have authorization to provide investment services or gather funds.
The event Saturday at a Madrid concert arena is expected draw 7,000 people. Spanish authorities and the CNMV say such gatherings are often aimed at luring people, especially youths, into investing in cryptocurrencies without full knowledge of the possible consequences.
Mundocrypto founder Mani Thawani, a Spaniard, has defended the event, arguing that it is for educational purposes and to guide people financially.
Mundocrypto describes itself as “world leader in crypto and blockchain education” and says 55,000 of its students have already become investors.
The CNMV says Mundocrypto is on its grey list of entities suspected of raising funds and providing financial services without permits.
Organizers say the show is aimed unveiling new trends in the sector. Show business personalities and economists are also expected to take part. Two well-known television personalities have pulled out of the event since the market regulator’s warning.
Earlier this year, a number of families complained to authorities that another cryptocurrency academy was brainwashing their children into spending their money on courses with promises they would become wealthy.
Investments in cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoins, have boomed in recent years but in several cases currencies have lost their value quickly and people their investments in what is an unregulated market.
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| 2022-09-21T14:46:14Z
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LAUREL, Miss. (WHLT) — An alligator must really love that chicken from Popeye’s!
Recent rainy weather may be the reason an alligator turned up at a Popeye’s restaurant in Laurel on Monday, August 22.
City officials said restaurant staff noticed the unusual guest in the drive-thru lane. The three-foot gator turned up at the restaurant location on Leontyne Price Boulevard.
By the time an animal control officer showed up, the gator had taken cover under a pile of pallets next to the restaurant’s dumpster. The officer used a catch pole to secure it and put the gator in a dog box in the back of his truck.
The officer and a game warden with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks (MDWFP) set the animal free outside city limits. The gator was not harmed while being relocated.
The city’s animal control supervisor said alligator sightings are becoming more common. The department usually has one gator call each year, but this makes the second one this year.
Laurel Police Chief Tommy Cox said more critters may turn up as rainy weather continues. He advised neighbors to be aware of your surroundings, keep your pets on a leash and the leave it to animal control if you encounter a critter.
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| 2022-09-21T14:46:22Z
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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (NewsNation) — Breaking news update: A federal judge Saturday announced “preliminary intent” to appoint a special master to oversee the handling of the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The Justice Department on Friday made public a heavily redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate.
Despite being redacted, the affidavit contains details about an ongoing criminal investigation into classified documents being stored at Trump’s Palm Beach property after he left the White House.
Trump called the search of Mar-a-Lago a “weaponization” of the Justice Department and likened it to a “political attack on our country” during an appearance on “The Great America Show with Lou Dobbs.”
“They weaponize at a level that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said on the podcast, which was released Friday. “They go after political opponents at a level that nobody’s ever seen before with a raid (on) an ex-president, and a popular ex president.”
According to the affidavit, investigators believed additional classified documents were being held at Mar-a-Lago and that there was “probable cause” to believe that obstruction of evidence — somebody trying either to hide or destroy the documents — would be found.
The affidavit states that 14 of the 15 boxes recovered from Mar-a-Lago earlier this year contained documents with classification markings.
It details “184 unique documents (sic) bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”
Trump asserted he had done nothing wrong “from day one” during his interview with Dobbs.
“Everything was absolutely perfect. It was a perfect, it was perfectly handled,” Trump said. “And they could have come in, and they could have talked to us and they could have taken whatever they needed.”
The former president went on to reinforce the anger his supporters have directed at the FBI and Justice Department in wake of the Mar-a-Lago search, saying “they are furious. I’ve never seen anger like it.”
He also, once again, made a false claim he won the 2020 presidential election.
“They love the country more than they ever have, because they see what we’ve lost,” Trump said. “We’ve lost our country, in my opinion. If this continues, I think just horrible things will happen. And that’s not said as a threat. That said, as somebody that just feels it. I feel it, I think horrible things. They are destroying our country. They’re destroying our system. And they lost an election. They lost an election and they lost it big.”
Late Friday night Trump and his legal team filed a supplemental motion seeking judicial oversight and additional relief in their case against the FBI, essentially alleging the case has not been handled fairly thus far and a “special master” should be appointed to oversee the case.
In their motion, filed in a U.S. District Court, Trump’s legal team laid out why their previous requests for a special master to oversee the case should have been granted and also asked the court to provide them with a more ” sufficiently detailed” account of what was taken from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI and for the return any items that fell outside the scope of the affidavit.
Upon their original request for oversight, a judge ordered them to explain further why they believed a special master would be required. The motion filed by Trump Friday night attempted to do that.
“This Court’s authority to appoint a Special Master to oversee the review of potentially privileged material is well established,” the motion read in part. “The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has appointed Special Masters in two recent (and prominent) cases, in both instances directing the appointments in new dockets.”
Investigators believed documents were being kept in a storage room, the first lady’s residential suite, Pine Hall, the “45 Office” and other spaces on the premises not authorized for storage of classified information or national defense information.
According to the affidavit, several of the documents also contained what appeared to be the former president’s “handwritten notes.”
The Justice Department redacted, or blacked out, the information they want to keep secret to protect details about witnesses and the scope of the investigation.
It was expected that large chunks of the text would be redacted as the DOJ had tried to keep the affidavit sealed, saying the investigation is currently ongoing and releasing it could hamper investigators’ efforts.
View the redacted Mar-a-Lago search affidavit below:
Redacted Mar-a-Lago Search Document by NewsNation Digital on Scribd
Trump reacted to the release of the affidavit on his social media platform Truth Social, saying, “Affidavit heavily redacted!!! Nothing mentioned on “Nuclear,” a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ.”
Trump again called the FBI search a “Break-In of my home” and was critical of the judge who signed off on the search warrant.
“Judge Bruce Reinhart should never have allowed the break-in of my home,” Trump said.
The affidavit shows that the DOJ’s investigation began after the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requested help with “serious concerns” in recovering missing documents.
NARA first requested specific missing documents from Trump lawyers back in May of 2021.
It wasn’t until January that NARA said it recovered more than 100 documents bearing classified markings, totaling more than 700 pages, from an initial batch of 15 boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, according to government correspondence with the Trump legal team newly made public.
What they ended up finding in those boxes were “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records, and ‘a lot of classified records.'”
There was speculation that the DOJ may not have been intending to charge anybody with a crime and that they just wanted to get the documents back.
However, the affidavit states that the FBI was opening a criminal investigation to determine how these documents left the White House and who’s responsible.
In May of 2022, it became a criminal matter and the affidavit describes repeated attempts by the government to secure additional materials stored at Mar-a-Lago.
Documents already made public as part of the investigation show that the FBI retrieved from the property 11 sets of classified documents, including information marked at the top secret level.
It is not specifically known what the details of those documents are.
The Aug. 12 release of the search warrant in the investigation helped paint a picture of the possible crimes authorities believe Trump may have committed, including violating the Espionage Act.
Trump has urged the release of the full unredacted affidavit and has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government following what he calls an “un-American break-in.”
Trump and his legal team claim all of the documents were declassified and rightfully in his possession. The affidavit offered some insight into the claim.
It includes a letter from Trump lawyer M. Evan Corcoran in which he asserts that a president has “absolute authority” to declassify documents and that “presidential actions involving classified documents are not subject to criminal sanction.”
In the letter, Corcoran asks that the DOJ investigation into the “leader of the Republican Party” not “involve politics.”
He then says the boxes of classified documents were “unknowingly included among the boxes brought to Mar-a-Lago by the movers.”
The release of the redacted affidavit comes as a new NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll found that most Americans approve of the FBI’s search of Trump’s estate. More than 93% of Democrats and 61% of independents surveyed said they somewhat or strongly approve of the FBI’s search of Trump’s Florida home, compared to just 30% of Republicans who said the same.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates
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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The Dutch leader said he is ashamed that hundreds of asylum-seekers have been forced to sleep in the sweltering heat outside an overcrowded migrant reception center, as his government announced measures Friday to ease the situation by providing more accommodations and temporarily restricting migration.
“It is terrible what is happening in Ter Apel,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte said, referring to the center in the northeastern village of Ter Apel.
But, he added: “I think together we have found a way out of this problem.”
Among a raft of measures announced by Rutte’s four-party ruling coalition were moves to temporarily rein in family reunions of migrants who have been granted refugee status, provide more housing for people whose asylum requests are honored and process and repatriate people quicker from countries that are considered safe.
Part of the current crisis is that people who have been granted refugee status remain stuck in asylum-seeker centers because they have no place to move to amid a nationwide housing crisis.
The Netherlands also will temporarily stop accepting, for this year and in 2023, migrants who were supposed to be sent to the Netherlands as part of a European Union deal with Turkey in 2016 amid an EU-wide migration crisis, said the minister in charge of migration and asylum, Eric van der Burg.
Authorities moved 150 migrants Thursday night from the overcrowded Ter Apel asylum-seekers center to two sports halls in the central city of Apeldoorn, alleviating the suffering of people who have been camped in the open air. The city said it had provided short-term accommodations to ease the crisis and that the asylum-seekers would move after four days to another location.
Van der Burg said the Dutch military would help set up a location to house some people now sleeping outside in Ter Apel.
Hundreds of migrants have been sleeping outdoors in squalid conditions just outside Ter Apel because the asylum center there is too full to house them. The situation is so grim that Doctors Without Borders sent a team there Thursday, the first time the agency has launched a mission in the Netherlands.
Rutte conceded that, despite the new measures, some people seeking asylum would remain sleeping outside the Ter Apel complex over the weekend.
A 3-month-old baby died at the Ter Apel center this week and authorities are investigating the cause of death. On Thursday two men were taken to the hospital, one for a heart attack and another for diabetes that had gone untreated for weeks.
“These are 700 people sleeping rough: No showers, very bad facilities, no health care,” Doctors Without Borders’ Dutch director, Judith Sargentini, told The Associated Press about the situation at Ter Apel.
While many Dutch towns and cities have offered places for Ukrainians who fled the war in their country, the welcome has worn thin for asylum-seekers from other countries. Most people arriving in Ter Apel are Syrians fleeing their nation’s grinding civil war.
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Follow AP’s coverage of migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration
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HENDERSON, Ky. (AP) — Two people were killed and two were wounded in a shooting at a homeless shelter for men in western Kentucky, and a suspect has been arrested, authorities said.
Officers responded Thursday evening to a report of an active shooter at the Harbor House Christian Center, the Henderson Police Department said in a statement on social media.
The shooting occurred around 7:40 p.m. when about 15 people were inside the facility, Henderson City Commissioner Robert Pruitt told The Courier & Press in Evansville, Indiana.
The suspect was identified as Kenneth B. Gibbs, 37. He has been charged with two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder, Henderson Police Lt. Stuart O’Nan said Friday.
Gibbs was located after the shooting thanks to a tip from the public and taken into custody without incident shortly before 10 p.m., Henderson Police Chief Sean McKinney said during a news conference Friday. Gibbs was identified as the shooter by witnesses at the shelter and was armed when he was found.
The wounded men remained hospitalized Friday but were in stable condition, McKinney said.
Gibbs was being held at the Henderson County jail. Online records don’t indicate whether he has an attorney.
O’Nan said both Gibbs and the victims were residents of the shelter. Police have not released a motive in the shooting and did not identify the wounded men. Steven Wathen, 67, and Chad Holmes, 44, were killed, police said.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with Henderson this morning after a senseless act of violence,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear tweeted Friday morning. “Britainy and I pray those injured recover quickly and we give thanks to our brave first responders. Henderson, we stand with you.”
Harbor House is described on its Facebook page as a Christian-based homeless shelter and a “safe harbor for men in need.”
Pruitt said Harbor House has been an asset for the community since it opened in 1989, but “tonight puts a scar on that.”
Harbor House resident Brian McClain told the newspaper a church service had just ended and he was resting in a dorm room when a man he believed to be the shooter turned the lights on suddenly.
“He looked at me funny and shut the light back off, and when he went out the dorm room, it wasn’t five seconds later I heard shots,” he said.
He said he jumped out of bed, unlocked a window and climbed out.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people, man.”
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BERLIN (AP) — Two young brothers who drowned in a lake in western Germany were British tourists, authorities said Friday.
The boys, aged 7 and 9, were reported missing by their parents at a designated swimming area on Eiserbach Lake south of Aachen, near the border with Belgium.
Rescuers were able to retrieve the children from the water and they were taken to hospitals in Aachen and Cologne but they later died.
Aachen prosecutors said they were investigating whether the deaths were the result of negligence.
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A lawyer for an Afghan refugee accused in the Albuquerque slayings of three Muslim entered a not guilty plea Friday on her client’s behalf as the community continues its struggle to understand the motives behind the killings.
Muhammad Syed, 51, appeared remotely for the court hearing and will remain held without bond pending trial. He is charged with three counts of murder and tampering with evidence, and police have identified him as the suspect in the killing of a fourth Muslim man.
Syed, who has been in the U.S. with his family for several years, previously denied involvement in the killings when authorities detained him earlier this month.
Authorities have not disclosed a motive for the killings, but prosecutors have described Syed as having a violent history. His public defenders have argued that previous allegations of domestic violence against Syed never resulted in convictions.
Authorities have said they have linked bullet casings found at two of the crime scenes with casings found in Syed’s vehicle and with guns found at his home and in his vehicle.
Syed was arrested Aug. 8 more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from his Albuquerque home after tips led investigators to the Syed family. He told authorities he was on his way to Texas to find a new home for his family, saying he was concerned about the ambush-style killings.
Syed has been charged with these killings:
— Aftab Hussein, 41, was slain July 26 after parking his car in his usual spot near his home.
— Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, a 27-year-old urban planner who had worked on the campaign of a New Mexico congresswoman, was gunned down Aug. 1 while taking his evening walk.
— Naeem Hussain was shot Aug. 5 as he sat in his vehicle outside a refugee resettlement agency on the city’s south side following funeral services for two of the other shooting victims. Shots were fired at Hussain’s SUV, striking him in the head and the arm.
Syed is the primary suspect — but hasn’t been charged — in last November’s slaying of Muhammad Zahir Ahmadi, a 62-year-old Afghan immigrant who was fatally shot in the head behind the market he owned.
Muhammad Imtiaz Hussain, the older brother of Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, said in an interview Friday that his family is heartbroken and frustrated because they have no idea why the young man from Pakistan would have been targeted or how he would have crossed paths with Syed.
The two men were from different Islamic backgrounds. Syed speaks Pashto and no English. Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, who was the son of an elementary school teacher, studied law and human resource management at the University of Punjab before coming to the U.S. in 2017.
“These questions are rattling in my mind,” the victim’s brother said. “If you punish him (Syed) for 10 years, 20, 30, 1,000 or a million years, how would I satisfy myself if I don’t know why he killed my brother? What happened to him? For me, for justice, we need to know why.”
Muhammad Afzaal Hussain was working as the city of Española’s planning and land use director after receiving a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico. During his time at UNM, he became a student leader and an advocate for the international community.
His colleagues and those in political circles described him as having a bright future. His brother said his ultimate goal was to open a school in their hometown in Pakistan so other children could be afforded a quality education.
Muhammad Imtiaz Hussain said that mission will continue.
“My brother died but we will aim to make more brothers and sisters like him who can inspire people, who work for the benefit of humanity, who help others, who raise their voice for others,” he said.
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MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — Hell began at sunset.
It was a Friday evening in Somalia’s capital. The patrons of the Hayat hotel had finished their latest prayers and settled in for coffee, tea or dinner. Families, businesspeople and government workers were there — some of the many who see the promise of their country rebuilding from decades of war.
Hotels are refuges in Mogadishu, but targets, too. The al-Shabab extremist group, affiliated with al-Qaida, for years has carried out complex attacks on them, starting with explosions and holding out for hours as a handful of fighters exchanges gunfire with security forces until a bloody morning end.
This time, about 35 hours followed the moment an explosion shattered the Hayat’s peace. It was the longest such attack in Somalia’s history.
Last weekend’s siege could be a turning point for the Horn of Africa nation and its quest for more security. In the days before the attack, new President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had vowed an offensive against al-Shabab to dislodge it from the large sections of Somalia it has controlled for years.
Horrified Somalis then watched as 21 people at the Hayat were killed and some dismembered, their remains published by al-Shabab in propaganda videos.
The attack was “a window into the mindset of today’s Al-Shabab and how it has morphed into a more dark, sinister, and nihilistic movement,” the Somali Wire newsletter wrote Wednesday, noting that the hotel was not a “normal” target but “a modest hotel whose clientele were mostly ordinary people.”
Now Somalia’s president vows “total war.”
In a national address this week, he spoke with new determination. Al-Shabab “is like a deadly snake in your clothes,” Mohamud said. “There is no solution other than to kill it before it kills you.”
Standing in the rubble of his hotel still marked with blood and flesh, owner Abdulkadir Mohamud Nur could barely contemplate more death.
The 60-year-old was overwhelmed as he recounted his helplessness at being a short walk from the hotel for prayers when the attack began. Calls quickly flooded his phone. A suicide bomber had detonated at a side gate, callers said, and gunmen overran security forces and shot at everyone they found.
“I couldn’t get closer to the hotel because of the exchange of gunfire,” Nur told The Associated Press.
It was chaos. One survivor, Ibrahim Bashir Ali, joined frantic hotel patrons trying to hide in the hall where afternoon coffee had been served. Amid the gunfire, he saw the attackers wearing “battle fatigues.” Al-Shabab fighters at times disguise themselves in security uniforms.
“There were hand grenades that made everyone petrified,” Ali said. He broke two windows and leaped out the second to escape, injuring himself along the way.
Nur, the hotel owner, immediately thought of his two brothers, Abdirahman and Shuaib, who had come to have lunch with him and afternoon tea. They were still inside, but he dared not call them.
“When such attacks happen, people are advised not to call those whom they think might be at the scene of an attack,” Nur said. “The ringing phone might bring the attention of the attackers.”
It was wisdom drawn from years of watching al-Shabab attacks on the capital.
Later, Nur learned from hotel colleagues that Abdirahman had been killed near the reception area while looking for a place to hide. And on the second day of the attack, he found Shuaib’s body himself.
“We trust the fate of God,” Nur said, his face pressed with grief.
The long time it took for Somali security forces to end the siege, and even communicate among themselves, has been questioned and criticized. At first, a paramilitary force trained by Turkey deployed to the hotel but was repulsed by the attackers. Then a group trained by U.S. forces arrived and managed to start rescuing survivors on the ground floor while containing the gunmen.
Somalia’s prime minister, Hamza Abdi Barre, says those who failed in their response to the attack will be punished. Security forces did not comment.
The four-story hotel, in a highly fortified area near the international airport and government offices, has been shattered. Rebuilding, like everything else in today’s global economy, would be expensive with the rising costs of construction materials.
And yet 67 employees depended on the hotel, and on its owner, a reminder of the fragility in Somalia that remains.
“I’m wondering how these people will continue their lives,” Nur said.
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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — An airstrike by Ethiopia’s air force hit a kindergarten in the country’s embattled Tigray region, causing deaths and injuries on Friday, according to local broadcasters. It was the latest escalation of a conflict that has created a humanitarian crisis for millions of people.
Tigray Television quoted witnesses saying the afternoon attack hit a kindergarten called Red Kids Paradise in the Tigrayan capital of Mekele. It aired graphic images of children and adults with dismembered bodies in the aftermath of the attack.
Homes near the kindergarten also were hit in the strike, broadcaster Dimtsi Weyane reported.
Tigrayan officials called the airstrike “a heartless, sadistic” assault.
“This vicious regime has outdone itself with today’s deliberate targeting of a children’s building,” they said in a statement.
That statement didn’t say how many people were killed in the airstrike. But the director of Mekele’s Ayder Hospital, Kibrom Gebreselassie, said on Twitter that two children are among at least four people killed.
“More casualties are arriving. The total number so far in our hospital is 13,” he said.
The AP hasn’t been able to independently verify the footage. Ethiopian authorities didn’t immediately comment on the report.
But Ethiopia’s Government Communications Service said in a statement earlier Friday that the government will “take action targeting the military forces that are the source of the anti-peace sentiment of the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front.”
It warned people in Tigray to stay away from military equipment and training facilities used by Tigray forces.
The report of a strike on a kindergarten comes amid a resumption of fighting between Ethiopian federal forces and Tigray fighters. Both sides accused each other of restarting the war Wednesday after a lull in fighting since June 2021.
The conflict in Tigray, which began in November 2020, has killed thousands in Africa’s second-most populous country, which holds more than 115 million people. The conflict had calmed in recent months amid slow-moving mediation efforts. But last week the spokeswoman for Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed told journalists that Tigray authorities were “refusing to accept peace talks.”
Ethiopia’s government has said it’s ready for talks, but insists the African Union must lead the mediation efforts.
Tigray authorities have criticized the African Union’s efforts and urgently sought the resumption of telephone, banking and other services that have been largely cut off since the war began. The statement by Tigrayan authorities after Friday’s airstrike charged that the federal government isn’t interested in peace talks.
The conflict has created a humanitarian crisis for millions of people affected by the fighting in the Amhara and neighboring Afar regions, while thousands of Tigrayans now live in refugee camps in Sudan.
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LUANDA, Angola (AP) — Angola’s President Joao Lourenco appeared set to win a second term and his MPLA party was close to extending its 47-year rule over the country as final election votes were tallied Friday.
With 97% of ballots from Wednesday’s election counted, the ruling Peoples Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known as the MPLA, had 51% of the vote, according to the National Electoral Commission.
The longtime opposition party, the Union for the Total Independence of Angola, known as UNITA, secured 44% of the vote. Smaller parties took the remaining votes.
Turnout was low, with just 45.7% of registered voters casting their ballots.
The ruling party was poised to have a smaller majority in the central African country’s legislature with 124 of the 220 seats in the National Assembly. UNITA was likely to increase its presence in the legislature to 90 representatives.
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PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona constable who got the job earlier this year when her predecessor quit over frustration about serving eviction notices was shot and killed while carrying out that same duty. The gunman, his neighbor and the manager of his apartment complex also died, authorities said.
The shooting happened just after 11 a.m. Thursday at the Lind Commons Apartments in Tucson. Constable Deborah Martinez-Garibay and Angela Fox-Heath, the complex manager, were attempting to serve an eviction notice on Gavin Lee Stansell when he opened fire, according to police.
Fox-Heath, 28, was found fatally hit. Responding officers found her in a courtyard.
A SWAT team went into Stansell’s apartment and located a wounded Martinez-Garibay, police said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
They found Stansell, 24, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
A wider search of his home found Stansell had entered the apartment next door and fatally shot Elijah Miranda, 25. Police are trying to determine how he was able to gain entry, police spokesman Sgt. Richard Gradillas said.
Investigators don’t yet know why the constable entered the apartment or whether Stansell had tried to reject the notice.
There were no witnesses to the attack, Gradillas said. He doubted there was video of the incident, saying he didn’t think the constable was wearing a body camera.
The Pima County Constables Office said staff were devastated by the killing of Martinez-Garibay, 43. She gave her life in service to the people of Arizona, the office said.
“We all know that the job of an Arizona constable comes with risk, but we go about our business with caution and professionalism and treat all with whom we come in contact with respect and dignity,” the office said in a statement.
Few details have been released about the events leading up to the shooting. Local news outlets reported that an employee of the apartment complex was also killed in the shooting.
Residents at the apartment complex were evacuated but later let back into their homes, news outlets reported.
An eviction complaint filed on Aug. 15 by a landlord in Pima County Consolidated Justice Court indicated that Stansell had previously threatened violence.
The complaint said he or his guest had threatened and intimidated neighbors with a gun on July 27.
Stansell failed to appear at a hearing in the case set for Monday, court records said.
According to the records, a judge ruled that Stansell had breached his lease agreement, writing: “The evidence shows that defendant threatened another resident with a firearm and has otherwise disturbed the peace.”
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey ordered flags fly at half-staff in all state buildings Friday in honor of the slain constable.
“The loss of Constable Deborah Martinez is felt across our state,” Ducey said in a news release. “Whether it was serving in the U.S. Army or carrying out her duties as a constable for Pima County, she dedicated her life to helping others and her community.”
Martinez-Garibay became a constable for Justice Precinct 8 earlier this year, Ducey said. She was a Tucson native “who will be remembered for the way she treated others with dignity and respect,” the governor said.
“It’s just unreal, for someone to do that to another person,” her husband, Gabriel Garibay, told the Tucson Sentinel on Thursday. “I’m still trying to put it together. It seems like it’s unreal, I’m still thinking that it’s a joke somewhere, but it’s just a way to describe it. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Around 6 p.m. Thursday, Martinez-Garibay’s body was escorted from the area by law enforcement officers, who formed a guard of honor. Motorcycle police and other law enforcement vehicles drove in a line with lights flashing.
Her Ford F-150 remained at the scene Thursday afternoon, with a small “Constable” sign on the door, the newspaper reported.
Constables are elected peace officers who serve civil or criminal papers for Pima Justice Court and several county agencies. They can also serve papers from courts outside the region.
Martinez-Garibay enlisted in the U.S. Army after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and did multiple tours in Afghanistan before retiring after 16 years. After leaving the military, she volunteered at local nonprofits dedicated to veterans and their families, the governor’s news release said.
She was appointed constable after the previous one resigned.
“When I deal with the people that I have to evict, I understand that’s my responsibility, but they’re still people,” she said in March, according to the Arizona Daily Star. “Just giving some basic dignity and respect can go so far in helping these people rebuild their lives.”
Former Constable Kristen Randall had grown frustrated with having to serve people with eviction notices while not being able to help them stay in their homes.
“When a force for good can so easily be a force of pain and destruction, we should examine how this archaic position can better fit the needs of a changing community,” Randall said in her Feb. 13 resignation letter.
Martinez-Garibay was hoping to be elected to the position during the November election. Under state law, Martinez-Garibay will be replaced on the November general election ballot by a candidate chosen by the Pima County Democratic Party, the Tucson Sentinel reported.
This is the latest incident pointing to the dangers of serving eviction notices. On Monday, an Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office deputy was fatally shot and a second deputy was wounded while they attempted to serve eviction papers at a home near Oklahoma City, officials said.
Sheriff Tommie Johnson said the two deputies were serving “lock-out papers,” which is part of the eviction process, when one of the deputies went to the back door of the home and was shot. The second deputy was shot as he attempted to pull the first deputy to safety, Johnson said. A suspect in the Oklahoma shooting was taken into custody after leading law enforcement on a chase, officials said.
Evictions have been spiking nationwide in recent months now that early pandemic protections that kept millions of families housed have disappeared and rental assistance funds have dwindled.
Pima County courts, which include Tucson, have already seen 6,937 eviction filings this year, slightly more than the 6,899 filings registered during all of 2021. Eviction filings also have been surging in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix.
____ Associated Press writers Anita Snow in Phoenix and Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.
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MOSCOW (AP) — Azerbaijan has reclaimed control of a strategic city on the edge of Nagorno-Karabakh, the leader of Azerbaijan said Friday.
President lham Aliyev said Azerbaijani forces have moved into the city of Lachin and two nearby villages. “I congratulate Lachin residents and the entire people of Azerbaijan,” he tweeted.
Lachin sits on a road that has served as the main link between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan has reclaimed control of the city and the “Lachin corridor” after building an alternate route in line with a Russia-mediated truce that ended a 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in a decades-old conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.
During a six-week war in 2020 that killed more than 6,600 people, Azerbaijan reclaimed large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas that had been controlled for decades by the Armenia-backed separatists.
The cease-fire in 2020 was mediated by Russia, which deployed about 2,000 troops to the region to serve as peacekeepers.
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Windsor hearing officer rejects protest of parking petition: January special election set
A special election will be held Jan. 24 to ask Windsor voters if they want to create a permanent parking zone in downtown now that a hearing officer ruled against an effort challenging the validity of the petition seeking to put the parking issue on the ballot.
Hearing officer Karen Goldman ruled against Memory Lane Antiques owner Dan Stauss' challenge to the validity of the petition and in favor of petition organizer Marissa Banninga. Goldman said the petition had more than the minimum required number of signatures to force a vote and Stauss' main complaint was legal rather than administrative and not within her scope.
Stauss maintained the initiative to create a permanent parking zone on two downtown lots owned by the Downtown Development Authority and targeted for future development constituted a taking of private property and was an example of spot zoning.
Banninga said she was happy the town will have an opportunity to vote on the issue, but "until it actually gets done, I don’t know how much to celebrate. I'm cautiously optimistic and thrilled all the hard work we put in this summer is going to bear some fruit and that people will get a vote."
Disappointed with the ruling, Stauss said he is consulting with his attorneys on whether to take the case to Larimer District Court. He has until Oct. 14 to make a decision.
"It's disappointing the hearing officer chose such a narrow scope instead of looking at legal and administrative issues. She focused on the administrative side of it and not the totality of the whole situation," Stauss said. "District Court would look at that."
Stauss said he worries that a petition like this sets a bad precedent. "I believe in private property rights," he said. "Anyone can say they want to take your land. If a group wanted open space (instead of a development), they could just start a petition."
Previous coverageWindsor business owner files protest over downtown permanent parking zone petition
Goldman wrote in her decision that "making such a determination is not only not within the ability of what a hearing officer can decide, it is also premature. At this juncture, the petition has not been made into law and can only be considered when that occurs."
If Stauss does not challenge the hearing officer's decision, voters will be asked to modify the town's zoning map to create a permanent parking zone in the central business district, primarily the 400 and 500 blocks of Main Street, ultimately restricting development on two of the three backlots owned by the town and DDA. Plans to redevelop the site into retail, restaurants and residences are forging ahead even as the petition and election process play out.
The petition had 2,255 valid signatures; it needed 1,283.
The dirt lots south of Boardwalk Park and Windsor Lake have been used as parking for several years and provide access to the lake, park and local businesses. Earlier this year, the town board increased the maximum building height in the area from 35 to 65 feet, partially to accommodate future development of the backlots.
More:As Windsor grows, parking downtown is getting tough. Businesses are split on how to fix it.
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Fort Collins veterinarian honored for work helping Ukrainian war refugees and their pets
Fort Collins veterinarian Dr. Jon Geller, founder of the Street Dog Coalition that cares for pets owned by people experiencing homelessness, has been awarded a top honor by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or ASPCA.
Geller received the ASPCA Henry Bergh Award in honor of founder Henry Bergh for his work treating animals at the Ukraine border as Ukrainians and their pets fled following the Russian invasion.
In March, Geller traveled to Romania and spent several weeks setting up and operating a vet clinic at the Romania-Ukraine border with the help of a pair of Romanian veterinarians and local border authorities. The clinic provided refugees with free vet exams for their pets, vaccines, microchipping and the documentation and pet passports needed to keep traveling with them through the European Union, Geller told the Coloradoan in March.
In other cases, Geller said he saw transports come across the border with homeless pets that had been left behind in Ukraine amid Russia's ongoing invasion.
The award, which will be presented at a luncheon in New York in mid-October, is given to people or institutions that have have made significant achievements to save or protect vulnerable animals while exhibiting exceptional leadership, compassion and commitment to the cause of animal welfare in America, said Matt Bershadker, ASPCA president and CEO.
“No one fits that description better than Dr. Jon Geller, whose courageous animal rescue work at the Ukraine border and compassionate work here in the U.S. on behalf of pet owners and vulnerable animals is an inspiration to us all. We’re proud to honor and thank him for his tireless efforts to ensure a safer world for animals in need."
Geller calls the type of care he provides "street medicine" — it involves a lot of preventive care, like rabies and distemper vaccinations, heartworm prevention and minor medical attention for problems such as parasites or gastrointestinal issues.
Dogs that live outside with their owners are generally healthy, Geller has said, because dogs that aren't well socialized or healthy are not going to make it on the street.
In previous interviews, Geller estimated about 10% of people experiencing homelessness have pets.
For every unhoused person "who has no incentive to get up in the morning because no one cares, they get up to take care of the dog. It gives them a purpose in life," Geller said in a previous Coloradoan interview.
Working dog:Fort Collins police K9 Gunnar specially trained to keep summer events safe
Their animals provide emotional support, unconditional love and acceptance — something they rarely feel elsewhere. And the animals can provide protection while their owners sleep.
Geller initially self-funded the coalition to help homeless animals, with help from area veterinarians who donated time and supplies such as vaccines. Street Dog Coalition has since achieved nonprofit status and spread to more than 50 cities across the country. For more information, visit www.thestreetdogcoalition.org.
Coloradoan reporter Erin Udell contributed to this report.
Pat Ferrier is a senior reporter covering business, health care and growth issues in Northern Colorado. Contact her at patferrier@coloradoan.com.
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DENVER (AP) — A Colorado mother accused of plotting to kidnap her son from foster care after her teen daughter said she started associating with supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory was found guilty of conspiracy to commit second-degree kidnapping on Friday.
Cynthia Abcug, 53, denied she was involved in planning a raid on the foster home where her then 7-year-old son lived in the fall of 2019. She had lost custody of him earlier that year after being accused of medical child abuse — lying about him having seizures and other health problems in order to trick doctors into providing unnecessary care.
Jurors also found Abcug guilty of a misdemeanor count of child abuse. She is scheduled to be sentenced in October.
Her son, now 10, is still in foster care and has not had serious health problems since being removed from Abcug, according to prosecutors.
Abcug’s lawyers suggested that a drug prescribed to treat the seizures was responsible for at least some of the boy’s health problems. Doctors had begun weaning him from the medication before he was removed from Abcug’s custody.
Abcug moved her family to Colorado in the fall of 2017 at the suggestion of a doctor in Florida in hopes that neurologists at Children’s Hospital Colorado could find out what the cause of his health problems were.
Abcug testified that after her son was removed in May 2019 she was extremely anxious and reached out on social media for help getting her son back. She told jurors she ended up meeting members of a group that said it was working on reforming the family court system and offered to help her get her son back legally. She said it turned out to be a scam with members interested in stealing money raised online to help parents who had lost custody of their children.
She did not describe the group as being involved with QAnon but said she heard references to the conspiracy theory by people she met through her activism online.
Many QAnon supporters believe former President Donald Trump was fighting enemies in the so-called deep state to expose a group of satanic, cannibalistic child molesters they believe secretly runs the globe.
Around this time, Abcug posted on social media that social workers took children to sell them and sent them to other countries for adoption.
The conspiracy theory was not a main issue in the trial, which focused more on detailed testimony from medical providers and educators about Abcug’s medical history.
Abcug said she heard references to QAnon in passing in talking to people she met online. Rubber bracelets with a phrase used by QAnon supporters, Storm Is Upon Us, as well as a website known for posts about QAnon printed on them were found in Abcug’s home, according to police.
Abcug’s daughter, who was 16 at the time, told authorities she was concerned because her mother had been talking about a raid on the foster home for several months and that she believed people were going to be hurt because those involved believed her brother was wrongfully taken from his home, according to Abcug’s arrest affidavit. Her daughter also told them her mother had allowed a military veteran she believed to be armed to sleep on their couch to provide security, it said.
Abcug said the group she was working with arranged to send the man to protect her after the lock of her back sliding door was found broken. He has been been identified by police but has not been charged. In response to a question from the jury, she acknowledged she had never met him before she allowed him to stay with her.
Abcug said she bought a gun around this time because she feared for her safety but never made it to an appointment for a training class and has never fired it. Police found the appointment listed on the house’s whiteboard calendar when Abcug’s daughter was also removed from the home after reporting her concerns.
After her daughter was removed, Abcug said the man providing security coordinated with others to take her to a “safe house” and implied that she was held against her will. Abcug said her phone was taken from her and she was held for three months in a hotel.
Abcug was arrested in Montana on Dec. 30, 2019.
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| 2022-09-21T14:47:43Z
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'Wastewater doesn't lie': Testing used more in Larimer County as other COVID data lags
Long term, public health officials may be relying more on what's flushed down your toilet to track COVID-19.
Large-scale community COVID-19 testing sites — like the site at the Budweiser Events Center — have shuttered, and while at-home tests have become more widely available, not all results are reported to the state health department, making the data hard to track.
One data source continues to reliably inform public health officials of current COVID-19 conditions: Wastewater testing.
"Wastewater doesn't lie," said Carol Wilusz, who runs the Colorado State University lab conducting COVID-19 research on wastewater samples all along the Front Range, from Wellington to Pueblo. "The number there reflects the actual number that's circulating."
Wilusz's lab has been operating since May 2020, initially monitoring wastewater in the area for COVID-19. The county would use that data to track potential outbreaks and target messaging about testing to areas with increased amounts of COVID-19, county health department spokesperson Kori Wilford said.
The county has begun to rely more on the data from wastewater testing to track current COVID-19 conditions amid the shortcomings of other data points, like individual testing and hospitalizations, Larimer County epidemiologist Jared Olson said.
Rapid at-home tests have become the most accessible way to test for COVID-19 since large-scale PCR testing sites have scaled back, and public health officials know not every at-home test result is being reported to the state (which can be done here: covidrapidtests.colorado.gov).
“We know we’re undercounting the positives that are occurring in the community,” Olson said.
Case counts can help identify trends, but Olson said they're also looking more at test positivity rates and wastewater testing to get a more accurate picture of how prevalent COVID-19 is in the community.
"We know all of these are imperfect, but we try and take the consensus that we can see from all of them," Olson said. "... We take all three together to give us the most robust picture."
More:Here's where Larimer County stands with COVID case rates and vaccine rates
Olson said they also continue to watch hospitalizations, but that data shows up at the end of a wave or outbreak, not at the beginning. Hospitalizations are not as accurate of an indicator of the prevalence of COVID-19 in the community because there is broader immunity from vaccines and from being exposed, in addition to wider availability of treatments, all leading to fewer hospitalizations.
Wastewater is a good early warning sign that a potential outbreak is coming or a new variant may be circulating, Olson said.
“With the relative decline in hospitalizations and with less information coming from case data, it has become a more important piece of the overall picture, and hopefully something that will be available for long-term monitoring,” Olson said.
State wastewater testing data is shared publicly online at covid19.colorado.gov/covid-19-monitoring-in-wastewater. Data updated Sept. 16 shows south and central Fort Collins is seeing a plateau, west Fort Collins is seeing an increase and north and east Fort Collins experiencing a decrease.
Loveland, Windsor and Berthoud are also seeing decreases, according to the wastewater data.
"(Wastewater) is a more accurate indicator of the COVID that's circulating," Wilusz said.
Wilusz's lab has transitioned from wastewater monitoring to research, she said. She's had people from all over reach out to her to ask about how they do this testing and what they do with the data.
Wilusz said she can see a long-term use for their lab and wastewater testing in general — not just for COVID-19. The same kind of testing, research and monitoring could be used by public health agencies to track other diseases, like monkeypox, Wilusz said.
Undergraduate and graduate students are also getting hands-on experience working in the lab, and those who have graduated after working in the lab have gone on to work for biotech companies and the Centers for Disease Control.
"It has the potential to be really valuable," Wilusz said.
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BAGHDAD (AP) — A small homemade explosive detonated on Friday near Baghdad’s Green Zone as an Australian diplomatic convoy made its way into the area, two security officials told The Associated Press.
No injuries were reported.
The blast happened amid Australia’s diplomatic mission’s efforts to mediate between influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and an Iran-backed faction of rival Shiite parties, according to the security officials, to end one of Iraq’s worst political crises in recent years.
Caretaker Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi has been unsuccessful in trying to bring the quarreling groups to a settlement. Al-Sadr’s party declined to attend a meeting Al-Kadhimi held last week.
Despite the explosion, the Australian convoy was able to enter the Green Zone.
The followers al-Sadr and his political rivals, a coalition of Iran-backed Shiite groups called the Coordination Framework, have been at odds since after last year’s parliamentary elections.
Al-Sadr won the largest share of seats in the October vote but failed to form a majority government, leading to what has become one of the worst political crises in Iraq in recent years. His supporters in late July stormed the parliament and have held frequent protests there.
The firebrand clerics supporters have regularly protested, demanding the dissolution of parliament and early elections.
On Tuesday, Al-Sadr’s supporters pitched tents and protested outside the Supreme Judicial Council, accusing them of being politicized in favor of their Iran-backed allies.
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| 2022-09-21T14:47:51Z
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DALLAS (AP) — A federal judge has struck down one of Texas’ few remaining firearm restrictions, finding a law that barred adults under the age of 21 from carrying a handgun was unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth on Thursday ruled that the state law prohibiting most 18- to 20-year-olds from carrying a handgun outside the home violates the Second Amendment right to bear arms and cannot be enforced. He stayed the ruling from taking effect for 30 days.
The decision came in a case brought last year by a gun rights advocacy group and a man and woman who argued they should be able to carry handguns for protection despite being under 21. They sued five months after Texas removed one of its last major gun restrictions, allowing people over 21 to carry handguns without a license, background check or training.
Pittman, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled in favor of the pair and the Firearms Policy Coalition Inc. based on “the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by Founding-Era history and tradition.”
The decision follows a major expansion of gun rights by the U.S. Supreme Court. After a series of mass shootings, the high court ruled in June that Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.
Cody Wisniewski, a lawyer with the Firearms Policy Coalition, said Pittman’s decision “is a significant victory for the rights of young adults in Texas and demonstrates for the rest of the nation that similar bans cannot withstand constitutional challenges grounded in history.”
A spokeswoman for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican whose office defended the law in court, did not immediately responded to questions, including whether the state will appeal.
The ruling comes amid renewed calls in Texas for stricter gun laws following the May massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers with a legally purchased AR-15 style rifle.
Although Texas had kept age restrictions on handgun sales, the age limit to purchase long rifles in the state is 18. Many Uvalde families have joined Democrats and gun control advocates in calling on lawmakers to raise the age to purchase rifles to 21.
Uvalde parents are also expected to call for stricter gun measures at a rally Saturday at the Texas Capitol. Neither Republican Gov. Greg Abbott nor the GOP’s overwhelming majority in the state Legislature have signaled support for new gun measures since Uvalde.
Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa decried the new court ruling Friday and urged Abbott to convene a special legislative session to pass “meaningful, widely-supported gun safety laws.”
___
Associated Press reporter Paul J. Weber in Austin contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T14:47:59Z
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ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday he has agreed with his Algerian counterpart to work to combat illegal immigration while ensuring more flexible ways for the North African country’s nationals to come to France legally.
Macron’s comments Friday came during a three-day visit to Algeria meant to reset relations between the two countries, after a major diplomatic crisis last year broke out over the visa issue.
Tensions were heightened by a French decision to slash the number of visas issued to people in North Africa, including Algeria, because governments there were refusing to take back migrants expelled from France.
Both countries resumed cooperation in December.
Speaking to reporters in Algiers, Macron acknowledged the “sensitive” issue was discussed until late the previous night with President Abdelmajid Tebboune, during a meeting and a dinner at the presidential palace.
“We share the same will” to implement policies combating illegal immigration and trafficking, Macron said. That includes being “more efficient” in sending back to Algeria people illegally staying in France, he said.
France wants to have “a much more flexible approach” on providing visas to families of French-Algerian dual nationals, artists, sportspeople and entrepreneurs, he added.
Asked about whether he discussed human rights issues with Tebboune, Macron said that “we discussed very freely about everything,” but did not provide details.
Human rights activists criticize Algeria’s system of governance that views dissidents as criminals and doesn’t allow freedom of speech.
Macron said France wants to strengthen its economic partnership with Algeria. The country is a key partner in providing gas to the European continent, a status that has been reinforced amid the war in Ukraine.
France relies on Algeria for about 8% of its gas imports. No new contract was expected to be signed during the visit.
On Friday morning, Macron visited the Christian and Jewish cemetery of Saint-Eugene in Algiers, where he paid tribute to the French who died during Algeria’s war of independence.
Macron, the first French president born after the end of the war in 1962, has promised a reckoning of colonial-era wrongs. The country was occupied by France for 132 years.
On Thursday, Macron and Tebboune agreed to form a joint commission of historians who will examine the past from the beginning of the French colonization in 1830 to Algeria’s independence.
Macron was to have another meeting with Tebboune Friday to discuss peace and stability in the region. He was also scheduled to go to Algiers’ Great Mosque later in the day day, before heading to Oran, the country’s second largest city.
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| 2022-09-21T14:48:06Z
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A soccer field that was paid for but never built. A school that diverted resources from its students. A mayor who ran city hall out of his mother’s home and avoided property taxes.
Officials say these and dozens of other alleged acts of corruption cost Haiti’s government a “colossal loss” of some 500 million gourdes ($4 million) at a time when state infrastructure is collapsing amid political instability and deepening poverty.
The allegations were released Thursday by Haiti’s antigovernment corruption unit, whose general director, Hans Joseph, pledged to go after those who “torpedo the public treasury and asphyxiate the country’s economic and social development efforts.”
He called on Haiti’s judicial officials to act on his agency’s findings.
Jacques Lafontant, government commissioner for the capital of Port-au-Prince, told The Associated Press on Friday that he would order all those named in the report to appear before a judge.
“The process will start without any delay,” he said.
The 30-page report released to the public summarizes lengthy investigations launched by Joseph’s agency and provides a window into rampant corruption across Haiti, where more than 60% of its more than 11 million people struggle to survive on about $2 a day.
The agency pursued 10 unrelated investigations, finding alleged corruption in places including two schools, three mayors’ offices and three government agencies.
It accused the general director of Haiti’s National Lottery of diverting more than 41 million Haitian gourdes ($300,000) with help from her brother — a legal professional — and of not charging companies operating rights, resulting in a shortfall of 269 million gourdes (more than $2 million) to the public treasury.
In addition, it found irregularities with debit cards that Haiti’s National Police issued to employees, noting that benefits illegally given to those who were fired or retired resulted in a loss of more than 18.2 million gourdes ($140,000) in the span of just three months.
It also accused the former mayor of the southern coastal town of Petit-Goave of diverting nearly 12.8 million gourdes (more than $98,000) slated for several projects.
The former official also allegedly set up city hall in his mother’s home, “putting himself in a situation where it was necessary to choose between protecting the interests of the mayor’s office or those of his mother,” the report said. It accused him of not paying taxes on the property and said money was missing from the employee payroll.
A former mayor of the north coastal town of Anse-Rouge was accused of creating more than two dozen fictional employees whose checks were going to the city’s accountant. In addition, the report said there was no evidence of five purported sanitation projects on which 835,000 gourdes ($6,400) was spent and no proof that 595,000 gourdes ($4,500) offered by the international aid group Oxfam to buy fuel was used for that purpose.
Also in the north, a former mayor of Saint-Raphael was accused of paying a company more than 2 million gourdes ($15,000) for a soccer field and reading center that were never built. The anti-corruption agency said it tried to track down the company’s officials but said the physical address provided did not exist.
The agency accused the former director of a school in Maissade in central Haiti of diverting more than 2 million gourdes ($15,000), alleging he had only 735 students instead of the 1,004 registered.
Joseph said that despite Haiti’s “major structural differences,” he hoped the government could recover its assets and fully punish those whom he called “enemies of the republic.”
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Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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| 2022-09-21T14:48:14Z
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s defense minister said Friday it was important to maintain capabilities for “defensive and offensive purposes” as he met with a senior U.S. official to reiterate Israel’s opposition to an emerging nuclear deal with Iran.
Israel is staunchly opposed to efforts by world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement and says it will not be bound by the accord currently being discussed. Neither Israel nor the United States have ruled out military action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, meeting with U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, said Israel opposes the emerging agreement, which has not yet been finalized or released to the public.
Gantz “emphasized the importance of maintaining and advancing operational capabilities for both defensive and offensive purposes in (the) face of Iran’s nuclear program as well as its regional aggression,” a Defense Ministry statement said.
“This is regardless of the discussion surrounding the agreement,” it added.
A U.S. statement said the two officials discussed the “U.S. commitment to ensure Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon, and the need to counter threats from Iran and Iran-based proxies.”
Israel is widely believed to have acquired nuclear weapons decades ago but has never acknowledged having them.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes. Under the 2015 agreement with world powers, it curbed its nuclear activities and allowed expanded monitoring of its facilities in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018 and restored crippling sanctions on Iran, which then began ramping up its nuclear activities.
Experts say Iran has enriched enough uranium up to 60% purity — a short technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90% — to make one nuclear weapon should it decide to do so. However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system, which would likely take months.
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| 2022-09-21T14:48:22Z
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Nicole Stone will join thought leaders to discuss key industry trends and insights from the 2022 Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer Survey
NEW YORK,, Sept. 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Nicole Stone, Director of New Product Development Content Strategy at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., will moderate a discussion at Legal Value Network's first ever LVNx Conference Experience on a panel titled "Future Ready Lawyer 2022: Key Industry Trends & Insights." The conference will take place in Chicago on Thursday, September 22, 11:15 AM – 12:15PM CT.
The panel will focus on key findings from the 2022 Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer Survey, including legal industry trends, the dynamics of the changing law firm and legal department, the evolving client-firm relationship, and more. The panel will feature acclaimed industry professionals, including Sarah Andeen, Chief Knowledge & Research Services Officer at Chapman and Cutler LLP; Jared Applegate, Chief Legal Operations Officer at Barnes & Thornburg LLP; Esther Bowers, Chief Practice Management Officer at Honigman LLP; Leslie Brown, Director of Legal Process Innovation at Greenberg Traurig LLP; and Chloe Carver, Outside Counsel Programs Manager at Microsoft.
"As legal professionals prepare for new technology and ongoing industry changes, it's important for us to understand the factors that are impacting the industry's transformation," said Stone. "I look forward to joining this talented group of thought leaders to discuss their insights on the survey results and provide perspective on how legal professionals can prepare for the future."
The 2022 Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer Survey is an independently conducted survey that pulls and presents benchmark data from 751 professionals across 11 countries. The survey offers unique insights into the significant forces of change presenting both challenges and opportunities in the field with present data as well as projections three years into the future.
The LVNx Conference Experience was born out of the belief that there is significant value in leaning across the legal ecosystem to candidly identify forces of change, challenges, and opportunities for potential growth through better collaboration. The conference seeks to help professionals tap into diverse perspectives from members of law firms, in-house legal departments, and service providers.
To register and learn more, visit: https://www.legalvaluenetwork.com/conference-experience
About Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.
Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the healthcare; tax and accounting; governance, risk and compliance; and legal and regulatory sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services.
Wolters Kluwer reported 2021 annual revenues of €4.8 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,800 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.
Wolters Kluwer shares are listed on Euronext Amsterdam (WKL) and are included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices. Wolters Kluwer has a sponsored Level 1 American Depositary Receipt (ADR) program. The ADRs are traded on the over-the-counter market in the U.S. (WTKWY).
For more information, visit www.wolterskluwer.com, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Linda Gharib
Director, Brand & Communications
Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.
Tel: +1 (646) 887-7962
Email: lrusmedia@wolterskluwer.com
View original content to download multimedia:
SOURCE Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.
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KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia’s top court on Saturday condemned as a smear attempt the leaking of an alleged guilty verdict against the wife of former Prime Minister Najib Razak days after he was imprisoned for graft linked to the looted 1MDB state fund.
The High Court is due to deliver its verdict Thursday in Rosmah Mansor’s graft trial over a 1.25-billion-ringgit ($279-million) solar energy project. Najib began a 12-year prison term Tuesday after losing his final appeal in one of the five graft cases against him involving 1MDB.
The Malaysia Today website, run by a Malaysian blogger now based in England, posted a 71-page document it described as containing a guilty judgment against Rosmah. The report late Friday alleged the verdict was written by unknown people and not by the High Court judge handling Rosmah’s case.
The Chief Registrar office of the Federal Court, Malaysia’s top court, condemned the website’s action as “a deliberate act” to smear the court’s reputation. It said it has lodged a complaint with police and vowed the court would not be cowed by attempts to threaten the administration of justice.
“This office stresses that the judiciary will not be harassed by illegal and irresponsible acts meant to tarnish the integrity of the country’s judicial system,” the statement said.
Police said the leaked document was an initial draft prepared by the Kuala Lumpur High Court’s research unit.
“The document is a research work on the ongoing trial and is the view of the research unit for the judge’s reference,” said a police statement. According to the court, the document will be amended based on research findings and further studies and “is not a judgment,” it said.
The court complained the leaked document has also been edited from the original, police said, without giving further details.
Just four days ago, the chief registrar also filed a police report against Malaysia Today for publishing a document it said was the Federal Court’s guilty verdict against Najib, just before the ruling was read out in court. The court has said the leaked document was a working draft of the ruling.
Rosmah faces three charges of soliciting bribes and receiving 6.5 million ringgit ($1.5 million) between 2016 and 2017 to help a company secure a project to provide solar energy panels to schools on Borneo Island.
If she is found guilty, Rosmah is expected to remain out on bail for her appeal to higher courts.
Najib, his wife and several senior officials have faced corruption charges since the 1MDB scandal sparked public anger that forced his government out of office in 2018.
He says he is innocent and was misled by others. Rosmah’s defense lawyers argued an aide who testified against her was a corrupt liar.
Despite his conviction, Najib remains influential in his United Malays National Organization party, which returned to power after defections caused the collapse of the reformist government that won the 2018 polls.
Najib cannot compete in general elections due in September 2023 unless he gets a royal pardon, as his supporters are advocating.
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| 2022-09-21T14:48:29Z
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JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The rental home that Suzannah Thames owns in Mississippi’s capital city was filled with dirty, snake-infested flood water when the Pearl River overflowed its banks in 2020.
On Friday, Thames pointed to a column on the front porch to show how deep the water was then — about up to her waist. She’s now getting ready for another inundation, days after storms dumped torrential rainfall in Mississippi and other parts of the Deep South.
Hydrologists predict the Pearl River near Jackson will crest by Tuesday somewhat short of the levels it reached two years ago. Emergency officials are telling people in low-lying areas to prepare for flooding of homes and businesses.
Thames hired a crew to move furniture, appliances and other belongings out of the three-bedroom home that she now rents to a newly married couple — a medical student and engineer who will temporarily stay in a short-term vacation rental.
“We’re fortunate that we have two trailers,” Thames said as she oversaw the move. “There’s people who don’t have anything. There’s people who are going to lose everything.”
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba has urged residents in flood zones to pack enough belongings to get them through several days of evacuation. He said law enforcement officers will increase patrols to protect property.
“Don’t allow that to be an impediment for you saving your life and saving the lives of those other individuals in your home,” Lumumba said during a news conference Friday.
Second-year medical student Emily Davis and her husband, engineer Andrew Bain, rent the white-brick home from Thames in northeast Jackson. Davis said they knew they were moving into a flood zone, but this is the first time she’s ever had to prepare for high water.
“I’ve felt really stressed because there’s so much to do — so much more than I realized to do,” Davis said as workers hoisted items into moving vans.
Thames said the rental home is covered by flood insurance, and she lives in an elevated house nearby. She said her house is built 4 feet (1.2 meters) above the line of a massive 1979 flood.
Thames said she wants officials to move forward with a long-discussed plan to build another lake near Jackson to control flooding in the metro area. The project has stalled amid funding problems and opposition from people downstream along the Pearl River.
Thames describes her neighborhood as “paradise” because she can watch deer, alligators and other wildlife less than a mile from the Pearl River, even inside the city limits.
“I’ve lived in the flood zone for 30 years,” Thames said. “I’m not crying, ‘Oh, poor me, I’ve been flooded,’ because I knew of the potentiality of it and I prepared for it.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:48:37Z
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A school district in southwestern Missouri decided to bring back spanking as a form of discipline for students — if their parents agree — despite warnings from many public health experts that the practice is detrimental to students.
Classes resumed Tuesday in the Cassville School District district for the first time since the school board in June approved bringing corporal punishment back to the 1,900-student district about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southwest of Springfield. The district had dropped the practice in 2001.
The policy states that corporal punishment will be used only when other forms of discipline, such as suspensions, have failed and then only with the superintendent’s permission.
Superintendent Merlyn Johnson told The Springfield News-Leader the decision came after an anonymous survey found that parents, students and school employees were concerned about student behavior and discipline.
“We’ve had people actually thank us for it,” he said. “Surprisingly, those on social media would probably be appalled to hear us say these things, but the majority of people that I’ve run into have been supportive.”
Parent Khristina Harkey told The Associated Press on Friday that she is on the fence about Cassville’s policy. She and her husband did not opt-in because her 6-year-old son, Anakin Modine, is autistic and would hit back if he were spanked. But she said corporal punishment worked for her when she was a “troublemaker” during her school years in California.
“There are all different types of kids,” Harkey said. “Some people need a good butt-whipping. I was one of them.”
Morgan Craven, national director of policy, advocacy and community engagement with the Intercultural Development Research Association, a national educational equity nonprofit, called corporal punishment a “wildly inappropriate, ineffective practice.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that corporal punishment is constitutional and left it up to states to set their own policies. Craven said 19 states, many in the South, have laws allowing it in schools. The most current data from 2017-18 shows about 70,000 children in the U.S. were hit at least once in their schools.
Students who are hit at school do not fare as well academically as their peers and suffer physical and psychological trauma, Craven said. In some cases, children are hurt so badly that they need medical attention.
“If you have a situation where a kid goes to school and they could be slapped for, you know, some minor offense, it certainly creates a really hostile, unpredictable and violent environment,” Craven said. “And that’s not what we want for kids in schools.”
But Tess Walters, 54, the guardian of her 8-year-old granddaughter, had no qualms about signing the corporal punishment opt-in papers. She said the possibility of being spanked is a deterrent for her granddaughter, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
“I’ve read some some people’s responses on Facebook recently, and they’re just going over the top like, ‘Oh, this is abuse, and, oh, you’re just going to threaten them with, you know, violence.’ And I’m like, ‘What? The child is getting spanked once; it’s not beatings.’ People are just going crazy. They’re just being ridiculous,” Walters said.
Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer with American Psychological Association, said decades of research shows corporal punishment will not reduce inappropriate behavior and is likely to increase aggression, rage, hostility and could lead to depression and self-esteem problems.
Prinstein said better methods for eliminating undesirable conduct including problem-solving training; rewarding positive behavior, such as with extra recess; and providing extra attention in the classroom.
“Parents are experts on what works for their own children,” Prinstein said. “But it’s important for parents to be educated on very substantial science literature demonstrating again that corporal punishment is not a consistently effective way of changing undesirable behavior.”
Sarah Font, an associate professor of sociology and public policy at Pennsylvania State University, coauthored a 2016 study on the subject. Her research found that districts using corporal punishment are generally in poor, Republican-leaning rural areas in Southern states. Font said Black children are disproportionately subjected to it.
The disparity frustrates Ellen Reddy, of the Nollie Jenkins Family Center, which advocates on issues such as corporal punishment and special education.
“Look at the history of violence against Black and brown bodies,” said Reddy, who described herself as a Black mother of sons and a grandson. “Since we’ve been in this country, there’s been violence perpetrated against our children, our families, our foreparents. So when do we stop that kind of violence?”
Disabled students also are more likely to be subjected to corporal punishment, said Elizabeth Gershoff, a professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She said that led four states — Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Louisiana — to ban using it for those students.
She noted that overall, corporal punishment is on the decline, with the numbers dropping steadily since the federal government started tracking it in the late 1970s.
“Most schools are realizing, ‘You know what, we can discipline children, we can guide their behavior without hitting them,'” said Gershoff, who authored the 2016 study with Font.
Cassville School District spokeswoman Mindi Artherton was out of the office Friday and a woman who answered the phone in her office suggested reading the policy. She said staff had already done interviews. “At this time, we will focus on educating our students,” she added, before hanging up.
The policy says a witness from the district, which is in a county that is around 93% white, must be present and that the discipline will not be used in front of other students.
“When it becomes necessary to use corporal punishment, it shall be administered so that there can be no chance of bodily injury or harm,” the policy says. “Striking a student on the head or face is not permitted.”
In Missouri, periodic efforts to ban corporal punishment in schools have failed to gain traction in the Legislature. The state does not track which districts allow spanking because those decisions are made at the local level, a spokeswoman for Missouri’s K-12 education department said.
U.S. Sen. Christopher Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, is pushing for a ban on the use of corporal punishment in schools that receive federal funding. He has called it a “barbaric practice” that allows teachers and administrators to physically abuse students.
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| 2022-09-21T14:48:45Z
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CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The publisher of a weekly newspaper in New Hampshire is accusing the state attorney general’s office of government overreach after she was arrested on charges that she published advertisements for local races without properly marking them as political advertising.
The six misdemeanor charges allege that Debra Paul, publisher of The Londonderry Times, failed to identify the ads with “appropriate language” indicating that they were ads and saying who paid for them as required by state law, the New Hampshire attorney general’s office said in a news release, after reviewing cases that go back to 2019.
“This is clearly a case of a small business needing to defend itself against overreaching government,” Paul, 62, who’s also a member of the town council in Londonderry, responded in a statement.
“I would like to think the attorney generals office has more important matters to deal with than to send press releases out on misdemeanors such as this,” the statement said. “With multiple unsolved homicides over the past year, this seems a bit absurd.”
The attorney general’s office first issued Paul a letter pointing out the language omission in a political ad that ran in the weeks leading up to an election in March 2019, according to a police affidavit. The letter asked her to include the language going forward.
It issued a second letter in March 2021 after receiving a complaint about another political ad that didn’t receive the required “paid for” language, and that an investigator from the office followed up with with a phone call to her, the affidavit said.
The office sent another letter to her in September saying another ad “failed to contain” name and address information, and did not mark it as “political advertising.” She was notified that this was her “second and final warning” and if the law was violated again, the attorney general’s office “may pursue appropriate enforcement action.”
After the attorney general’s office received more complaints this year, the February and March issues of the paper were reviewed, the affidavit said. Two political ads leading up to a local election in March did not contain the “paid for” language and a third had no “political advertisement” designation, it said.
Two candidates who had placed ads during that time told the investigator that they had worked with Paul on them. They said they were not aware of language requirements and that any omissions were unintentional.
Paul, who along with her husband are the only two employees at the paper, was contacted by the investigator in May and said she originally believed the state’s complaint involved advertising rates, the affidavit said. She said she was trying to review the ads and believed that the “paid for by” address information was only required on political signage, not ads, the affidavit said.
The affidavit said altogether, nearly 60 violations in the Times and a related publication were counted between 2020 and this year.
“My understanding is that I’m accused by someone of neglecting to use the phrase, “Political Advertisements,” when it was an obvious political ad,” Paul said in her statement.
The charges carry a maximum penalty of up to a year in jail. Paul, who is not in custody, is scheduled to be arraigned Oct. 19.
“The Londonderry Times is among the dwindling numbers of small newspapers in New Hampshire, as well as around the country,” her lawyer, Tony Naro, said in a statement Friday. “The Londonderry Times does their absolute best to put out a quality publication with limited staff and a limited budget. Ms. Paul acted with no criminal intent, denies the allegations, and is presumed innocent.”
A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said the office could not comment on the case further but said its election law unit receives hundreds of calls or complaints about political advertising each election cycle, and that the overwhelming majority of them are resolved without opening a matter for formal investigation.
As an example of another matter the office investigated, the spokesperson provided a letter dated Aug. 8 and sent to the publisher of a periodical who is running for office regarding a complaint it received about the publisher’s own campaign ad. The letter said the candidate was not complying with campaign finance obligations and didn’t mark ads as political advertising.
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| 2022-09-21T14:48:52Z
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SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) — A car packed with 16 Syrian migrants crashed while trying to avoid a police roadblock in North Macedonia and four of its occupants were injured, authorities said Friday.
A police statement said the accident occurred on a highway near the northern border with Serbia late Thursday. A man from North Macedonia was arrested on suspicion of driving the vehicle.
The four injured migrants were hospitalized with non life-threatening injuries.
North Macedonia, a tiny Balkan country of 1.8 million, is on a major route used by migrants from the Mideast and Asia to reach wealthier European countries — often after paying large sums to smuggling gangs. Most enter illegally from Greece.
Two weeks ago, 35 people were injured when a truck carrying Syrian migrants overturned in North Macedonia.
___
Follow AP’s global migration coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/migration
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| 2022-09-21T14:48:59Z
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UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia late Friday blocked agreement on the final document of a four-week review of the U.N. treaty considered the cornerstone of nuclear disarmament which criticized its military takeover of Europe’s largest nuclear plant soon after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, an act that has raised fears of a nuclear disaster.
Igor Vishnevetsky, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department, told the delayed final meeting of the conference reviewing the 50-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that “unfortunately there is no consensus on this document.” He insisted that many countries — not just Russia — didn’t agree with “a whole host of issues” in the 36-page last draft.
The final document needed approval of all countries at the conference that are parties to the treaty aimed at curbing the spread of nuclear weapons and ultimately achieving a world without them.
Argentine Ambassador Gustavo Zlauvinen, president of the conference, said the final draft represented his best efforts to address divergent views and the expectations of the parties “for a progressive outcome” at a moment in history when “our world is increasingly wracked by conflicts, and, most alarmingly, the ever growing prospect of the unthinkable nuclear war.”
But after Vishnevetsky spoke, Zlauvinen told delegates, “I see that at this point, the conference is not in a position to achieve agreement on its substantive work.”
The NPT review conference is supposed to be held every five years but was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This marked the second failure of its 191 state parties to produce an outcome document. The last review conference in 2015 ended without an agreement because of serious differences over establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction.
Those differences haven’t gone away but are being discussed, and the draft outcome documents obtained by The Associated Press would have reaffirmed the importance of establishing a nuclear-free Mideast zone. So, this was not viewed as a major stumbling block this year.
The issue that changed the dynamics of the conference was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, which brought Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning that Russia is a “potent” nuclear power and that any attempt to interfere would lead to “consequences you have never seen.” He also put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert.
Putin has since rolled back, saying that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” a message reiterated by a senior Russian official on the opening day of the NPT conference on Aug. 2.
But the Russian leader’s initial threat and the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southeastern Ukraine as well as the takeover of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986, renewed global fears of another nuclear emergency.
The four references in the draft final document to the Zaporizhzhia plant, where Russia and Ukraine accuse each other of shelling, would have had the parties to the NPT express “grave concern for the military activities” at or near the facility and other nuclear plants.
It also would have recognized Ukraine’s loss of control and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inability to ensure the plant’s nuclear material is safeguarded. It supported IAEA efforts to visit Zaporizhzhia to ensure there is no diversion of its nuclear materials, a trip the agency’s director is hoping to organize in the coming days.
The draft also expressed “grave concern” at the safety of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities, in particular Zaporizhzia, and stressed “the paramount importance of ensuring control by Ukraine’s competent authorities.”
After the conference’s failure to adopt the document, dozens of countries took the floor to express their views.
Indonesia, speaking on behalf of the Nonaligned Movement comprising 120 developing countries, expressed disappointment at the failure, calling the final document “of utmost importance.”
Yann Hwang, France’s ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, read a statement on behalf of 56 countries and the European Union reaffirming unwavering support to Ukraine and deploring Russia’s “dangerous nuclear rhetoric, actions and provocative statements about raising its nuclear alert level.”
The countries expressed deep concern that Russia is undermining international peace and the objectives of the NPT “by waging its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Russia’s deputy delegation head, Andrei Belousov, said the conference had become “a political hostage” to countries that were “poisoning discussions” with political language on Ukraine and were determined “to settle scores with Russia by raising issues that are not directly related to the treaty.”
“These states, namely Ukraine and the backers of the Kyiv regime, bear full responsibility for the absence of a final positive result,” he said.
Adam Scheinman, the U.S. special representative for nuclear nonproliferation, noted the final draft never named Russia, and he said it understated the situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant “and failed to acknowledge what we all know to be true — that the risk of radiological disaster only exists because of Russia’s war of choice.”
“Russia is the reason we do not have consensus today,” he said. “The last-minute changes that Russia sought were not of a minor character. They were intended to shield Russia’s obvious intent to wipe Ukraine off the map.”
Under the NPT’s provisions, the five original nuclear powers — the United States, China, Russia (then the Soviet Union), Britain and France — agreed to negotiate toward eliminating their arsenals someday and nations without nuclear weapons promised not to acquire them in exchange for a guarantee to be able to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
The draft final document would have expressed deep concern “that the threat of nuclear weapons use today is higher than at any time since the heights of the Cold War and at the deteriorated international security environment.” It would also have committed parties to the treaty “to making every effort to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again.”
Rebecca Johnson, a British nuclear analyst and co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, said that “after weeks of negotiations at a time of war, unprecedented global risks and heightened nuclear threats, it is clearer than ever now that nuclear abolition is urgent and necessary.”
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said: “This NPT conference represents a missed opportunity to strengthen the treaty and global security by agreeing to a specific action plan with benchmarks and timeframes that is essential to effectively address the growing dangers of nuclear arms racing and nuclear weapons use.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:49:07Z
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ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif asked Friday for international help battling deadly flood damage in the impoverished Islamic nation.
His request on Twitter came amid exceptionally heavy rain that continued lashing Pakistan, raising the overall death toll from mid-June to 937.
Sharif said he met with foreign diplomats in the capital, Islamabad, on damages caused by the floods.
“The ongoing rain spell has caused devastation across the country,” he tweeted, thanking other countries and groups for their support. “Together we will build back better.”
The flooding from rains, melting glaciers and cloudbursts affected over 3 million people.
Floods have damaged 170,000 homes, washed away roads and destroyed nearly 150 bridges, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. Although floodwater receded in some areas, the situation worsened in Sindh province, where rescue workers were using boats to evacuate marooned people. Thousands of flood-affected people were living in makeshift homes and tents.
The crisis forced Sharif’s government to declare a state of emergency.
A United Nations statement on Thursday said it has allocated $ 3 million for U.N. aid agencies and its partners in Pakistan to respond to the floods. “This will be used for health, nutrition, food security, and water and sanitation services in flood-affected areas, focusing on the most vulnerable,” it said.
Monsoon rains in Pakistan typically begin in July. But this year, heavy downpours started lashing the country in June, triggering floods. Scientists say climate change is a major factor behind the unusually severe weather, which has made life miserable for millions of people.
According to Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman, right now the real challenge was saving lives and arranging tents and food for homeless people.
“This is a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions, thousands are without shelter, many are without food and people are stranded,” Rehman said. “We need to ask not just the provinces and Islamabad, it is beyond the capacity of any one administration or government to rehabilitate and even manage the rescue and relief.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:49:22Z
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MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A Philippine ferry carrying 82 passengers and crew caught fire as it was approaching a port south of Manila on Friday, and at least 73 of those aboard have been rescued, including many who jumped into the water, the coast guard and survivors said.
Search and rescue efforts were continuing after nightfall for the passengers and crew of the M/V Asia Philippines, an inter-island cargo and passenger vessel which came from nearby Calapan city in Oriental Mindoro province, the coast guard said.
A 44-year-old woman who was among those rescued was taken to a hospital with unspecified injuries.
Video released by the coast guard showed flames and black smoke billowing from the ferry, which was near other ships more than a kilometer (about a mile) from the Batangas port’s anchorage area, coast guard officials said.
A ship helped coast guard vessels extinguish the fire, they said. The cause of the fire was not immediately clear.
Passenger Benedict Fernandez told DZMM radio that smoke and flames suddenly rose from the second deck as crew members were apparently trying to turn an engine on and off as the ferry approached the port. There was no immediate order to abandon ship, but when it became hard to see because of the smoke, he said he decided to jump into the water with his two children from the third deck, along with other passengers.
“I pushed my children off because if we didn’t jump from the top, we would really get burned because the soles of our feet were already feeling the heat,” Fernandez said.
They were rescued from the water by another boat that approached the burning ship and then transferred to a tugboat, which brought them to port, he said.
The ferry, which was carrying 48 passengers, 34 crewmembers and 16 vehicles, can carry about 400 passengers, the coast guard said. In the past, there have been instances when ferries carried unlisted passengers in defiance of regulations.
Sea accidents are common in the Philippine archipelago because of frequent storms, badly maintained boats, overcrowding and spotty enforcement of safety regulations, especially in remote provinces.
In December 1987, the ferry Dona Paz sank after colliding with a fuel tanker, killing more than 4,300 people in the world’s worst peacetime maritime disaster.
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| 2022-09-21T14:49:29Z
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MORAG, Poland (AP) — Poland sealed a deal with South Korea on Friday to purchase $5.8 billion worth of tanks, howitzers and ammunition as the European country steps up its defense and deterrence capabilities in the face of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Polish Deputy Prime Minister Mariusz Blaszczak, who is the defense minister, signed the contracts to confirm them and handed them to the head of South Korea’s defense acquisition program administration, Minister Eom Dong-hwan, at a military base in the northern Poland town of Morag.
“It is most important that the first tanks and cannon howitzers will be available to Poland’s army this year,” Blaszczak said during the ceremony. “We are strengthening Poland’s defenses.”
Speaking through an interpreter, the Korean minister stressed the good relations and trust that the two countries have developed in their business, social and cultural ties.
Also attending the ceremony were the heads of the Korean plants involved in the contracts as well as Polish tank crews who will go to Korea for training in October.
Poland’s conservative government has worked to strengthen the country’s armed forces in response to neighboring Russia’s aggression.
Poland, like other European nations and the United States, has sent military equipment to Ukraine during the 6-month war. The Polish government is seeking to replace of that equipment, including with U.S.-made Abrams tanks.
Under the deal with South Korea, Poland is purchasing 180 K2 Black Panther tanks made by Hyundai Rotem and worth $3.4 billion, along with 212 K9 Thunder howitzers made by Hanhwa Defense, worth $2.4 billion. The deal includes training, logistics and ammunition.
All of the items are expected to arrive by the end of 2025.
Poland and South Korea also plan to sign a deal this year for the purchase of 12 FA-50 planes, a light training and combat aircraft made jointly by Korea Aerospace and Lockheed Martin, according to Blaszczak.
Poland is also seeking a technology transfer so it can launch production domestically.
___
Follow all AP developments related to the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.
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| 2022-09-21T14:49:36Z
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico’s governor on Friday said all aggressive incidents stemming from a protest against a private power company that operates the island’s transmission and distribution system will be investigated.
The announcement comes after media organizations denounced police who in one video appear to assault a photojournalist who was covering Wednesday’s protest. Other videos also showed clashes between police and protesters in a fog of tear gas.
The protest is the latest against Luma Energy, which recently pledged to dedicate more crews and resources to reduce the number of power outages and their duration that have angered many in this U.S. territory of 3.2 million people who are demanding that the government cancel its contract.
In a press conference on Thursday, Puerto Rico Police Commissioner Antonio López accused a small group of protesters of attacking officers with rocks and other objects, injuring four of them. He also said the incident involving the photojournalist would be investigated, with the photojournalist publicly thanking López for having called him and apologizing.
“All use of force will be investigated in-depth,” López said.
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| 2022-09-21T14:49:44Z
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PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Firefighters have rescued a 13-year-old blind dog that fell into a hole at a California construction site.
According to KABC-TV, the dog, named Cesar, lives next to the site in Pasadena with his owner. The dog apparently wandered onto the site, said Cesar’s owner Mary, who declined to give her last name.
Cesar then fell into the hole, which was about 15 feet (4.5 meters) deep and 3 feet (0.91 meters) wide, around 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Mary was alerted by the barking of her other dog. Cesar responded and she could hear he was no longer in her own yard. A Pasadena search and rescue team soon responded to the scene.
Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said confined-space rescues present unique challenges for firefighters. “There’s lot of steps we need to do to make it as safe as possible. For not just the dog but also our rescuers,” Augustin said.
The team hooked up a series of ropes and pulleys to lower one team member into the hole. It took the team member about 12 minutes to reach the dog, secure him in a harness and bring him back to the surface.
Cesar appeared to be healthy and uninjured after he was brought out of the hole. He shook off a heavy coat of construction dirt and dust and was reunited with his owner at the scene.
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| 2022-09-21T14:49:51Z
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The president of a super PAC in Puerto Rico who pled guilty to hiding the identity of donors who supported the U.S. territory’s governor during his 2020 election campaign was sentenced Friday to 14 months in federal prison.
Joseph Fuentes Fernández also served as treasurer for Salvemos a Puerto Rico — Let’s Save Puerto Rico — and had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Gov. Pedro Pierluisi’s campaign.
Pierluisi is not charged in the case and has stressed that his campaign committee did not coordinate its activities with any PAC, including Salvemos a Puerto Rico. The island’s electoral comptroller’s office previously audited and cleared Pierluisi’s campaign committee.
Fuentes and others were accused of forming two shell nonprofit organizations and soliciting donations. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Puerto Rico said Fuentes and others then reported to the Federal Election Commission that the two nonprofits had donated the funds instead of revealing the true source behind the money.
Federal authorities said the super PAC was ordered to pay a $150,000 fine and placed on a three-year probation.
Super PACs — unlike traditional PACs — are barred from donating money directly to political candidates. They also are required to report donors to the Federal Elections Commission.
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| 2022-09-21T14:49:51Z
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BANGKOK (AP) — A U.S. coast guard cutter conducting patrols as part of an international mission to prevent illegal fishing was recently unable to get clearance for a scheduled port call in Solomon Islands, an incident that comes amid growing concerns of Chinese influence on the Pacific nation.
The cutter Oliver Henry was taking part in Operation Island Chief monitoring fishing activities in the Pacific, which ended Friday, when it sought to make a scheduled stop at Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, to refuel and re-provision, the Coast Guard office in Honolulu said.
There was no response from the Solomon Islands’ government for diplomatic clearance for the vessel to stop there, however, so the Oliver Henry diverted to Papua New Guinea, the Coast Guard said.
When the stop in Solomon Islands had been scheduled wasn’t disclosed, but the Coast Guard said the Oliver Henry had arrived in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, on Tuesday “following a patrol in parts of the Coral Sea and the Solomon Islands.”
Britain’s Royal Navy did not comment directly on reports that the HMS Spey, also taking part in Operation Island Chief, was also denied a port call in Solomon Islands.
“Ships’ programs are under constant review, and it is routine practice for them to change,” the Royal Navy said in an emailed statement.
“For reasons of operational security we do not discuss details. The Royal Navy looks forward to visiting the Solomon Islands at a later date.”
During Operation Island Chief, the U.S., Australia, Britain and New Zealand provided support through aerial and surface surveillance for Pacific island nations participating in the operation, including Solomon Islands.
China has been assertively trying to expand its presence and influence in the Pacific, and Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare alarmed some neighbors, the U.S. and others after he signed a new security pact with China.
The pact has raised fears of a Chinese naval base being established within 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) of Australia’s northeast coast. A Chinese military presence in the Solomon Islands would put it not only on the doorstep of Australia and New Zealand but also in close proximity to Guam, the U.S. territory that hosts major military bases.
Both the Solomon Islands and China have denied their pact will lead to a Chinese military foothold in the South Pacific.
Sogavare also raised eyebrows earlier in August when he skipped a memorial service marking the anniversary of the Battle of Guadalcanal, a key battle in World War II in which American and other allied forces wrested control of the islands from Imperial Japan.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, whose father was wounded during the Guadalcanal campaign and who attended the memorial, said Sogavare “missed an important opportunity” by failing to attend.
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn met with Sogavare in the Solomon Islands on Wednesday but it was not clear whether she raised the issue of the Coast Guard’s refused port call.
The Tennessee Republican said in a statement on her website that her visit to the Solomon Islands as well as Fiji and Papua New Guinea “was an important step in showcasing America’s commitment to the region and expanding our strategic relationships.”
The Coast Guard, in the statement from Honolulu, said it respects the sovereignty of its foreign partners and looks forward to future engagement with Solomon Islands.
Coast Guard Lt. Kristin Kam told the Stars and Stripes newspaper that the U.S. State Department had been in touch with the Solomon Islands government following the refusal of the port call and that they “expect all future clearances will be provided to U.S. ships.”
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Associated Press writer Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T14:49:59Z
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CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — With Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” blaring in the background, about 20 New Hampshire educators grabbed wooden sticks and began pounding their tables to the beat.
Emily Daniels, who was leading a two-day workshop on burnout, encouraged the group including teachers, school counselors, occupational therapists and social workers to stand up inside a hotel conference room. Before long, the group was banging on walls and whatever else they could find. Laughter filled the air. A few started dancing.
“Rhythm making offers the body a different kind of predictability that you can do every single day,” said Daniels, a former school counselor who created The Regulated Classroom which trains teachers on how to manage their own nervous system and, in turn, reduce stress in the classroom.
The training session is part of a growing and, some would say long overdue, effort to address the strains on educators’ mental health.
Addressing the mental health challenges of students coming out of the pandemic has emerged as a priority for schools nationwide. Many districts, facing hiring challenges, see tending to the educators as a way to help them help students and to retain them, amid stressors that range from behavioral problems to fears of shootings.
School districts have provided increased mental health training for staff, classroom support as well as resources and systems aimed at identifying burned out teachers and getting instructors connected to help.
Karen Bowden-Gurley, a fifth grade teacher, said she attended the New Hampshire training because of teacher burnout, but she also feels student burnout.
“The demands on all of us were really high and we were trying to make up for lost time for the couple of years that they fell back on their curriculum. But we forgot that they haven’t been in school for a couple of years so they missed that social-emotional piece. We are dealing with that in the classroom.”
In a survey by the Rand Corporation, twice as many principals and teachers reported frequent job-related stress as other working adults. A study from a coalition of mental health organizations of New Orleans found educators working during the pandemic reported rates of emotional distress similar to health care workers — 36% screened positive for anxiety, 35% for depression and 19% for post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“It’s all pretty bad,” said Leigh McLean, the primary investigator at the Teacher Emotions, Characteristics, and Health Lab at the University of Delaware School of Education, who has found levels of depression, anxiety and emotional exhaustion among elementary school teachers that are 100% to 400% higher than before the pandemic.
She saw those issues increasing the most among early career teachers and teachers of color.
“So it seems like the patterns among teachers are mirroring inequities that we’re seeing in the general population with underrepresented groups being hit the hardest, which is really unfortunate,” she said.
Some districts have or are planning to invest federal COVID-19 relief money in teacher mental health, seeing it as a way to also improve the classroom environment, boost retention and ultimately benefit the students themselves. Among the states singling out teacher mental health as priorities are Nebraska and Pennsylvania.
The Atlanta school district launched a service with Emory University using federal funds to provide mental health services. Dubbed Urgent Behavioral Health Response, it funds 11 clinicians from Emory who provide emotional and behavioral assistance during school hours for struggling school employees.
A Delaware district, meanwhile, hired two social and emotional learning coaches who work to address problems teachers are having in the classroom.
“If you can imagine a teacher has a classroom where students are engaged, they are helping each other and there is a positive supportive culture, their job satisfaction is likely to be higher,” Jon Cooper, the director of the Colonial School District’s health and wellness division. “They are less likely to leave the profession, and in turn, that supports their well being.”
Houston, which started building calming rooms where students can go to decompress, is hoping to do the same for teachers, according to Sean Ricks, the Houston Independent School District’s senior manager of crisis intervention, noting that he has seen a “significant rise in teachers that were in distress.”
The rooms would be different from the traditional teacher break rooms and a place where teachers could go during time off to “calm down and chill out,” Ricks said, adding they could have “could have some aromatherapy, maybe some soft music.”
“We want them to be able to understand that we have to take mindfulness breaks and self-care breaks during the academic day sometimes,” Ricks said.
An elementary school in Indiana starts the week with Mindful Mondays, where teachers guide their classes in deep breathing techniques. There are also Thoughtful Thursdays, where a student is called on to write a letter to a staff member to show appreciation, and Friday Focus, when students and teachers talk about self-care.
“My teachers know when they need to take breaks throughout the day I want them to take those breaks,” said Allison Allen-Lenzo, the principal at O’Bannon Elementary School.
A growing number of groups offer training that incorporates breathing exercises, yoga, gentle movements and meditation.
One of these is Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education or CARE. In studies of its use among 224 New York City teachers, researchers found statistically significant improvements including reductions in emotional psychological distress, stress that comes from not having enough time as well as improvements in quality classroom interactions. Researchers also found that it extended to the students who showed increased engagement.
“Your stress level can rise without you even realizing it because your attention is so outwardly directed at everything else that’s going on around you,” said Tish Jennings, a University of Virginia education professor who led the team that developed CARE and was the lead researcher studying the program. “So what these practices do is build the capacity to be more aware of how you’re feeling at any given moment, so that you can be proactive.”
Back in New Hampshire, the educators pushed aside the tables and were mastering a series of stretching movements known as qigong. Then, they gathered in a circle for an exercise that aims to synchronizing their nervous system. Known as collective rhythm making, they began clapping their hands and snapping their fingers in unison.
The educators at The Regulated Classroom training believe these new tools — though on first glance a little unorthodox — invigorated them. Bowden-Gurley felt they allowed her to “train her brain to think differently” and planned to use them in the classroom to build a better sense of community and more confidence with her students.
Kelly Hurd, a kindergarten teacher, said the training gave her a sense of what is possible going into the new school year.
“I love teaching and I love the kids but it’s also hard,” Hurd, who experienced burnout before the pandemic and was part of the New Hampshire training, said. “The pandemic was so hard and so impactful and so stressful. I feel a sense of renewal and excitement and I do feel like I’ve been given permission to have more fun and focus on joy in school.”
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Associated Press writer Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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For more back-to-school coverage, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/back-to-school.
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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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| 2022-09-21T14:50:07Z
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Norman Reedus to Receive Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
As The Walking Dead, fan-favorite Daryl Dixon, Norman Reedus has been a model of consistency, holding the record for most appearances on the show. In addition to his role as Daryl, Reedus gave memorable performances in the likes of The Boondock Saints and Blade II. For his contributions to the industry, Variety reported that Reedus will be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The 53-year-old will receive his star in the television category on September 27, 2022. This marks the 2,734th to be awarded by the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Fans will be able to watch the ceremony at 11:30 a.m. PT on walkoffame.com
RELATED: Two Walking Dead Trailers Tease Endings and New Beginnings
The end is near for the legendary zombie series as the final eight episodes of The Walking Dead begin its run on October 2 with a two-episode premiere. The week prior, AMC will air the first 16 episodes of season 11 in succession starting September 25. Additionally, the marathon ends with a special episode of Talking Dead where Chris Hardwick will preview the final eight episodes. Joining Hardwick will be showrunner/executive producer Angela Kang and actor Cooper Andrews, who plays Jerry.
The Walking Dead concludes its run on November 20. However, Reedus will return in a spinoff centered around Daryl, which will arrive sometime in 2023.
Are you excited to watch the remaining episodes of The Walking Dead? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
Recommended Reading: The Art of AMC’s The Walking Dead Universe
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| 2022-09-21T14:50:12Z
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Adria Arjona Reveals How Morbius and Andor Share the Same Fans
2022 continues to be a banner year for Adria Arjona. The 30-year-old actress joined two major franchises. First, Arjona starred alongside Jared Leto in Morbius, the latest film from Sony’s Spider-Man universe of Marvel characters. Now, Arjona makes her debut in the Star Wars universe as Bix Caleen in Andor. Marvel and Star Wars are known for secrecy within projects and their passionate fanbases. In speaking with Comicbook.com, Arjona shared her experiences within both franchises and how, in her experience, they share the same fans.
“So I know that when I was doing press for Morbius I got all the Star Wars questions and I was like, ‘Let’s talk about Morbius’ And I feel like even now in these interviews there’s people that are like, ‘Oh, I loved Morbius,'” said Arjona. “I feel like I’ve been part of it in a way for the past like couple of months since Morbius ’cause they do share fans.”
RELATED: Andor Season 2 Likely Won’t Arrive On Disney+ Until 2024
Arjona further elaborated on how the historical aspect of Star Wars gave her a different feeling about Andor when compared to Morbius.
“But I think Star Wars, there’s something specifically about Star Wars that it’s almost like you’re going almost into history that I think Marvel definitely felt bigger, but I think there’s something about Star Wars that just turned sort of my belly,” Arjona said.
Despite negative reviews and a poor box office performance, Morbius remains one of the most streamed films on Netflix since its September 7 debut. Meanwhile, Andor streams the first three episodes to Disney+ starting today, September 21.
If you could only pick one to watch, would you choose Morbius or Andor? Leave your answers in the comments below!
Recommended Reading: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
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| 2022-09-21T14:50:13Z
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TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Taiwan’s leader on Friday said China and Russia are “disrupting and threatening the world order” with Beijing’s recent large-scale military exercises near the island and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
President Tsai Ing-wen was speaking during a meeting in Taipei with U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is on the second visit by members of Congress since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip earlier this month. That visit prompted China to launch military exercises in which it fired numerous missiles and sent dozens of warplanes and naval ships to virtually surround the island. Some ships crossed the center line in the Taiwan Strait that has long been a buffer between the sides.
China claims Taiwan as its own territory, to be brought under its control by force if necessary. Beijing has also boosted its relations with Russia and is seen as tacitly supporting Moscow’s attack on Ukraine.
“These developments demonstrate how authoritarian countries are disrupting and threatening the world order,” Tsai said.
Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, reaffirmed shared values between the two governments and said she “looked forward to continuing to support Taiwan as they push forward as an independent nation.”
In later remarks at the Foreign Ministry’s Institute of Diplomacy and International Affairs, Blackburn criticized leaders she did not identify for failing to take the threat from authoritarian regimes seriously enough.
Xi Jinping, China’s president and leader of the ruling Communist Party, “will not stop threatening the safety and security of Taiwan simply because it would be in everyone’s best interest to do so,” she said. “He is not a normal leader. And he has no interest in normal reactions or normal relations with the rest of the world.”
In Beijing, China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement it deplores Blackburn’s visit and urges her to cease all forms of official communication with Taiwan, saying it sends the wrong signal to Taiwan independence forces.
China sees high-level foreign visits to Taiwan as interference in its affairs and a de facto recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty. China’s recent military drills were seen by some as a rehearsal of future military action against the island, which U.S. military leaders say could come within the next few years.
Along with staging the exercises, China cut off contacts with the United States on vital issues, including military matters and crucial climate cooperation, raising concerns over a more aggressive approach by Beijing. It also called in U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns to formally complain. He later said China was overreacting in order to manufacture a crisis.
Due to the separation of powers in the U.S. government, the executive branch has no authority to prevent legislators from making such foreign visits and Taiwan benefits from strong bipartisan support in Washington. China, where the Communist Party wields total control over the country’s politics, refuses to acknowledge that fundamental principle.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said members of Congress and elected officials “have gone to Taiwan for decades and will continue to do so,” and that it was in line with U.S. policy to only maintain formal diplomatic ties with Beijing.
“We’re going to continue to take calm and resolute steps to uphold peace and stability in the region and to support Taiwan in line with our longstanding policy,” Patel said at a briefing Thursday.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told reporters Friday that “China’s motivation is to destroy the Taiwan Straits’ status quo, and after this they want to cut down on Taiwan’s defensive space.”
Taiwan is seeking stepped-up defense cooperation and additional weaponry from the U.S., along with closer economic ties.
In their meeting, Tsai and Blackburn underscored the importance of economic links, especially in the semiconductor sector, where Taiwan is a world leader and the U.S. is seeking greater investment at home.
Blackburn arrived in Taipei late Thursday after visiting Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea as part of a U.S. push to “expand our diplomatic footprint in the area,” her office said in a statement.
“The Indo-Pacific region is the next frontier for the new axis of evil,” Blackburn, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, was quoted as saying. “We must stand against the Chinese Communist Party.”
China has been making inroads in the western Pacific, signing a broad security agreement with the Solomon Islands that the U.S. and allies such as Australia see as an attempt to overthrow the traditional security order in the region.
Pelosi was the highest-level member of the U.S. government to visit Taiwan in 25 years. China’s response was to announce six zones surrounding the island for military exercises that included firing missiles over the island, some of which landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone.
Following Pelosi’s trip, a delegation of House and Senate members visited. This week, Indiana’s governor made a visit focused on business and academic cooperation. U.S politicians have called their visits a show of support for the island.
Blackburn, whose visit is to last three days, also met with Foreign Minister Wu and Secretary General of the National Security Council Wellington Koo, along with members of the American business community.
Washington has no official diplomatic ties with Taipei in deference to China, but remains the island’s biggest security guarantor, with U.S. law requiring it ensure Taiwan has the means to defend itself and to regard threats to the island as matters of “grave concern.”
Taiwan and China split in 1949 after a civil war and have no official relations but are bound by billions of dollars of trade and investment.
China has increased its pressure on Taiwan since it elected independence-leaning Tsai as its president. When Tsai refused to endorse the concept of a single Chinese nation, China cut off contact with the Taiwanese government.
U.S. congressional visits to the island have stepped up in frequency in the past year.
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| 2022-09-21T14:50:14Z
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MEXICO CITY (AP) — When Mexico imposed a visa requirement on Venezuelans in January, it briefly had the desired effect: The number of Venezuelans detained at the U.S.-Mexico border plunged. But it’s now clear that it only pushed the migrants onto more dangerous clandestine routes.
Suddenly unable to simply fly to Mexico as tourists, but still desperate to leave their country, Venezuelan migrants joined others traveling over land through the dense, lawless jungle on the Colombia-Panama border.
In 2021, when Venezuelans could still fly to Cancun or Mexico City as tourists, only 3,000 of them crossed the Darien Gap — a literal gap in the Pan-American Highway that stretches along 60 miles (97 kilometers) of mountains, rainforest and rivers. So far this year, there have been 45,000, according to Panama’s National Immigration Service.
“If they can’t arrive at Mexican airports, they’re arriving by land through the Darien,” said Adam Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America. From there it’s just series of stops: in southern Mexico, the remote middle of the Mexico-U.S. border and then a final destination in the U.S., usually on the East Coast.
Such visa requirements can stop some migrants — the pace of Brazilians and Ecuadorans slowed after Mexico imposed them last year — but not others, Isacson said. “It has to do with the level of desperation,” he said.
Venezuela’s economy has collapsed under a combination of mismanagement and U.S. sanctions. The minimum wage for public employees has fallen to the equivalent of $2 a month. Monthly salaries in the private sector average $75. Some of the Venezuelans arriving in the U.S. now, left Venezuela years ago, spent time in other countries and are moving north now.
In December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained Venezuelans at the U.S.-Mexico border nearly 25,000 times. Mexico imposed the visa requirement in late January and in February there were barely 3,000 detentions. But that number began to rise again, slowly at first, and then sharply in June and July when detentions surpassed 17,000.
The information about the alternate route was passed among groups on platforms such as WhatsApp and through social media. Migrant smugglers who often infiltrate such groups influence the route, in this case a treacherous, yet well-established one, some 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) long.
Anderwis Gutiérrez, a 42-year-old construction worker, and his wife spent weeks watching videos online about crossing the Darien to judge whether they thought they could do it. When they finally made up their minds, they joined a group of 110 migrants of different nationalities. Only 75 of them emerged from the jungle together.
“They robbed us, took our money, we lasted four days without eating,” he said. “One broke his leg, another was bitten by a snake, we didn’t have medicine, we weren’t carrying anything.”
He said they saw bodies, witnessed two rapes and unable to hold back his tears said that his wife almost drowned when a swollen river carried her 100 yards downstream. “In the jungle no one helps anybody.”
Yonathan Ávila, a 34-year-old former Venezuelan National Guard soldier, traveled with his wife, their 3-year-old daughter and 4-month-old baby. In total, they were 14 relatives and friends. He believes his military training helped him lead them through without some of the tragedies that strike others.
The southern Mexico city of Tapachula near the border with Guatemala has been the second bottleneck for those traveling by land. Since the Trump administration, Mexico has employed a strategy of containment meant to keep migrants confined to the south, far from the U.S. border.
Thousands apply for asylum, but the process is lengthy and there is little work in Tapachula. Frustrated migrants have pressured the government by repeatedly walking out of the city en masse. Since June, Venezuelans have made up the majority.
The Mexican government started busing migrants to offices outside Tapachula or to other states in October for quicker processing of temporary documents and to stop the demonstrations.
Ávila led one such march and got a transit permit that allowed his family to continue north. A foundation also helped because his baby was sick. Gutiérrez got a humanitarian visa.
“To appease them, the National Immigration Institute is giving them passes,” Isacson said.
Venezuelans and some other nationalities also pose a problem for Mexico and the United States, because they generally can’t be deported. After much negotiation, Mexico was recently able to send back more than 100.
Once out of Tapachula, the migrants travel quickly to the U.S. border, usually buying bus tickets with money sent by relatives.
According to WOLA’s analysis of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 92% of the Venezuelans crossed the U.S. border at two stretches in July: Yuma, Arizona, and Del Rio, Texas.
Gutiérrez and Ávila crossed at Del Rio with their families.
Both areas are “in the middle of nowhere,” Isacson said. “That tells us that they are being guided there by someone, it can’t just be rumors circulating on WhatsApp.”
Gutiérrez and Ávila made it to the United States with their families. Gutiérrez was in Maryland, but without work or a place to sleep, he and his wife were planning to return to New York, where they had spent a couple months in a homeless shelter.
Ávila has a sales job in Boston and a charitable foundation has found them shelter and helped get treatment for his kid. Each week he has to send a photograph and his location on a cellphone U.S. immigration authorities gave him while he waits to sort out his status.
Meanwhile, he says his friends in Venezuela haven’t stopped asking him for advice to make their own journeys to the U.S. “More are coming all the time.”
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AP writers Claudia Torrens in New York and Juan Zamorano in Panama City contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T14:50:22Z
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(KTLA) – Residents in L.A.’s Hollywood Hills neighborhood spotted an A-list celebrity Thursday morning, but it wasn’t George Clooney or Beyoncé.
Instead, it was a full-grown mountain lion, and most likely P-22 — aka “L.A.’s most famous feline.”
The puma, who resides mostly in the Griffith Park area and is believed to be about 12 years old, was caught on a doorbell camera walking down a residential street.
Video from one home shows the cougar strolling down the street in broad daylight. Other cameras captured the big cat strolling through yards at night.
“It’s wild. It’s wild. You hear of it, but usually there’s so many people out between the cars or people jogging or walking their dogs, you don’t think it would come around our part of the neighborhood,” said Jeffrey Drew, who lives in the area.
Drew’s partner, Jon-Eric Baer, said he was concerned for their small dog.
“I’m from the inner city, so I’m good with gang members, but with big-a– cats, I’m not that good,” Baer said. “That thing was huge.”
The area is no stranger to bobcats, deer, skunk and other creatures, but “rarely do you see a cat that big,” Drew added.
“It’s the big news. I thought it was exciting,” he said.
While the National Parks Service has yet to confirm if this particular lion is P-22, it seems likely given the cat’s size and the monitoring collar visible around its neck. P-22 was also spotted outside a Hollywood Hills home in April.
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| 2022-09-21T14:50:37Z
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Elton John and Britney Spears have collaborated for the first time, creating the slinky, club-ready single “Hold Me Closer” that sees the pop icons take old sounds and fashion something new.
The funky, piano-driven single uses John’s 1971 hit “Tiny Dancer” as the skeleton and adds elements from his songs “The One” and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” all with Spears voice soaring and fluttering.
While John has been releasing new music in the past few years — including the 16-track 2021 album “The Lockdown Sessions” — the song represents Spear’s first new music since her 2016 album “Glory” and her first offering since the ending of her contentious conservatorship.
“She truly is an icon, one of the all-time great pop stars and she sounds amazing on this record. I love her dearly and am delighted with what we’ve created together,” John said in a statement. Spears, in her statement, told John it was an honor to be asked: ”I am so grateful that I got the opportunity to work with you and your legendary mind.”
The track is produced by Andrew Watt, who has worked with such acts as Ed Sheeran, Eddie Vedder, Ozzy Osbourne, Justin Bieber, Post Malone and Miley Cyrus.
The song begins with both stars singing the opening lyrics of “The One” — “I saw you dancing out the ocean/Running fast along the sand/A spirit born of earth and water/Fire flying from your hands.” It then seamlessly moves to ”Tiny Dancer”: “Hold me closer, tiny dancer/Count the headlights on the highway/Lay me down in sheets of linen/You had a busy day today.”
The track calls to mind last year’s hit “Cold Heart (PNAU Remix),” which melded John’s songs “Kiss the Bride,” “Rocket Man,” “Where’s the Shoorah?” and “Sacrifice” into a dance bop featuring vocals by Dua Lipa.
John and Spears first met in 2014 at an Oscar viewing party and she later tweeted her love of “Tiny Dancer,” sowing the seeds for the latest collaboration. John is in the midst of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour.
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| 2022-09-21T14:50:44Z
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(The Hill) – President Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for other student loan holders is a controversial move cheered by many Democrats but jeered by Republicans, who say it will increase inflation.
The effort — the largest student loan forgiveness plan in U.S. history — also leaves a lot of questions.
Here are five of the biggest.
Will it raise inflation?
Biden’s plan immediately came under fire for the potential negative impact it could have on the already 40-year high inflation rate, with some economists warning it will be highly inflationary. Others have said any effect is likely to be more marginal.
While Republicans are using inflation to hammer the White House, the criticism that the plan could raise inflation is also coming from at least some political allies to Biden.
Jason Furman, a Harvard professor and former top economic adviser to President Obama, said Wednesday that it is “reckless” to pour “roughly half [a] trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning.”
The White House argued any risk on inflation will be mitigated by the fact that while it is extending the years-long payment pause on federal student loans through Dec. 31, the pause will end in January 2023. Officials argued that the combination of restarting loan payments while providing some relief will basically zero out any inflationary effect.
The pause has long been seen as a program that could be adding to inflation, though other stimulus programs and the fact that consumers saved money during the pandemic are likely bigger factors.
“It’s pretty clear that the pause in student loan repayment has probably been a little bit inflationary, that’s money that would have been drawn down from the economy and has stayed in peoples’ pockets,” said Kevin Miller, Bipartisan Policy Center associate director for higher education policy.
Will colleges raise tuition in response?
Many observers have questioned whether colleges will raise tuition in response to the Biden move, under the rationale that more forgiveness could be on the way.
“It creates this problem of once you have forgiven or have canceled loans, just broadly … that sets a precedent and it gives people going forward an expectation and a reasonable argument,” said Neal McCluskey, policy analyst at the CATO Institution. “If people don’t think their loans will ever have to be repaid or repaid in full, they have incentive to take out more loans.”
Others doubt it will have an immediate or substantial impact on tuition.
“Most schools are basically multilevel organizations,” said Dalié Jiménez, director of the student loan law initiative at the University of California Irvine. “The process of setting tuition prices, there are just so many inputs that I don’t know that it would have any kind of immediate effect on average or overall.”
The Department of Education will be “vigilant” and “laser-focused” with bad actors, according to officials, and plans to publish an annual “watch list” of institutions with the worst debt levels as a way to hold accountable colleges that have contributed to the student debt crisis.
Will this stand up to court challenges?
Court challenges to Biden’s effort are expected, though their precise nature is a bit of a mystery.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday that the White House is confident in its legal authority and that the steps will hold up in court.
The legal authority the White House has pointed to is through the 2003 HEROES Act, which gives the Secretary of Education authority to take certain actions believed to be necessary to ensure a borrower is not placed in a worse position financially due to a national emergency, like the COVID-19 pandemic.
McCluskey said it’s far from clear those holding student debt were made worse off during the pandemic.
“College graduates were sort of the most insulated from the negative impacts of the pandemic and the associated economic problems that went with it and lockdown because they were most able to continue working,” he said.
“They have been made much better off regarding their loans as they have been frozen,” he added.
McCluskey also raised the issue that Biden is “essentially appropriating money,” which is a power that belongs to Congress. But, he noted, the Democratic-controlled Congress is not likely to challenge that.
“To say loans, which is money from the government that has to returned, now doesn’t have to be returned, that turns the loan into a grant,” he said.
Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas (N.H.) said on Wednesday that the decision “sidesteps Congress and our oversight and fiscal responsibilities.”
Who is in and out in terms of eligibility?
The policy appears to leave out a very small number of borrowers— estimated to be about 5 percent of those who have loans.
The program caps eligibility for the program by income level; $125,000 for a single person and $250,000 for couples.
If everyone who is eligible claims the relief, 43 million federal student loan borrowers will benefit and nearly 90 percent of the benefits will go to borrowers earning less than $75,000, according to the White House.
Who pays for it?
Taxpayers will pick up the bill for the program, though it isn’t clear how much the price tag will be and the White House has skirted questions on the issue.
Reporters pressed Jean-Pierre for a cost estimate at the White House briefing on Thursday and she leaned on saying it’s unclear how many borrowers will take up the offer.
The White House has insisted the loan forgiveness will be fully paid for because of other policies it says Biden has taken to reduce the deficit.
Republicans are going on the attack, raising political issues that aren’t going away.
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said the plan is a “scheme” that “forces blue-collar workers to subsidize white-collar graduate students.” He and other Republicans have also argued the plan will help wealthy people, given the income levels are capped at $125,00 and $250,000.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the decision a “wildly unfair distribution” of wealth in favor of higher-earning Americans and a “slap in the face” to those in the workforce who made sacrifices to pay off their debt.
How the arguments on both sides resonate with blue collar workers — a demographic Democrats worry they could lose to the GOP in the midterms — will be closely watched in November.
Biden is betting enough people will support the forgiveness, particular in minority communities, to ward off political hits from the GOP.
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| 2022-09-21T14:50:52Z
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(The Hill) – A heavily redacted version of the affidavit that convinced a federal judge to approve a warrant to search former President Trump’s Florida home was released on Friday.
Despite numerous redactions necessary to protect “a broad range of civilian witnesses,” according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the document does shed some light on the search.
In particular, it indicates Trump had a much larger collection of classified documents than previously known, including some of the most sensitive secrets careful storage of records is designed to protect.
Here is what we’ve learned – and still don’t know – from the affidavit.
Agents believed Mar-a-Lago housed more classified documents, evidence of ‘obstruction’
The search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month — and the affidavit justifying it — shows that investigators believed more classified documents were being housed at Trump’s residence even after the government previously retrieved more than 180 classified documents.
The unredacted portions of the affidavit make this conclusion plain: “There is probable cause to believe that additional documents that contain classified (National Defense Information) or that are Presidential records subject to record retention requirements currently remain at the PREMISES,” the agent states in the affidavit.
The most eye-popping statute cited in the warrant, the Espionage Act, deals with mishandling of national defense information.
The agent goes on to say that there was probable cause to believe that “evidence of obstruction” would be found at Mar-a-Lago.
The newly unsealed court record shows the DOJ repeatedly informed Trump’s lawyers that Mar-a-Lago was “not authorized to store classified information.” According to the affidavit, DOJ lawyers, as recently as June, reiterated that point to Trump’s counsel, as well as a request to secure any remaining records on the premises.
“[W]e ask that the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice,” reads the June 8 letter from DOJ to Trump’s attorneys.
Extensive redactions leave DOJ’s ‘probable cause’ basis largely unknown
One of the most heavily redacted sections of the affidavit pertains to evidence that led investigators to believe additional classified material was at Mar-a-Lago.
Toward the end of the document, a subheading reads: “There is Probable Cause to Believe That Documents Containing Classified NDI and Presidential Records Remain at the Premises.”
What follows are seven fully redacted paragraphs, totaling roughly three pages, followed by the agent’s stated belief that at least four rooms in Mar-a-Lago were not authorized to store classified information, or materials that fall under “national defense information.”
In an apparent reference to the redacted material, the agent then states: “As described above, evidence of the SUBJECT OFFENSES has been stored in multiple locations at the PREMISES.”
In keeping with department policy, officials said the redactions helped to shield key investigatory details and grand jury information.
Although the unsealed portions of the affidavit shed some new light on aspects of the probe, the extensive redactions that were applied to this section of the document means that much of the underlying facts supporting DOJ’s basis for carrying out the search of Trump’s residence remain largely unknown to the public.
Trump mischaracterized level of cooperation with federal officials
Trump has sought to characterize the search of his home as an unnecessary “break in” after his team was in lengthy negotiations with both the National Archives and DOJ.
In prior statements, Trump noted that he put a larger lock on his storage room at Mar-a-Lago at the request of the government – “We agreed. They were shown the secured area, and the boxes themselves.”
But the interaction does not appear to be as friendly as Trump suggested.
“They have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location,” DOJ wrote in the letter asking for the lock and the preservation of those records.
The affidavit indicates the National Archives first reached out about retrieving records as early as May 6, 2021 – just a few months after Trump left office. But it wasn’t until December that Trump’s team indicated it had boxes of documents ready for pick up.
And while Trump has relayed surprise by the execution of a search warrant, his legal team seemed to understand there could be pending charges in a May letter that followed receipt of a subpoena earlier that month.
His lawyer sought to push back on the idea that Trump could even face charges as a former president.
“Any attempt to impose criminal liability on a President or former President that involves his actions with respect to documents marked classified would implicate grave constitutional separation-of-powers issues,” Evan Corcoran wrote.
But he cites only one law to back his claim that “unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material does not apply to the President.”
That particular statute wasn’t cited in the warrant, however, as the government is relying on other statutes, including the Espionage Act, which only require mishandling national defense information that could be used to injure the United States.
The affidavit offers new details on classified records previously recovered from Trump
The affidavit points to a review of documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago in January as a basis for the search earlier this month.
It reveals Trump had far more classified documents than was previously known.
The affidavit indicates that among 15 boxes handed over to the National Archives, there were 184 classified documents, including 25 deemed to be particularly sensitive. These contained top secret information such as those gained from “clandestine human sources,” information prohibited from being shared with foreign governments, and information obtained by monitoring “foreign communications signals.”
When the January recovery became public in February, Trump released a statement saying the National Archives did not “find” anything.
However, Archives actually referred the matter to the Justice Department given the wide array of classified materials found in those initial boxes.
“It appears, based on the affidavit unsealed this morning, that among the improperly handled documents at Mar-a-Lago were some of our most sensitive intelligence,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (R-Va.) said in a statement.
Why Trump held on to classified materials a mystery
Trump’s reasons for holding on to dozens of classified and top-secret documents more than a year after leaving office is still unclear, but the affidavit underscored the messy nature of the former president’s record keeping.
The affidavit indicated that the documents recovered during an initial search in January found classified and top-secret documents were intermixed with other materials in boxes.
Former administration officials have spoken publicly about the haphazard nature of document organization in the final days of the Trump White House, and he was known to discard or rip up documents throughout his time in the White House despite strict rules about preservation.
Multiple former Trump administration officials, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have said they did not take any classified materials with them when they left office even as they criticized the FBI for searching Mar-a-Lago.
Trump has maintained he could declassify documents unilaterally upon leaving office, allowing him to take them with him to Florida. But former administration officials and President Biden have rejected that theory as nonsense.
“Come on,” Biden said dismissively Friday when asked about Trump’s claim.
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| 2022-09-21T14:51:00Z
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(The Hill) – A redacted FBI affidavit used to convince a judge for a search warrant for former President Trump’s Florida home noted that authorities found 184 classified documents in their initial review of recovered boxes in an effort that began just a few months after he left office.
Authorities’ concern that Trump may have additional national security information at his private residence was spurred by a review of the 15 boxes recovered by the National Archives in January.
The affidavit indicates that among the 184 documents were 25 that contained top secret information, including those gained from “clandestine human sources,” information prohibited from being shared with foreign governments, and information obtained by monitoring “foreign communications signals.”
The 28-page affidavit contains numerous redactions but indicates authorities believed “evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed” would be found at Mar-a-Lago.
Entirely redacted is a provision explaining why the government believed additional “classified [national defense information]” would be found on the premises.
In a separate filing explaining the rationale behind its redactions, DOJ said it had to protect “a broad range of civilian witnesses,” warning they would likely face intimidation.
The same federal magistrate judge who approved the search ordered DOJ to release the affidavit that convinced him to approve the warrant. Judge Bruce Reinhart concluded Thursday that proposed redactions from DOJ were narrow enough to allow for public disclosure while protecting their ongoing investigation.
The affidavit offers new information about the extent of the saga to recover documents from Mar-a-Lago. The document says the National Archives first reached out about retrieving records as early as May 6, 2021 — just a few months after Trump left office.
Yet it wasn’t until late that year that the Trump team alerted Archives that they had 12 boxes ready for pick up. The agency would instead leave with 15.
The release of the redacted affidavit follows the disclosure of the warrant that allowed for the search of Trump’s home, indicating that storing documents there may have violated the Espionage Act, as well as two other statutes.
One bars concealing, removing and mutilating government documents, and the other prohibits similar actions when done “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence [an] investigation.”
An inventory released alongside the warrant indicated the FBI recovered 11 different sets of classified documents during the search, along with information about “the president of France” and Trump’s pardon of his ally Roger Stone.
The affidavit consistently refers to the possibility of finding “national defense information” at Trump’s home, a term used in the Espionage Act. The law does not require mishandling classified materials, only information that if released could injure the United States.
In a statement from Trump shortly after the affidavit’s release, the former president called the document “a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ” that was not reflective of “our close working relationship regarding document turnover – WE GAVE THEM MUCH.”
But the affidavit counters some of the prior statements from Trump and his legal team.
While in prior statements Trump noted that he put a larger lock on his storage room at Mar-a-Lago at the request of the government — “We agreed. They were shown the secured area, and the boxes themselves” — the interaction does not appear to be as friendly as Trump suggested.
“They have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location. Accordingly, we ask that the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice,” the Justice Department wrote in a June 8 letter.
That correspondence came after DOJ had already issued a May subpoena requesting Trump return classified materials kept at Mar-a-Lago.
An included letter from Trump’s team also seems to indicate that they were aware that same month that the former president could face charges.
“Any attempt to impose criminal liability on a President or former President that involves his actions with respect to documents marked classified would implicate grave constitutional separation-of powers issues. Beyond that, the primary criminal statute that governs the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material does not apply to the President,” an attorney for Trump wrote in a May 25 letter.
But that letter references a statute that was ultimately not listed among those included in the warrant for searching Trump’s home. Trump’s attorneys imply he is immune from charges under a law dealing with unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents. Violating that law now triggers felony charges rather than a misdemeanor following a bill passed by Republicans and signed into law by Trump.
Trump has not been charged in connection with the search, and the affidavit does not name him as having potentially violated various statutes, instead saying evidence of violations may be found at the premises.
Trump had called for the release of both the warrant and the affidavit. He filed a separate case, however, seeking an injunction to stall the FBI’s investigation and asking a court to appoint a special master for the case. Doing so would let an outside party approved by the court first review the evidence taken during the search before the FBI can review it.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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(The Hill) — The Biden administration has committed nearly $13 billion worth of military assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded six months ago.
The scope and power of those weapons have increased over time, with Ukrainian officials arguing that firepower is crucial to defend not only their country, but democracy worldwide.
“Finally it is felt that the Western artillery — the weapons we received from our partners — started working very powerfully,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last month.
On Wednesday, the United States greenlighted another military assistance package to Ukraine, preparing to send nearly $3 billion in arms and equipment to meet Kyiv’s medium- and long-term needs as it beats back Russia’s military.
Major weapons
- High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and ammunition
- The U.S. has committed 16 HIMARS since late May. It is a lighter-wheeled system that can allow Ukrainians to hit Russian targets within Ukraine from further distances.
- 1,500 Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles
- Manufactured by Raytheon, the TOW missiles are long-range precision, anti-tank and assault weapons that can hit targets up to 4,500 meters away.
- 155mm Howitzers
- A towed field artillery piece that can hit targets up to 30 km, or 18 miles away. The U.S. has sent 126 of these howitzers, along with 806,000 155mm artillery rounds and 126 tactical vehicles to tow the howitzers.
- 105mm Howitzers
- The U.S. committed to sending 16 105mm howitzers and 108,000 105mm artillery rounds to go with the howitzers. The United Kingdom has already provided the L119 model, which is a lightweight howitzer that can provide direct fire support at armored vehicles or buildings or indirect fire to support combat arms in ranges over 10 km, or 6 miles.
- 120mm mortar systems
- The U.S. Army uses three versions of the 120mm mortar systems, but they are designed to provide close-range, quick-response indirect fire during tactical combat. The U.S. has sent 20 of these systems, as well as 85,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition.
- National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS);
- The National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, also known as the Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, are advanced air-defense systems that can hit targets up to 100 miles away. The U.S. has committed to sending eight NSAMS, along with munitions for the systems.
- Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems
- The U.S. has committed approximately 700 Phoenix ‘Ghost’ drones to Ukraine between April and July. The systems, made by AEVEX Aerospace, are designed to attack targets.
- Switchblade Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems
- The U.S. has sent over 700 Switchblade drones to Ukraine since March. There are two types of Switchblade drones and the U.S. has sent both, those its unclear how many of each type Washington has sent.
- The Switchblade 300 weighs about five pounds and can fly roughly 6 miles, and is intended to target personnel and light vehicles. However, the Switchblade 600 can fly more than 24 miles and can stay in the air for 40 minutes.
- Puma unmanned aerial systems
- The Pentagon awarded AeroVironment $19.7 million in April to produce the Puma AE RQ-20 system for Ukraine. Designed for reconnaissance and surveillance, it has a range of 20 km, or about 12 miles, and has over three hours of flight endurance.
- Mi-17 helicopters
- The U.S. has provided 20 of the Soviet-era transport helicopters that can also be used as a helicopter gunship. Can carry as many as 30 passengers or 9,000 pounds of cargo
- Harpoon coastal defense systems
- The U.S. announced in June that it would provide two vehicle-mounted Harpoon systems, which are intended for coastal defense. The U.S. said in June that it would provide the launchers, while allies and partners would provide the missiles.
- Scan Eagle Unmanned Aerial Systems
- The U.S. sent 15 Scan Eagle systems as part of its Aug. 19 package to Ukraine for reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition. These systems are just under four feet in length and have an altitude of 16,000 feet above ground level. The Aug. 24 weapons package included support equipment for these systems.
- VAMPIRE Counter-unmanned aerial systems
- The U.S. first committed to providing the VAMPIRE system in its $2.98 billion weapons package announced on Aug. 24. Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s top policy official, said the VAMPIRE uses small missiles to shoot drones out of the sky.
- Stinger anti-aircraft systems
- The U.S. has provided over 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The Stinger has a range of 5 miles and can attack targets up to 15,000 feet.
- Javelin anti-armor systems
- The U.S. has provided over 8,500 Javelin surface-to-air missiles. Javelin is a portable anti-tank system that can hit targets from 65 meters to 4,000 meters away in most operational circumstances.
- High Speed, Anti-Radiation Missiles
- The Aug. 19 weapons package included an undisclosed amount of High-speed Anti-radiation (HARM) missiles. The Pentagon first disclosed in early August that it has sent these missiles, but didn’t specify which kind or how many. However, CNN reported that the U.S. has sent the AGM-88 HARM, an air-to-surface tactical missile that has a range of at least 30 miles, and is designed to find and destroy radar-equipped air defense systems.
- Over 27,000 other anti-armor systems
Other equipment and small arms
Radars
- 50 counter-artillery radars
- Four counter-mortar radars
- Four air surveillance radars
- Counter-battery radar systems
Vehicles/Boats
- Four Command Post vehicles
- Unmanned Coastal Defense Vessels
- Hundreds of Armored High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles
- 50 armored medical treatment vehicles
- 200 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers
- 18 coastal and riverine patrol boats
- 40 MaxxPro Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles with mine rollers
Explosives, Small Arms, Ammunition, Munitions
- M18A1 Claymore anti-personnel munitions (command-detonated fixed-direction fragmentation weapon for use against personnel)
- C-4 explosives, demolition munitions, and demolition equipment
- Over 10,000 Grenade launchers and small arms
- Over 59,000, 000 Small arms ammunition
Equipment
- 75,000 sets of body armor and helmets
- 22 Tactical Vehicles to recover equipment
- Laser-guided rocket systems
- Tactical secure communications systems
- Night vision devices, thermal imagery systems, optics, and laser rangefinders
- Commercial satellite imagery services
- Explosive ordnance disposal protective gear
- Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear protective equipment
- Medical supplies
- Electronic jamming equipment
- Field equipment and spare parts
- Funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment
- Mine clearing equipment and systems
Sources:
Fact Sheet on U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine – Aug. 24 (DOD)
Sources: $1 Billion in Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine – Aug. 8 (DOD)
Fact Sheet on U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine – Aug. 8 (DOD)
Pentagon confirms anti-radiation missiles sent to Ukraine – Aug. 9 (The Hill)
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| 2022-09-21T14:51:15Z
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(The Hill) — Jared Kushner called model and television personality Chrissy Teigen a “nasty” troll for her attacks on his wife, Ivanka Trump, in a clip from a radio interview that was released Friday.
Kushner said while speaking with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that many people in the media praised Ivanka for pursuing a business brand of “empowering” women and helping people find “balance” in their lives, but that changed when she joined the Trump administration as an adviser.
“And then she basically gave up the actual business part and just went to pursue the mission, and the same people who praised her for it started attacking her, often viciously and very cruelly,” he said.
Teigen criticized Ivanka on Twitter on multiple occasions, posting in July 2020 that she has “had it with anyone who EVER defends this woman or puts her as the ‘sane’ one in this family.”
Teigen also slammed the former president’s daughter in March 2020 for a post she made encouraging families to plan a campout in their living rooms while they were stuck inside at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“After we quote pack unquote sandwiches can we please have Covid tests,” Teigen tweeted.
Kushner said Ivanka was hurt when people like Teigen would say the “most awful, horrible things” about her, but she never lowered herself to their level or “got into the mud.”
Kushner spoke to Hewitt to promote his memoir from his time in the White House, “Breaking History.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:51:22Z
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(The Hill) — Moderna said Friday it is suing Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, alleging patent infringement over the COVID-19 vaccine.
The move sets up a showdown between two major vaccine makers that together have helped blunt the impacts of the pandemic in the United States and other countries.
“We believe that Pfizer and BioNTech unlawfully copied Moderna’s inventions, and they have continued to use them without permission,” Moderna Chief Legal Officer Shannon Thyme Klinger said in a statement.
Moderna is seeking compensation from Pfizer for the use of technology that Moderna says it pioneered.
The move also marks that Moderna views the pandemic as being in a different phase. The company said that it previously pledged not to enforce it patents while the pandemic continued. But, it said, “in March 2022, when the collective fight against COVID-19 entered a new phase and vaccine supply was no longer a barrier to access in many parts of the world, Moderna updated its pledge.”
It now says that while it will not enforce its patents in 92 low and middle-income countries, it will in other parts of the world.
“We have not been served and are unable to comment at this time,” Pfizer’s media relations department wrote in an email.
Moderna said that Pfizer infringed on work on its mRNA vaccine technology dating back as early as 2010, well before the pandemic began.
“This foundational platform, which we began building in 2010, along with our patented work on coronaviruses in 2015 and 2016, enabled us to produce a safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccine in record time after the pandemic struck,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement.
Moderna said it is seeking compensation but not to block the use of the Pfizer vaccine.
“Recognizing the need to ensure continued access to these lifesaving vaccines, Moderna is not seeking to remove [the Pfizer vaccine] from the market and is not asking for an injunction to prevent its future sale,” Moderna said.
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| 2022-09-21T14:51:30Z
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JACKSON, N.J. (WPIX) — Multiple people were hurt while riding a roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey on Thursday evening, officials said.
Several people reported back pain after riding the El Toro roller coaster, a Six Flags spokesperson confirmed. Five people were taken to a local medical facility to be evaluated. El Toro has since been closed for inspection, the spokesperson said.
Additional details about how the people were hurt on the ride were not immediately available.
WPIX has reached out to New Jersey’s Department of Community Affairs, which has a Carnival-Amusement Ride Safety Unit.
There have been a number of incidents at the Six Flags location in recent years. In 2020, guests were briefly stuck on rides during a short power outage.
In 2021, a log flume malfunction sent two people to the hospital. The El Toro roller coaster along with Nitro and Joker were also briefly shut down over problems in 2021.
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| 2022-09-21T14:51:37Z
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(The Hill) – The Justice Department on Friday complied with a judge’s order to release a redacted version of the affidavit that convinced him to approve a warrant to search former President Trump’s Florida home.
Its release comes after Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered the Justice Department to propose redactions to a document that the department argued a full release of would compromise their ongoing investigation.
Read the redacted document below.
The Justice Department previously unsealed portions of the warrant related to the search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, indicated that the government seized 11 different sets of classified materials, along with other information about Trump’s decision to pardon ally Roger Stone.
The warrant also indicated that Trump was under investigation for a possible violation of the Espionage Act, as well as two other statutes: one that bars concealing, removing and mutilating government documents, and another that prohibits similar actions when done “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence [an] investigation.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:51:45Z
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(NEXSTAR) – The ever-growing list of states where people can legally buy recreational marijuana could get a little longer this fall.
Recreational marijuana is already legal in 19 states, and legalization proposals are on the ballot this fall in South Dakota, Missouri and Maryland.
Supporters are also trying to get measures on the ballot in Arkansas, North Dakota and Oklahoma.
Backers of the Missouri ballot proposal are highlighting a provision that would erase past marijuana-related convictions for nonviolent offenders and those whose conviction didn’t include selling to minors or driving while high.
Despite 60% of Americans supporting the legalization of recreational marijuana in a 2021 Pew Research poll – and over 90% saying either medical or recreational pot should be legal – it doesn’t appear that federal law will be changing any time soon.
In July, Senators Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker and Ron Wyden released a bill to legalize marijuana, but the legislation appears unlikely to have the 60 votes it would need to pass.
Recreational marijuana is currently legal in the following states:
- Alaska
- Arizona
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Illinois
- Maine
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Montana
- Nevada
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- Oregon
- Rhode Island
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T14:51:53Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped more than 1,000 points as the stock market had its biggest skid in two months Friday after the head of the Federal Reserve dashed Wall Street’s hopes that it may soon ease up on high interest rates in its effort to tame inflation.
The S&P 500 lost 3.4%, its biggest drop since mid-June, after Jerome Powell said the Fed will likely need to keep interest rates high enough to slow the economy “for some time” in order to beat back the high inflation sweeping the country.
The Dow dropped 3% and the Nasdaq composite ended 3.9% lower, reflecting a broad sell-off led by technology stocks. Higher rates help corral inflation, but they also hurt asset prices.
Investors initially struggled to make out the meaning of Powell’s highly anticipated speech. Stocks fell at first, then erased nearly all their losses, and then turned decisively lower with all but five of the companies in the S&P 500 ending up in the red.
“He focused more on the Fed’s goals rather than the path,” said Jeffrey Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “That left the market with less to grab onto in terms of the future path for policy.”
Powell’s speech followed up on several other Fed officials, who have recently pushed back on speculation the Fed may ease up on its interest-rate hikes. The increases help corral inflation, but they also hurt the economy and investment prices.
Powell acknowledged the increases will hurt U.S. households and businesses, in perhaps an unspoken nod to the potential for a recession. But he also said the pain would be far greater if inflation were allowed to fester and that “we must keep at it until the job is done.”
He was speaking at an annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which has been the setting for market-moving Fed speeches in the past.
“He basically said there will be pain and that they won’t stop and can’t stop hiking until inflation moves a lot lower,” said Brian Jacobsen, senior investment strategist at Allspring Global Investments. “It was a mercifully short speech and to the point. Powell didn’t really break new ground, which is good since Jackson Hole isn’t a policy meeting.”
The sell-off capped a week of choppy trading that left major indexes down 4% or more for the week.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 141.46 points to 4,057.66. The benchmark index is now down almost 15% for the year.
The Dow lost 1,008.38 points to close at 32,283.40. The last time the blue-chip average had a 1,000-point drop was in May.
The Nasdaq slid 497.56 points to 12,141.71, its biggest drop since June.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 64.81 points, or 3.3%, to finish at 1,899.83.
Expectations had built through the week that Powell would try to to bat down recent talk about a “pivot” by the Fed. Such speculation had helped stocks surge through the summer. Some investors were even saying the Fed could cut interest rates later in 2023, as pressures on the economy mount and the nation’s high inflation hopefully recedes.
But Powell’s speech made clear the Fed will accept weaker growth for a while for the sake of getting inflation under control, analysts said. “Powell reiterated that the Fed is worried about rising prices, and getting inflation under control is emphatically job number one,” said Jeff Klingelhofer, co-head of investments at Thornburg Investment Management.
Perhaps giving some hope to investors, some analysts said Powell seemed to indicate expectations for future inflation aren’t taking off. If that were to happen, it could cause a self-perpetuating cycle that worsens inflation.
A report on Friday said U.S. consumers are expecting 2.9% annual inflation over the long run, which is at the lower end of the 2.9% to 3.1% range seen in the University of Michigan’s survey over the last year.
For now, the debate on Wall Street is whether the Fed will raise short-term rates by either half a percentage point next month, double the usual margin, or by three-quarters of a point. The Fed’s last two hikes have been by 0.75 points, and a slight majority of bets on Wall Street are favoring a third such increase in September, according to CME Group.
A report Friday morning showed that the Fed’s preferred gauge of inflation decelerated last month and wasn’t as bad as many economists expected. It’s a potentially encouraging signal, which may embolden more of Wall Street to say that the worst of inflation has already passed or will soon.
Other data showed that incomes for Americans rose less last month than expected, while consumer spending growth slowed.
Following the reports and Powell’s comments, the two-year Treasury yield rose for much of the day, but slipped by late afternoon to 3.36% from 3.37% late Thursday. It tends to track expectations for Fed action.
The 10-year Treasury yield, which follows expectations for longer-term economic growth and inflation, initially rose then slipped to 3.02% from 3.03% late Thursday.
The Fed has already hiked its key overnight interest rate four times this year in hopes of slowing the worst inflation in decades. The hikes have already hurt the housing industry, where more expensive mortgage rates have slowed activity. But the job market has remained strong, helping to prop up the economy.
Investors got a fresh set of warnings from companies about the persistent impact from inflation and a slowing economy. Computer maker Dell slumped 13.5% after it said weaker demand will hurt revenue. Chipmaker Marvell Technology fell 8.9% after giving investors a disappointing earnings forecast.
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| 2022-09-21T14:52:00Z
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(NewsNation) — Researchers studying the composition of tattoo inks have discovered that those used in the United States may contain cancer-causing chemicals.
In the study presented this week at an American Chemical Society conference, Dr. John Swierk said little is known about the chemical composition of inks, which are mostly unregulated in the U.S.
During their analysis of inks, Swierk and his team discovered the presence of ingredients that were not listed on the label. In one case, ethanol was not listed, but the chemical analysis showed it was present in the ink.
“Every time we looked at one of the inks, we found something that gave me pause,” Swierk said in a news release from the American Chemical Society. “For example, 23 of 56 different inks analyzed to date suggest an azo-containing dye is present.”
It’s those azo pigments that raise concerns.
While they cause no health problems when chemically intact, bacteria or ultraviolet light can degrade azo pigments into a compound that is a potential carcinogen, according to the Joint Research Centre.
The European Union has recently cracked down on tattoo inks, placing a ban on certain blue and green pigments. Americans should assume that those pigments of concern are in their tattoo inks, Swierk said at the conference.
“I think it’s important to note that those particular pigments, Blue 15:3 and Green 7, have been used in tattooing for a very long time,” he said. “While the EU’s data is a concern, it’s not a definite. Much like with everything involving tattooing, it’s incumbent on consumers and artists to make a decision about their particular comfort level and then proceed accordingly.”
In addition to ink ingredients, Swierk and his team noted a red flag in particle sizes, with some measuring as small as 100 nanometers.
“When you get down to that size regime, you start to have concerns about nanoparticles penetrating into cells, getting into the nucleus of those cells, doing damage and causing cancer that way,” Swierk said.
After the team has conducted more tests and their research is peer-reviewed, it will be posted on their website.
“With these data, we want consumers and artists to make informed decisions and understand how accurate the provided information is,” Swierk said.
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| 2022-09-21T14:52:07Z
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DENVER (KDVR) — New video shows a group of people getting into a fight in the middle of a Denver airport train on Friday.
Denver International Airport called the fight “minor,” but the video shows fists flying as many try to get out of the way.
Passenger Audrey Giger told Nexstar’s KDVR that the train was traveling from the main airport terminal when two people, who seemed drunk, began to instigate a fight.
Giger told KDVR that she was extremely worried, because there was a baby close to the violence.
“That’s really where I lost my cool,” Giger said.
When the train pulled into Concourse A, Giger said the fight had ended and everyone got off to go their separate ways.
“I can say, for a fact, that the Denver Police, or whoever was here — they did respond really quickly. By the time I had made it up the escalators to ask for help, they already had officers heading down that way.”
Police said no one was hurt and no charges were filed.
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| 2022-09-21T14:52:15Z
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(The Hill) – Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Friday the central bank will continue to boost interest rates and leave them at levels meant to restrict the economy until inflation steadily declines.
Speaking at the Fed’s annual policy summit in Jackson Hole, Wyo., the Fed chief said the bank will keep taking “forceful and rapid” steps to curb price growth even though it could cause higher unemployment and a recession.
“While higher interest rates, slower growth, and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses,” Powell said Friday.
“These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation. But a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain,” he continued.
Powell’s speech comes as the Fed races to bring inflation down from levels last reached during the 1980s. Annual inflation as measured by personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, was 6.3 percent in July—more than twice the Fed’s target of 2 percent.
While the annual inflation rate dropped sharply in July from 6.8 percent, Powell said the brief dip “falls far short” of what the Fed needs to see “before we are confident that inflation is moving down.”
The Fed has already raised its baseline interest rate range from a span of 0 to 0.25 percent in March to 2.25 to 2.5 percent as of July, hiking borrowing costs at a historically rapid pace.
Powell did not specify whether the Fed’s monetary policy panel will raise rates by 0.75 percentage points for the third consecutive meeting at its meeting in September, or if it would opt for a smaller 0.5 percentage point hike. But he made clear the Fed will keep hiking rates and leave them at levels intended to slow the economy enough to curb price growth.
“We are moving our policy stance purposefully to a level that will be sufficiently restrictive to return inflation to 2 percent,” Powell said.
“In current circumstances, with inflation running far above 2 percent and the labor market extremely tight, estimates of longer-run neutral are not a place to stop or pause.”
The Fed aims to reduce inflation by raising its baseline interest rate range, which increases borrowing costs throughout the economy.
Higher interest rates suppress economic activity by making it more expensive for households and businesses to borrow money and increasing the cost of pre-existing debts. Rate hikes also tend to slow the housing market by making mortgage payments more expensive and forcing homeowners to sell at lower prices to compensate for higher borrowing costs.
Fed rate hikes also tend to slow consumer spending as credit card rates increase and declining stock prices give wealthier households less financial wiggle room. Higher interest rates and slower consumer spending also cut into business profit margins, which often leads to declines in hiring and business expansion.
As higher rates curb consumer spending and hiring, the Fed hopes to slow the economy enough to reduce price pressures and bring inflation down without causing a recession or job losses. But Powell warned Friday that the U.S. economy will likely feel pain as the Fed continues to ramp up rates.
“Restoring price stability will take some time and requires using our tools forcefully to bring demand and supply into better balance. Reducing inflation is likely to require a sustained period of below-trend growth,” Powell said.
Even so, Powell said the likely dip in economic growth and weaker job market is a necessary sacrifice to prevent a deeper downturn from derailing the economy for longer. He cited the recession invoked by the Fed during the early 1980s after the bank spent 15 years struggling to bring inflation down.
“History shows that the employment costs of bringing down inflation are likely to increase with delay, as high inflation becomes more entrenched in wage and price setting,” Powell said.
“Our aim is to avoid that outcome by acting with resolve now,” he continued.
The Fed has faced criticism from some economists and financial experts for boosting rates to restrictive levels even though many of the forces pushing prices higher are beyond the bank’s control.
The war in Ukraine has caused prices for food, oil, and other key commodities to rise and swing rapidly, pinching household budgets across the world. And while the U.S. has added roughly 2 million jobs since the start of 2022, the size of the workforce is still smaller than before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employers have scrambled for years to fill a record number of open jobs, boosting wages and compensation at rapid rates to woo scarce workers.
Powell, however, said its the Fed’s responsibility to bring inflation down to stable levels regardless of the obstacles in its way.
“None of this diminishes the Federal Reserve’s responsibility to carry out our assigned task of achieving price stability. There is clearly a job to do in moderating demand to better align with supply. We are committed to doing that job,” Powell said.
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| 2022-09-21T14:52:22Z
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PLANO, Texas (AP) — A woman was arrested and faces a possible hate crime charge after she was captured on video in a racist rant and assault on women of South Asian descent in a suburban Dallas parking lot, in another disturbing example of anti-Asian violence seen across the U.S.
Plano police said in a statement Thursday that Esmeralda Upton, 58, of Plano, was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault and terroristic threat charges. She was jailed with bond set at $10,000.
Rani Banerjee told Dallas TV station WFAA that she and three friends had just finished eating dinner at a restaurant when Upton approached them in the parking lot.
“Suddenly, we heard this woman yelling at us and started coming toward us. We were shocked by the racial slurs that she used and combative attitude,” Banerjee said.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the attack.
“The level of vitriol and alleged physical assault against four Indian-American women in Plano is truly appalling,” Faizan Syed, executive director of CAIR-DFW, told the TV station. “This type of hate has no place in North Texas, and we call on law enforcement to investigate this incident as a hate crime.”
The police statement said the incident was being investigated as a hate crime. Jail officials had no attorney listed for Upton.
The confrontation happened shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday. A widely circulated video showed Upton unleashing a profanity-laced rant on them, challenging their presence in the United States, threatening to shoot them and physically assaulting Banerjee, who was recording the confrontation on her phone.
Anti-Asian violence has risen sharply in recent years. Last year, six women of Asian descent were among the eight killed in a shooting at massage businesses in and near Atlanta, heightening anger and fear among Asian Americans.
Earlier this month, a man accused of shooting three Asian American women at a salon in Dallas’ Koreatown was indicted on hate crime and other charges. And a West Texas man was sentenced to 25 years in prison earlier in August for attacking an Asian family outside a Midland department store in 2020 because he thought they were Chinese and therefore responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
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| 2022-09-21T14:52:29Z
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COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) — Four years ago, Georgia Democrats had a contested primary for governor because the party’s old guard didn’t believe in Stacey Abrams. She routed their alternative and, in a close general election loss, established herself as de facto party boss in a newfound battleground state.
That previewed 2020, when Joe Biden put Georgia in Democrats’ presidential column for the first time in 28 years, and Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff captured Senate seats soon after to give Democrats control on Capitol Hill.
Now Abrams and Warnock top the Democratic ticket together for the first time as the party tries to replicate its success in a tough midterm election landscape. The outcome will again help determine the balance of power in Washington and whether Republicans retain their dominance in state government.
“We’re going to defy all the naysayers and take our state all the way back,” Abrams told delegates to the Democratic state convention Saturday. “Georgia Democrats, we’ve got unfinished business to take care of.”
Yet Democratic leaders acknowledge that 2022 is not a simple replay of the last two cycles.
Abrams, in her governor’s race rematch with Brian Kemp, is not running against a little-known Republican secretary of state but a well-positioned incumbent. Warnock, no longer a political newcomer, is trying to distinguish himself from a relatively unpopular president who once campaigned for him. That’s a point that challenger Herschel Walker relentlessly seeks to make by criticizing Warnock as a rubber-stamp for the White House.
The rest of the Democratic ticket must run under the banner of a national party that controls Washington at a time of sustained inflation and an uncertain economy. And Democrats must retool their voter turnout operation to comply with tighter voting restrictions that Kemp and the Republican-led legislature enacted after Democrats’ 2020 victories.
The response, Democrats say, isn’t to run from their record but to embrace it, while portraying Republicans as an “extremist” party that advances an out-of-step cultural agenda and remains in thrall to former President Donald Trump.
“The party of Trump is a party of extremism, a party of election deniers, a party of authoritarianism,” Charlie Bailey, the nominee for lieutenant governor, said ahead of the convention.
On stage Saturday, Bailey reminded delegates that his GOP opponent, Burt Jones, is among the fake electors who signed certificates falsely stating that Trump, not Biden, had won their states. “If you seek to overthrow the United States government, you are not fit, you are not qualified to hold any office in this country,” Bailey said. “Make no mistake, this November democracy is on the ballot.”
The approach aligns with the national pitch that Biden made Thursday at a campaign rally in Maryland, where he framed voters’ choice in November as being between Democrats and Trump’s “MAGA movement,” a dominant strain of the GOP that Biden said resembles “semi-fascism.”
Kemp and Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, have garnered plaudits from moderate voters for bucking Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election. But Abrams and others challenge the “moderate” label for either man.
Abrams criticizes Kemp as an “extremist” who signed a concealed carry law to loosen gun restrictions and a near-total abortion ban that bars the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they’re pregnant.
Bee Nguyen, a legislator challenging Raffensperger, hammers the secretary of state for his part in overhauling state voting procedures. Nguyen notes that Raffensperger, as a state lawmaker, compiled a staunchly conservative record on abortion and guns, among other matters.
“We can build a Georgia where we believe in democracy,” Nguyen told convention delegates Saturday. “You can’t gerrymander the statewide seats.”
Georgia Democrats say the Supreme Court’s decision eliminating a constitutional right to access abortion, combined with Georgia’s near ban, is a critical enough issue to overcome swing voters’ worries about the economy.
“I’ll tell you that people are much more concerned about protecting their rights and their access to health care than anything else,” said attorney general nominee Jen Jordan, a state senator who has made her support of abortion rights a centerpiece of her bid.
Kemp blasts Abrams as a liberal who wants to “defund the police.” Abrams counters with proposals that would increase salaries for many law enforcement and criminal justice personnel. “Brian Kemp wants you to be afraid of me,” she says in one of her advertisements.
Jordan talks openly of crime increases but dismisses Republicans’ effort to cast it as “an Atlanta problem” — GOP framing aimed at white voters beyond the demographically diverse and heavily Democratic city.
“It’s not an urban problem or a suburban problem. It’s a Georgia problem, and the people who have been in charge have a lot to answer for,” Jordan said.
In the Senate campaign, Warnock has largely steered clear of Biden, even as he embraces Democrats’ legislative victories. Warnock cites a pandemic relief bill and its child tax credit as critical aid to Georgia families. He cites benefits from a long-sought infrastructure package.
The senator acknowledges that gas prices and general inflation have spiked but notes that he called for a suspension of the federal gas tax and then won passage of a provision in the Democrats’ big climate and health care bill that caps the price of insulin for Medicare patients. Republicans blocked his effort to extend the cap to all consumers.
“Today we stand on this mountaintop together,” Warnock told Democratic delegates at their convention. “Tomorrow we go down in the valley until we cap the cost of insulin for everybody, until we lower the costs for all Georgians.”
In 2018, Kemp topped Abrams by 55,000 votes out of about 4 million cast. Biden outpaced Trump by less than 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast. In concurrent Senate runoffs two months later, about 4.5 million Georgians voted; Warnock and Ossoff won by 2 percentage points and 1.2 percentage points, respectively.
Democrats hope the November electorate is at least as large as that on Jan. 5, 2021. Georgia requires a majority vote to win statewide office, and Libertarian candidates can draw enough to force a runoff.
With that in mind, Abrams, a Black woman from Atlanta, has spent a noticeable amount of time in rural, mostly white Georgia, where she lost ground in 2018 compared with Democrats’ performances in previous midterms. Jordan, who is white, notes that she grew up in small-town south Georgia but now represents a suburban Atlanta state Senate district that had been a Republican lock. Abrams sometimes campaigns alongside Bailey, a white man with a pronounced Southern accent and small-town Georgia roots. Nguyen tells of her parents fleeing Vietnam as political refugees.
“Standing with me is the most extraordinary ticket Georgia has ever produced,” Abrams said before she addressed the convention. “It looks like Georgia; it sounds like Georgia; it knows Georgia.”
___
Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics.
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| 2022-09-21T14:52:37Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — As Republican-led states continue to ban nearly all abortions, President Joe Biden said Friday that such restrictions were “beyond the pale.”
Biden and Democrats are trying to harness outrage over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide, in this year’s midterm elections.
“You’re going to hear women roar on this issue, and it’s going to be consequential,” he said.
Biden made the comments at a White House meeting of state and local officials to talk about ways to expand access to abortion and to mark Women’s Equality Day.
Biden reiterated his desire for Congress to codify Roe v. Wade into law, but “we’re short a handful of votes,” he said.
Democrats would need 10 Republican votes to overcome a filibuster and get a bill through the 50-50 Senate, but only two GOP senators have publicly backed abortion rights. And even though they narrowly control the Senate, Democrats don’t have enough votes to sidestep the filibuster.
“The only way it’s going to happen if the American people make it happen in November,” Biden said.
In the meantime, Biden has been looking for ways to protect abortion access. But his options are limited.
Idaho, Tennessee and Texas are the latest Republican-led states to tighten their restrictions. They’ve been implementing so-called “trigger laws” that were put on the books to severely limit abortions if Roe was overturned, which happened in June.
Lina Hidalgo, the county judge from Harris County, Texas, called her state’s law a “slap in the face.”
“I think you speak for the majority of the American people,” Biden responded.
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| 2022-09-21T14:52:44Z
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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — To Democrats championing the White House’s student loan forgiveness plan, it was the long-awaited delivery of one of President Joe Biden’s campaign promises.
To Republicans — and even some in the president’s own party — it was an ill-advised move that was unfair to those who had diligently paid back their loans or decided not to go to college.
In the student debt relief plan, both parties see an opportunity to boost their own political message ahead of the critical November midterm elections. While Democrats contended that the loan forgiveness would provide a lifeline for struggling working-class families, Republicans charged that it’s a giveaway to the “elites.”
For the midterms, the elitist rhetoric tactic “plays right in line with the GOP’s current brand of grievance and victimization politics,” conservative strategist Chip Felkel said, “giving them another rallying point to fire up their base and maybe attract some like-minded independents who see this action as ‘unfair.’”
Both the White House and some of Biden’s top allies argued that it was instead Republicans who were focused on the elite and that the potential beneficiaries of the student loan debt relief include more than just the wealthy.
“Who paid the piper?” asked U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, one of Biden’s top congressional allies, pointing to Republican-passed tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations in 2017 under the Trump administration as the real iniquity. “I think a lot of low-income people that we are trying to help today, those families paid for that tax cut while rich people and big corporations got off tax-free. … This is an attempt on the part of this administration to once again help working families.”
Biden’s plan will erase $10,000 in federal student loan debt for those with incomes below $125,000 a year, or households that earn less than $250,000. It will also cancel an additional $10,000 for those who received federal Pell Grants to attend college, and it will pause federal student loan repayments.
The rhetoric from both parties over the student debt loan relief also likely reflects the education levels of their core constituencies, though plenty of people who attended college classes and took out student loans did not end up graduating from college.
Forty-four percent of Biden voters in the 2020 presidential election had college degrees, compared with 34% of Trump voters, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of the electorate. Fifty-six percent of Biden voters did not have a college degree, compared with 66% of Trump voters.
Initially hesitant to endorse broad cancellation of student loan debt, Biden gradually embraced deeper tactics to alleviate the burden during the 2020 campaign, even expressing support for some proposals from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who made broad-based student loan debt cancellation a hallmark of her own bid.
This week, Warren applauded Biden’s plan, saying she would “keep pushing for more because I think it’s the right thing to do” but noting the significance of “what it means for the president of the United States to touch so many hard-working middle-class families so directly.” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who also campaigned in 2020 to “cancel all student debt,” called the plan “an important step forward” but said “we’ve got to do more.”
Speaking at a White House briefing Friday, deputy director of the National Economic Council Bharat Ramamurti said student loan forgiveness would help “teachers, nurses, firefighters, police, members of the military and more.”
But not all Democrats were enthusiastic about the student debt loan relief, particularly those candidates facing tough races in November.
Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, facing off in a U.S. Senate battle in Ohio against Republican JD Vance, criticized Biden’s order as unnecessary for some people and unfair to others. Saying he’s paying off his family’s own loans, Ryan said that “waiving debt for those already on a trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message to the millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to make ends meet.”
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, in a tough reelection of his own, said the administration should have “proposed a way to pay for this plan,” adding that ”one-time debt cancellation does not solve the underlying problem.”
Republicans, meanwhile, focused on the higher-end income bracket on Biden’s student loan plan, excoriating it as a boon for the wealthy.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the plan “student loan socialism” that is “astonishingly unfair.” He said inflation is “crushing working families” and decried Biden’s proposed fix “to give away even more government money to elites with higher salaries.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who is seeking reelection, said it was “grossly unfair to families who didn’t send their kids to college or managed to pay off their student debt.”
Mike Berg, spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said, “Democrats know robbing middle-class taxpayers to give a bailout to Harvard Law graduates is an indefensible policy.”
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis — campaigning for his reelection this year, in addition to laying the groundwork for a possible 2024 presidential challenge to Biden — posted on his social media accounts that “It’s unfair to force a truck driver to pay a loan for someone that got a PhD in gender studies.”
The contention that recipients of the relief plan were gender studies majors was a popular refrain among Republicans, though only a small number of students nationwide study in that field.
Largely driven by comments from conservative pundits and politicians including DeSantis and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, Facebook and Instagram posts mentioning the term “gender studies” received more than half a million mentions, comments and likes in the 48 hours after Biden’s announcement, according to data from social media insights tool CrowdTangle.
The posts highlight how conservatives plan to campaign off potential frustration from millions of blue-collar workers who skipped college and might not see a benefit from Biden’s student loan debt relief order. Some of the critical Republicans, including DeSantis, hold multiple Ivy League degrees.
Aneesa McMillan, deputy executive director of Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC, said student loan forgiveness would help drive support for Democrats in the midterms.
“This is one of the reasons we saw historic turnout for Joe Biden,” McMillan said. “And he has consistently delivered on those promises that he made to voters.”
Felkel, though, doubted the order’s ultimate weight for Biden’s party, given Democrats’ challenges to satisfy internal factions.
“While progressives on the left have been pushing this for a while, I don’t think this will give them a boost in the November elections like they might hope,” he said. “Those pushing were voting for Democrats already. Attempts to satisfy the progressives will hurt some Democrats in tough races.”
___
Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Chris Megerian and Amanda Seitz in Washington and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.
___
Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.
___
Find more on AP’s coverage of student loans at https://apnews.com/hub/student-loans and the midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections
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| 2022-09-21T14:52:59Z
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PHOENIX (AP) — A federal judge refused Friday to require that Arizona officials count ballots by hand in November, dismissing a lawsuit filed by the Republican nominees for governor and secretary of state based on false claims of problems with vote-counting machines.
Kari Lake, who is running for governor, and Mark Finchem, a secretary of state candidate, won their GOP primaries after aggressively promoting the narrative that the 2020 election was marred by fraud or widespread irregularities.
Their lawsuit repeated unfounded allegations about the security of machines that count votes. They relied in part on testimony from Donald Trump supporters who led a discredited review of the election in Maricopa County, including Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, who oversaw the effort described by supporters as a “forensic audit.”
U.S. District Judge John Tuchi ruled that Lake and Finchem lack standing to sue because they failed to show any realistic likelihood of harm and that their lawsuit must be brought in state, not federal, court. He also ruled that it is too close to the election to upend the process.
“The 2022 Midterm Elections are set to take place on November 8,” Tuchi wrote. “In the meantime, Plaintiffs request a complete overhaul of Arizona’s election procedures.”
Finchem said he’s evaluating his next step.
“The so-called ‘lack of standing’ seems to be a catchall for dismissing things that the court would rather not have to rule on,” Finchem wrote in a text message. “If we don’t have standing, then who does?”
A spokesman for Lake, Ross Trumble, said he hadn’t seen the ruling and wasn’t prepared to comment.
The lawsuit was filed against Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, and the elected supervisors of Maricopa and Pima counties, who oversee elections in the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas.
Lawyers for Lake and Finchem said hand counts are the most efficient method for totaling election results. They said the lawsuit wasn’t about undoing the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona, but rather about the upcoming election.
Election administrators testified that hand counting dozens of races on millions of ballots would require an extraordinary amount of time, space and manpower, and would be less accurate. They said extensive reviews have confirmed that vote-counting machines in Maricopa County are not connected to the internet and haven’t been hacked.
Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the 2020 election was tainted. Trump’s allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by courts, including by judges he appointed. A hand recount led by Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County found no proof of a stolen election and concluded Joe Biden’s margin of victory was larger than the official count.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which is controlled 4-1 by Republicans, asked the court to sanction attorneys for Lake and Finchem and force them to pay the county’s legal fees. The attorneys should have known their complaint was based on frivolous information, wrote Emily Craiger, a lawyer for the county.
Lake, Finchem and their lawyers used the court “to further a disinformation campaign and false narrative concerning the integrity of the election process,” she wrote.
The lawyers for Lake and Finchem responded that their claims are “legally sound and supported by strong evidence.” Their brief was signed by attorneys Andrew Parker of Minneapolis, Kurt Olsen of Washington and Alan Dershowitz, a well-known former Harvard Law School professor.
The judge did not rule on the request for sanctions.
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| 2022-09-21T14:53:07Z
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SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — The NAACP is supporting efforts to bar a New Mexico-based county commissioner from public office, alleging that the Cowboys for Trump cofounder has sought to disenfranchise voters — including people of color — and stoke insurrection.
The nation’s oldest civil rights organization urged a state district court judge to remove and disqualify Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin from holding future public office, noting Griffin’s presence at the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and his recent refusal to certify local results of New Mexico’s June 7 primary election.
Written final arguments and judgement are pending after a two-day bench trial against Griffin, who has represented himself without legal counsel.
In a court filing Tuesday, the NAACP noted that Griffin attempted to draw comparisons between the Jan. 6 insurrection and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Lawful protests and demonstrations in support of civil rights and the Black Lives Matter movement are fundamentally different from the insurrectionist conduct that occurred on Jan. 6,” the NAACP said in its briefing.
The lawsuit’s three plaintiffs argue that Griffin should be disqualified from holding public office on the basis of a clause in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that holds that anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution be barred from office for engaging in insurrection or rebellion or giving aid or comfort to the nation’s enemies.
Griffin has invoked free speech guarantees in his defense and argues that removing him from office would cut against the will of the people and set a “dangerous precedent.”
Elected in 2018, Griffin withstood a recall vote last year but isn’t running for reelection or other office in November.
“If the plaintiffs prevail and a single judge subverts the will of the great people of Otero County, it will only be further proof of the tyranny we currently live under,” Griffin said Friday in an email. “There was already a recall effort waged against me after Jan. 6. In that recall effort the people of Otero County spoke and the recall failed.”
Griffin was convicted in federal court of a misdemeanor for entering Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, without going inside. He was sentenced to 14 days and given credit for time served.
The NAACP has also highlighted attempts by Griffin to invoke the plight of civil rights activists of the 1960s in his own defense. The NAACP briefing also denounces Griffin’s prior criticism of those who support performances at football games of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, also known as the Black National Anthem.
In a July 2020 selfie video, Griffin suggested supporters of the Black National Anthem “go back to Africa and form your little football teams over in Africa and you can play on an old beat-out dirt lot.”
Griffin has called his comments a poor choice words to express what he sees as a double standard that holds white people responsible for racist behavior.
“If there was a group of white people wanting to play a ‘white national anthem’ I would have had the same response to them,” Griffin said Friday in response to the NAACP briefing. “And as a white person I’d be disgusted by that idea.”
Griffin voted in June against certification of local primary election results based on a “gut feeling” without specific objections.
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| 2022-09-21T14:53:22Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — A Pennsylvania man was sentenced Friday to 46 months in federal prison for attacking a police officer with a Donald Trump flag during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
The newspaper reported that Howard Richardson, 72, of King of Prussia, told the court in Washington “there’s no excuse” for his behavior and pleaded for mercy.
But U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly responded, “Your presence and actions in joining other insurrectionists was an inexcusable attack on our democracy.”
Richardson’s sentence is one of the longest yet among those who have been prosecuted for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. In addition to the nearly four-year prison sentence, Richardson was ordered to serve three years under court supervision after his release and to pay $2,000 in restitution.
Richardson never entered the Capitol, the Inquirer reported, but prosecutors said his attack on a Washington, D.C., police officer merited a lengthy prison term.
According to the paper, police body camera footage showed Richardson bludgeoning an officer outside the Capitol with a metal flagpole. NBC News reported that Richardson also joined a mob using a giant Trump billboard as a battering ram.
Approximately 850 people have been charged with federal crimes for their conduct on Jan. 6. Over 350 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors, and over 230 have been sentenced. Dozens of Capitol riot defendants who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor offenses have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from seven days to five months.
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| 2022-09-21T14:53:30Z
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Driven by moral outrage over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, U.S. governors and other top state officials made it clear: They wanted to cut their financial ties with Russia.
A few states quickly followed through. Idaho sold $300,000 of bonds in a Russian oil company in early March. A day before the invasion, the Kentucky Teachers Retirement System sold its shares in the Russian bank Sberbank.
But those examples are outliers. Six months into a war that has killed thousands of Ukrainians and displaced over 12 million more, most of the pledges to drop Russian investments — some made with great fanfare during news conferences — have gone unfulfilled, according to an Associated Press review, state retirement administrators and firms that invest state funds.
Swift global reaction has cut off much of Russia’s economy from the rest of the world. That has made it nearly impossible for divestment by state pension funds, university endowments and other public-sector holdings — as well as private investments such as those in 401(k) accounts.
“These pension funds want to get out, but it’s just not realistic to sell everything in the current environment,” said Keith Brainard, research director at the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.
Benjamin Smith, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island treasury, said the factors that make it hard to divest also show that a worldwide effort to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin is working.
“This is good news because it means that pressure from investors across the world, including Rhode Island, is succeeding in exacting a toll on the Russian economy, making it more difficult for Putin to fund his military operation, state-owned companies, and corrupt network of oligarchs,” he said in an email, noting that Rhode Island’s pension plan exposure in Russia never exceeded 0.3% of its assets.
Any pre-war investments in Russia are now worthless, or nearly so. That’s raising questions from some officials and fund managers about whether divesting is even necessary.
In Hawaii, one of a handful of states where top administration officials did not pledge to divest, Gov. David Ige said at a May 5 news conference that the state’s employee pension system had “very little to almost nothing” invested in Russia.
“The few remaining investments are quite small, and so I didn’t feel compelled to just make a statement for political reasons that we would be divesting,” he said.
Before Russia’s invasion in late February, many government-controlled investments had only small holdings — a fraction of 1% in every reported case — in Russian investments. But even that could amount to millions of dollars.
The largest U.S. public-sector retirement fund, California’s CalPERS, said just 17 cents of every $100 of its portfolio was in Russian investments as the war broke out. Even so, that translated into $765 million worth of stocks, real estate and private equity.
By the end of June, the value had shrunk to $194 million. The entire loss was because the holdings dropped in value; none had been sold.
There is no way to know how much state government entities in the U.S. have invested in Russia or companies based there, but collectively they were worth billions of dollars before the war. Much of the money was invested in Russian government bonds, oil and coal companies as part of emerging-markets index funds.
Quick to condemn the invasion, state officials said they could put pressure on Putin by dumping their Russian investments.
“Our moral imperative before these atrocities demand that you act to address Russia’s aggressions and immediately restrict Russian access to California’s capital and investments,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote in a letter Feb. 28 to the boards overseeing the massive pension funds that serve teachers, state and local government workers and university employees.
Across the country, governors and other top officials made similar statements.
Just after the invasion began, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order calling for divestment “to the extent possible,” while Arizona’s Board of Regents voted to exit any Russian investments.
The treasurers for 36 states plus the District of Columbia and U.S. Virgin Islands signed a joint letter in March advocating divestment of publicly controlled funds from Russia. They noted a financial reason for doing so: “The current crisis also constitutes a substantial risk for states’ investments and our economic security.”
A major chunk of the government holdings in Russia are in the form of index funds that investors use to mimic overall stock market performance. Russian stocks were commonly part of funds specializing in emerging markets. MCSI and other firms that decide which stocks should be in the funds quickly dropped Russian securities.
But the companies that sell investment products based on those indexes were left in the lurch, still leaving pieces of Russian stocks in their investors’ portfolios.
As part of the sanctions, stock markets in the U.S. and elsewhere stopped the trading of Russian stocks. And the Moscow Stock Exchange was closed for nearly a month, reopening with tight controls that keep U.S. investors from selling.
The assets sank in value amid the invasion, though the precise value isn’t always clear.
Maryland said that as of the beginning of February, $197 million of its state retirement and pension system funds were invested in Russian assets. A month later, the state estimated the value had plunged and amounted to just $32 million. The state has been unable to unload its investments.
For the handful of states in which top officials have not endorsed divestment, eroding values like that are a main reason.
Shortly after the invasion, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said the amount of state investments in Russia was “miniscule” and noted that the value was about to “shrink to almost nothing as the Russian economy is being virtually shut off from the world.”
In Florida, Lamar Taylor, the interim executive director of the agency that oversees investments of pension funds, said during a cabinet meeting that some investment managers might seek to unload Russian assets as soon as they’re able, while others could hold on in case they’re worth more later.
At the meeting, Gov. Ron DeSantis said the State Board of Administration has a legal responsibility to try to make money for the retirement system.
“That would violate your fiduciary duty, if you liquidated at massive losses for political reasons rather than for the best interests of the beneficiaries,” he said.
But DeSantis said there was a way to make it easier: Lawmakers passing a bill banning investment in Russia.
“If the Legislature could speak clearly, that would be something we’d welcome here, just to make sure we’re not furthering investments in parts of the world that are not reflective of our interests or values,” he said.
Hank Kim, executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, said he has told member pension funds that taking steps to divest is important even if it can’t be completed right away.
“The public has a right to know that it was debated in a serious manner,” he said.
___ Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Associated Press writers Kimberly Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama; Amy B. Hanson in Helena, Montana; Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tennessee; and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T14:53:37Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Secret Service said Friday that it has recovered $286 million in fraudulently obtained pandemic loans and is returning the money to the Small Business Administration.
The Secret Service said an investigation initiated by its Orlando office found that alleged conspirators submitted Economic Injury Disaster Loan applications by using fake or stolen employment and personal information and used an online bank, Green Dot, to conceal and move their criminal proceeds.
The agency worked with Green Dot to identify roughly 15,000 accounts and seize $286 million connected to the accounts.
“This forfeiture effort and those to come are a direct and necessary response to the unprecedented size and scope of pandemic relief fraud,” said Kevin Chambers, director for COVID-19 fraud enforcement at the Justice Department.
Billions have been fraudulently claimed through various pandemic relief programs — including Paycheck Protection Program loans, unemployment insurance and others that were rolled out in the midst of the worldwide pandemic that shutdown global economies for months.
In March, the Government Accountability Office reported that while agencies were able to distribute COVID-19 relief funds quickly, “the tradeoff was that they did not have systems in place to prevent and identify payment errors and fraud” due in part to “financial management weaknesses.”
As a result, the GAO has recommended several measures for agencies to prevent pandemic program fraud in the future, including better reporting on their fraud risk management efforts.
Since 2020, the Secret Service initiated more than 3,850 pandemic related fraud investigations, seized over $1.4 billion in fraudulently obtained funds and helped to return $2.3 billion to state unemployment insurance programs.
The latest seizure included a collaboration of efforts between Secret Service, the SBA’s Inspector General, DOJ and other offices.
Hannibal “Mike” Ware, the Small Business Administration’s inspector general, said the joint investigations will continue “to ensure that taxpayer dollars obtained through fraudulent means will be returned to taxpayers and fraudsters involved face justice.”
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| 2022-09-21T14:53:45Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Friday unsealed the FBI affidavit justifying the unprecedented search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. While the document released is highly redacted, with many of its pages crossed out by black blocks, it includes new details about the sheer volume of sensitive and highly classified information that was stored at the former president’s Florida beachfront home, underscoring the government’s concerns about its safety.
Here are top takeaways of what the document revealed:
TRUMP HAD ‘A LOT’ OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL STORED AT HIS CLUB
While the affidavit doesn’t provide new details about the 11 sets of classified records that were recovered during the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of Trump’s winter home, it does help to explain why the Justice Department believed that retrieving the outstanding documents was necessary.
Federal investigators knew months before the search that Trump had been storing top secret government records at Mar-a-Lago, a private club accessible not only to Trump, his staff and his family, but paying members and their guests, along with a revolving door of attendees at various functions, including weddings, political fundraisers and charity galas.
The affidavit notes that Mar-a-Lago storage areas, Trump’s office, his residential suite and other areas at the club where documents were suspected to still be kept were not authorized locations for the storage of classified information. Indeed, it notes that no space at Mar-a-Lago had been authorized for the storage of classified information at least since the end of Trump’s term in office.
Yet the affidavit reveals that, of the batch of 15 boxes that the National Archives and Records Administration retrieved from Trump’s home in January, 14 contained documents with classification markings. Inside, they found 184 documents bearing classification markings, including 67 marked confidential, 92 secret and 25 top secret.
The Archives referred the matter to the Justice Department on Feb. 9 after a preliminary review of the boxes found what they described as “a lot of classified records.”
THE RECORDS INCLUDED TOP INTELLIGENCE SECRETS
Agents who inspected the boxes found special markings suggesting they included information from highly sensitive human sources or the collection of electronic “signals” authorized by a court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The affidavit lists several markings, including ORCON, or “Originator Controlled.” That means officials at the intelligence agency responsible for the report did not want it distributed to other agencies without their permission.
There may also be other types of records with classified names or codewords still redacted.
“When things are at that level of classification, it’s because there’s a real danger to the people who are collecting the information or the capability,” said Douglas London, a former senior CIA officer who wrote a book about the agency, “The Recruiter.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that it would review documents recovered during the search for potential damage to national security.
Democratic Reps. Carolyn Maloney of New York, who leads the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Adam Schiff of California, head of the House Intelligence Committee said in a joint statement that it is “critical” that the intelligence agencies “move swiftly to assess and, if necessary, to mitigate the damage done — a process that should proceed in parallel with DOJ’s criminal investigation.”
CLASSIFIED RECORDS WERE MIXED WITH OTHER PAPERS
Some of those classified records were mixed with other documents, the affidavit says, citing a letter from the Archives.
According to Archives’ White House liaison division director, the boxes contained “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records, and ‘a lot of classified records.’” Several contained what appeared to be Trump’s handwritten notes.
Of most significant concern: “highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly (sic) identified.”
A president might be given raw intelligence reporting to supplement his briefings or to cover a breaking or critically important matter, said David Priess, a former CIA officer and White House briefer who wrote “The President’s Book of Secrets,” a history of the President’s Daily Brief.
But it would be “unusual, if not unprecedented, for a president to keep it and to intermingle it with other papers,” he said.
“Even though I was prepared for this because I knew the judge would not approve a search based on something minor, the breadth and depth of the careless handling of classified information is truly shocking,” Priess said.
TRUMP HAD REPEATED OPPORTUNITIES TO RETURN THE DOCUMENTS
The affidavit makes clear yet again that Trump had numerous opportunities to return the documents to the government, but simply chose not to.
A lengthy process to retrieve the documents had been underway essentially since Trump left the White House. The document states that on or about May 6, 2021, the Archives made a request for the missing records “and continued to make requests until approximately late December 2021,” when it was informed 12 boxes were found and ready for retrieval from the club.
The affidavit makes clear that the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation concerns not just the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces and the potentially unlawful concealment or removal of government records, but says investigators had “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction” would be found in their search.
Trump’s lawyer, in a letter that was included in the release, had argued to DOJ that presidents have “absolute” authority to declassify documents, claiming that his “constitutionally-based authority regarding the classification and declassification of documents is unfettered.” Trump has not provided evidence the documents at Mar-a-Lago were declassified before he left Washington.
TRUMP SAYS HE DID ‘NOTHING WRONG’
Trump has long insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that he fully cooperated with government officials and had every right to have the documents on site. On his social media site, he responded to the unsealing by continuing to vilify law enforcement.
He called it a “total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ” and said “WE GAVE THEM MUCH.” In another post, he offered just two words: “WITCH HUNT!!!”
In an interview on Lou Dobbs’ “The Great America Show” on Thursday, he said he’d done nothing wrong.
“This is a political attack on our country and it’s a disgrace,” he added. “It’s a disgrace.”
___
Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writers Mike Balsamo, Lisa Mascaro, Eric Tucker and Nomaan Merchant contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-21T14:53:52Z
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ATLANTA (AP) — The prosecutor investigating whether former President Donald Trump and others illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 election in Georgia is seeking information about the alleged involvement of a Trump ally in the breach of voting equipment at a county roughly 200 miles south of her Atlanta office.
The widening of the probe highlights the latest instance in which unauthorized people appear to have gained access to voting equipment since the 2020 election, primarily in battleground states lost by Trump. Election experts have raised concerns that sensitive information shared online about the equipment may have exposed vulnerabilities that could be exploited by people intent on disrupting future elections.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is seeking to have attorney Sidney Powell, who tried persistently to overturn Trump’s loss, testify before a special grand jury seated for the investigation into possible illegal election interference. In her court petition filed Thursday, Willis said Powell is “known to be affiliated” with Trump and the Trump campaign and has unique knowledge about her communications with them and others “involved in the multi-state, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere.”
The scope of Willis’ criminal investigation has expanded considerably since it began, prompted by a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump suggested Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger could “find” the votes needed to overturn Trump’s narrow election loss in the state. Among other things, Willis wrote that she wants to ask Powell about rural Coffee County, where Trump beat President Joe Biden by nearly 40 percentage points.
Emails and other records first reported this month by The Washington Post and also obtained by The Associated Press show that Powell was involved in arranging for a team from data solutions company SullivanStrickler to travel to the county’s elections office.
The records were produced in response to subpoenas issued by plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit that alleges Georgia’s voting machines, which are manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, are vulnerable to attack. The plaintiffs want the machines replaced by a system that uses hand-marked paper ballots.
The lawsuit filed by the Coalition for Good Governance and individual voters long predates and is unrelated to false allegations of widespread election fraud pushed by Trump and his allies.
Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against high-profile Trump supporters, including Powell, who made false claims about Dominion voting machines being used to steal the 2020 election.
In an email sent to Powell on Jan. 7, 2021, SullivanStrickler COO Paul Maggio said he and his team were “on our way to Coffee County Georgia to collect what we can from the Election/Voting machines and systems.” He included an invoice for an “initial retainer” of $26,000 to pay for a team of four people for one day. The subject of the invoice is “Voting Machines Analysis.”
“Everything went smoothly yesterday with the Coffee County collection. Everyone involved was extremely helpful,” Maggio wrote in an email the next day. “We are consolidating all of the data collected and will be uploading it to our secure site for access by your team.”
A document listing the contents of Maggio’s hard drive shows that it includes forensic images of an election management system server, a precinct tabulator, compact flash cards and thumb drives used to program tabulators and touchscreen voting machines, a computer used to check in voters and a laptop computer supplied by Dominion. It also includes scanned images of paper ballots from the January 2021 U.S. Senate runoff election.
The company defended its actions in a statement sent by its attorney, Amanda Clark Palmer.
“SullivanStrickler was retained by and took direction from licensed, practicing attorneys to preserve and forensically copy the Dominion Voting Machines used in the 2020 election,” the statement said. “The firm had no reason to believe that, as officers of the court, these attorneys would ask or direct SullivanStrickler to do anything either improper or illegal.”
The attorneys told the firm to contact county election officials to access certain data and then to distribute it to certain other people, the statement said. The company maintains that “at the time they engaged in that work, they were operating under the good faith belief that their client was authorized to access the voting machines and servers.”
“With the benefit of hindsight, and knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind,” the statement said, adding that the company intends to fully cooperate with any investigation.
Willis noted that there also is “evidence in the public record” that Powell was involved in similar efforts in Michigan and Nevada around the same time. A lawyer representing Powell didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Ryan Germany, general counsel for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said in a declaration filed in court on Aug. 2 that the office opened an investigation in mid-March and brought in an expert to perform a forensic inspection of the Coffee County election server. The next steps, he said, are to complete the forensic investigation and interview witnesses.
The secretary of state’s office requested help earlier this month from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which on Aug. 15 opened “a computer trespass investigation of a Coffee County elections server,” spokesperson Nelly Miles said in an email.
The Coffee County case appears similar to breaches of voting equipment elsewhere. In addition to Georgia, these include local election offices in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Colorado.
During an event last summer held by Trump ally Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who has sought to prove voting machines are being manipulated, copies of voting systems from Mesa County, Colorado, and Antrim County, Michigan, were distributed and made available online.
A month earlier, Pennsylvania election officials decertified voting equipment used in one county — also named Fulton — after officials there allowed an outside firm access to “certain key components of its certified system, including the county’s election database, results files, and Windows systems logs.” The firm also was allowed to make copies of voting system hard drives.
In Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters and her deputy were indicted in connection with a May 2021 security breach at the election office. Prosecutors allege the pair were part of a “deceptive scheme” to provide access to their voting system technology to unauthorized individuals.
This week, the deputy clerk, Belinda Knisley, pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Peters, who has denied wrongdoing and claimed she had an obligation to investigate.
Also in Colorado, state election officials have been investigating a potential breach in Elbert County, where they say the clerk made two copies of the county’s voting system and provided them to two attorneys not authorized to have them.
In Antrim County, Michigan, a judge had allowed a forensic exam of voting equipment after a brief mix-up of 2020 election results led to a lawsuit alleging fraud. The lawsuit was dismissed, but somehow a copy of the voting system ended up being distributed publicly at the Lindell event, according to attendees.
Michigan authorities also are investigating security breaches at four local election offices that are alleged to have occurred between March and late June 2021.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Fourteen of the 15 boxes recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate early this year contained classified documents, many of them top secret, mixed in with miscellaneous newspapers, magazines and personal correspondence, according to an FBI affidavit released Friday.
No space at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was authorized for the storage of classified material, according to the court papers, which laid out the FBI’s rationale for searching the property this month, including “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found.”
The 32-page affidavit — heavily redacted to protect the safety of witnesses and law enforcement officials and “the integrity of the ongoing investigation” — offers the most detailed description to date of the government records being stored at Mar-a-Lago long after Trump left the White House. It also reveals the gravity of the government’s concerns that the documents were there illegally.
The document makes clear how the haphazard retention of top secret government records, and the apparent failure to safeguard them despite months of entreaties from U.S. officials, has exposed Trump to fresh legal peril just as he lays the groundwork for another potential presidential run in 2024.
“The government is conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records,” an FBI agent wrote on the first page of the affidavit.
Documents previously made public show that federal agents are investigating potential violations of multiple federal laws, including one that governs gathering, transmitting or losing defense information under the Espionage Act. The other statutes address the concealment, mutilation or removal of records and the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations.
Trump has long insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that he fully cooperated with government officials. And he has rallied Republicans behind him by painting the search as a politically motivated witch hunt intended to damage his reelection prospects. He repeated that refrain on his social media site Friday, saying he and his representatives had had a close working relationship with the FBI and “GAVE THEM MUCH.”
His attorneys late Friday repeated their request for the appointment of an independent special master to review the documents taken from the home, saying the redacted affidavit doesn’t give Trump sufficient information about why the search took place or what materials were removed.
The affidavit does not provide new details about 11 sets of classified records recovered during the Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago but instead concerns a separate batch of 15 boxes that the National Archives and Records Administration retrieved from the home in January. The Archives sent the matter to the Justice Department, indicating in its referral that a review showed “a lot” of classified materials, the affidavit says.
The affidavit made the case to a judge that a search of Mar-a-Lago was necessary due to the highly sensitive material found in those 15 boxes. Of 184 documents with classification markings, 25 were at the top secret level, the affidavit says. Some had special markings suggesting they included information from highly sensitive human sources or the collection of electronic “signals” authorized by a special intelligence court.
And some of those classified records were mixed with other documents, including newspapers, magazines and miscellaneous print-outs, the affidavit says, citing a letter from the Archives.
Douglas London, a former senior CIA officer and author of “The Recruiter,” said this showed Trump’s lack of respect for controls. “One of the rules of classified is you don’t mix classified and unclassified so there’s no mistakes or accidents,” he said.
The affidavit shows how agents were authorized to search a large swath of Mar-a-Lago, including Trump’s official post-presidential “45 Office,” storage rooms and all other areas in which boxes or documents could be stored. They did not propose searching areas of the property used or rented by Mar-a-Lago members, such as private guest suites.
The FBI submitted the affidavit, or sworn statement, to a judge so it could obtain the warrant to search Trump’s property. Affidavits typically contain vital information about an investigation, with agents spelling out the justification for why they want to search a particular location and why they believe they’re likely to find evidence of a potential crime there.
The documents routinely remain sealed during pending investigations. But in an acknowledgment of the extraordinary public interest in the investigation, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Thursday ordered the department by Friday to make public a redacted version of the affidavit.
In a separate document unsealed Friday, Justice Department officials said it was necessary to redact some information to “protect the safety and privacy of a significant number of civilian witnesses, in addition to law enforcement personnel, as well as to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.”
The second half of the affidavit is almost entirely redacted, making it impossible to discern the scope of the investigation or where it might be headed. It does not reveal which individuals might be under investigation and it does not resolve core questions, such as why top secret documents were taken to Mar-a-Lago after the president’s term ended even though classified information requires special storage.
Trump’s Republican allies in Congress were largely silent Friday as the affidavit emerged, another sign of the GOP’s reluctance to publicly part ways with the former president, whose grip on the party remains strong during the midterm election season. Both parties have demanded more information about the search, with lawmakers seeking briefings from the Justice Department and FBI once Congress returns from summer recess.
Though Trump’s spokesman derided the investigation as “all politics,” the affidavit makes clear the FBI search was hardly the first time federal law enforcement had expressed concerns about the records. The Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, for instance, visited Mar-a-Lago last spring to assess how the documents were being stored.
The affidavit includes excerpts from a June 8 letter in which a Justice Department official reminded a Trump lawyer that Mar-a-Lago did not include a secure location authorized to hold classified records. The official requested that the room at the estate where the documents had been stored be secured, and that the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago “be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice.”
The back-and-forth culminated in the Aug. 8 search in which agents retrieved 11 sets of classified records.
The document unsealed Friday also offer insight into arguments the Trump legal team is expected to make. It includes a letter from Trump lawyer M. Evan Corcoran in which he asserts that a president has “absolute authority” to declassify documents and that “presidential actions involving classified documents are not subject to criminal sanction.”
Mark Zaid, a longtime national security lawyer who has criticized Trump for his handling of classified information, said the letter was “blatantly wrong” to assert Trump could declassify “anything and everything.”
“There are some legal, technical defenses as to certain provisions of the espionage act whether it would apply to the president,” Zaid said. “But some of those provisions make no distinction that would raise a defense.”
In addition, the affidavit includes a footnote from the FBI agent who wrote it observing that one of the laws that may have been violated doesn’t even use the term “classified information” but instead criminalizes the unlawful retention of national defense information.
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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Nomaan Merchant, Michael Balsamo and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.
Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
___
Find more on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump
___
An earlier version of this story said the affidavit was 38 pages. The document released Friday included a 32-page affidavit and six pages of supplemental material.
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Russia’s attack on a Ukrainian train station that killed more than 20 people this week is the latest in a series of strikes on the country’s railway system that some international legal scholars say may be war crimes.
While Russia claimed that it had targeted the train because it was carrying Ukrainian troops and equipment on Wednesday, an Associated Press reporter on the ground said there was no visible indication that Ukrainian troops were among the dead, who included children. If civilians were the target, experts said Thursday, the attack could be considered a war crime.
“A train station is generally a civilian object and should not be a target of attack,” said Jennifer Trahan, a clinical professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.
Wednesday’s attack in Chaplyne, a small village in southeastern Ukraine, was one of the deadliest in months on the country’s extensive railway system. In the more than six months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the AP and the PBS series “Frontline” have independently verified more than 40 attacks on civilian infrastructure that could be considered war crimes. Three of those hit the country’s railway infrastructure and seven have involved local bus stops, killing more than 100 civilians. In these attacks, there has been little evidence to back up Moscow’s claims that Ukrainian troops were the target.
The deadly strike Wednesday came as Ukrainians were defiantly celebrating their Independence Day while remaining on high alert because of threats that Russia would use the occasion to mount attacks.
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This story is part of an ongoing investigation from The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” that includes the War Crimes Watch Ukraine interactive experience and an upcoming documentary.
___
More than 50 people, including children, were on their way to flee Donbas when they were killed in a Russian attack on a train station in Kramatorsk in April. Photos from the aftermath showed dead bodies and abandoned luggage strewn around the station. Rail cars were crushed and hollowed out by fire.
Mykola Lukashuk, chair of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Council, said during a press briefing Friday that the shelling in Chaplyne led to a fire in five carriages of the train. A family, including a 17-year-old daughter, was killed when its car was struck as it was traveling from Donetsk.
“People were being evacuated from Pokrovsk, Donetsk region, and a train was leaving from there to Lviv,” Lukashuk said.
The deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said Thursday that an 11-year-old boy died under the rubble of a nearby house and a 6-year-old died in a car fire by the station.
Tetyana Kvitnytska, deputy head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional health department, told the AP that those in Wednesday’s attack had suffered head injuries, broken limbs, burns and shrapnel wounds.
“There is no such war crime that the Russian occupiers have not yet committed on the territory of Ukraine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said that an Iskander missile was used to carry out the attack and that 200 reservists “were destroyed on their way to the combat zone.” An AP reporter who went to the scene said no Ukrainian troops were visible among the dead.
Even if some members of the military were among the dead, the attack could still violate the laws of war if it disproportionately harmed civilians.
“If you’re going to kill a small number of troops as opposed to a large number of civilians, that’s a war crime,” said Michael Newton, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school and director of the international legal studies program.
Iskander missiles are expensive precision guided missiles and are not used for trivial missions, said Frank Ledwidge, visiting fellow at the Transatlantic Dialogue Center in Kyiv and a former British military intelligence officer.
“The takeaway is a deliberate strike on a civilian target to cause civilian casualties for the purpose of disrupting rail traffic of civilians throughout Ukraine,” he said.
In May, Russia used sea- and air-launched precision missiles to strike power facilities at five railway stations mostly in Lviv after claiming that the West was using the rail lines to deliver weapons to Ukraine.
It’s not only the train stations that have become targets. Dozens of civilians waiting for buses have been killed in similar attacks. The AP has counted seven incidents where civilians waiting for a bus were killed. Photos of their bodies lying in pools of blood were shared across Telegram after the fact. In Mykolaiv, five people were killed and a dozen were injured at a bus stop during a Russian attack on July 29. Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych said on Telegram at the time that Russian forces had fired cluster munitions at a crowded intersection around 10 a.m.
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Editor’s Note: The AP and “Frontline” are gathering information from organizations including the Centre for Information Resilience, Bellingcat, the International Partnership on Human Rights, the Ukrainian Healthcare Center and Physicians for Human Rights to inform the War Crimes Watch Ukraine interactive experience.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration said Friday it will upgrade its engagement with the Arctic Council and countries with an interest in a region that’s rapidly changing due to climate change.
The State Department said the U.S. will appoint an ambassador-at-large for the Arctic to deal with national security, environmental and development issues in the far North. The U.S. has had an Arctic coordinator for many years, but the upgraded position may bring new energy to the job.
President Joe Biden “plans to elevate the Arctic Coordinator position by appointing an Ambassador-at-Large for the Arctic Region, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate,” the State Department said in a statement.
Friday’s announcement did not nominate a person to take the post.
The Arctic has been a hotbed of activity in recent years as warming seas have reduced ice coverage and opened new shipping lanes. Russia, in particular, has made the Arctic a priority, something that has concerned the U.S. China, while not an Arctic nation, has also made moves in the region.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the Arctic at https://apnews.com/hub/arctic.
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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s Republican Assembly leader on Friday withdrew subpoenas submitted as part of a GOP-led investigation into the 2020 election, marking the end of a 14-month endeavor that yielded no evidence of election fraud.
Speaker Robin Vos withdrew subpoenas that Michael Gableman, the former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice he hired to look into the results of the 2020 election, submitted to mayors and other officials across the state. Vos, the state’s most powerful Republican, fired Gableman two weeks ago after narrowly winning a primary election against a Donald Trump-backed political newcomer.
Vos also withdrew subpoenas issued to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, its administrator and two commission members.
Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway was among the city officials who were subpoenaed. Upon the withdrawal, City Attorney Michael Haas said in a statement that the investigation did nothing but harm public confidence in elections “despite wasting over one million dollars of taxpayer funds.”
Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, sounded a similar note.
“Last fall, I called for this fake investigation to be shut down and we challenged several subpoenas,” Kaul tweeted. “While it shouldn’t have taken nearly this long, I’m glad the ‘investigation’ has ended, and the subpoenas have finally been withdrawn.”
Gableman’s attorney, James Bopp, told The Associated Press that Vos withdrew all of the subpoenas that Gableman had submitted.
“The last part of the investigation was seeking compliance with the subpoenas and now they’ve been withdrawn, so the investigation is over,” Bopp said.
President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin by nearly 21,000 votes has withstood recounts, multiple state and federal lawsuits and several reviews, including Gableman’s investigation, which drew bipartisan criticism for the way it was conducted.
Among the subpoenas withdrawn was one submitted to Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich, whom Gableman sought to jail alongside Rhodes-Conway with a lawsuit filed last December that alleged they had failed to comply with his subpoenas. A hearing is scheduled Tuesday to determine the status of that lawsuit.
Genrich’s office did not immediately respond to Friday afternoon phone messages seeking comment.
“Speaker Vos has finally recognized that this cynical and divisive exercise should be ended,” Haas said.
____
Harm Venhuizen 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 undercovered issues. Follow Harm on Twitter.
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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul vowed to aggressively prosecute anyone who attacks or harasses election workers in the key swing state this fall and proclaimed his faith in the state’s election system as clerks report rising concerns about potential threats due to misinformation about elections.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press this week, Kaul also touted his work defending the results of the 2020 election against a host of legal challenges that accompanied President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud.
Kaul, a Democrat seeking reelection in November against Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, said public trust in “the reality of our elections” is important.
“We have the world’s greatest democracy in the U.S. and it’s something we should be proud of,” Kaul told the AP on Wednesday. “We have had that system tested over and over in Wisconsin through audits and recounts and reviews and consistently they show that our system works and the results reflect the will of the voters.”
Some of Trump’s followers have lashed out as they refused to accept his loss to Joe Biden. The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and and public policy institute, found in a March poll that one in six election officials have been threatened because of their job, with more than three-quarters saying they feel threats have increased in recent years.
In Wisconsin, multiple clerks have cited distrust and hostility toward election workers as concerns going into the November election. At a gathering of the National Association of State Elections Directors in July, election officials and bureaucrats meeting in Madison raised concerns that federal law might not be up to date with the threats they’ve faced since 2020.
Kaul said he is planning a public relations campaign informing people that intimidating, threatening or assaulting election workers is illegal and telling them how they can quickly report incidents. He said the Justice Department is working with the Wisconsin Elections Commission to stay abreast of any potential cases.
“What people should know is intimidating election officials is a crime and something we take very seriously,” Kaul said. “Continuing to get that message out is a proactive way to deter people from engaging in that activity. And if they do we will hold them accountable.”
Kaul also questioned whether Toney would defend the 2024 election results in court if Trump runs again and loses Wisconsin. He noted that Toney has drawn support from former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who called for Biden’s win to be decertified as part of an investigation into Wisconsin’s 2020 results. The probe found found no evidence of election fraud.
“If he were to take that kind of approach it would create chaos,” Kaul said. “I’m proud to have defended the will of the voters and our system of government. Based on what we’ve seen from (Toney), he hasn’t shown that type of commitment.”
Toney rejected Kaul’s attack.
He told AP that he believes Biden won the presidency, but said state laws were broken during the election. He brought charges in February against five voters who allegedly used improper addresses and has called for removing five state election commissioners who voted to keep special voting assistants out of nursing homes early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Toney promised to review any allegation of election fraud and prosecute “because it’s the job of district attorneys and the attorney general to enforce the rule of law.”
Other key issues Kaul discussed in his AP interview:
— Abortion. Kaul filed a lawsuit this summer seeking to overturn Wisconsin’s 1849 ban on abortion, arguing in part that it’s so old it’s no longer valid. Kaul said if that lawsuit is unsuccessful, he may file more lawsuits based on other legal theories such as equal protection and the fundamental right to liberty. He also maintained his pledge not to use state Justice Department resources to enforce the ban and promised to lobby legislators to repeal the prohibition.
— Pollution. Kaul sued 18 companies in July looking to hold them liable for polluting state waters with a group of chemicals known as PFAS, an abbreviation for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. He promised to see that case through to its conclusion.
—Gun control. Kaul, like Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, has advocated for universal background checks and a red-flag law that would allow family members and police to ask judges to seize guns from people who might pose a threat. Republican leaders have refused to even debate those proposals. Kaul said he plans to keep pushing.
___
Associated Press writer Harm Venhuizen contributed to this report. Venhuizen 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 undercovered issues. Follow Venhuizen on Twitter.
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