id
stringlengths 32
32
| url
stringlengths 31
1.58k
| title
stringlengths 0
1.02k
| contents
stringlengths 92
1.17M
|
|---|---|---|---|
ba13e053d9b852afdf8b647a18310db5
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/04/report-mass-public-shootings-rise/31071301/
|
Report: Mass public shootings on rise
|
Report: Mass public shootings on rise
Mass public shootings have increased in frequency from 1.1 a year to 4.5 a year since the 1970s, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service.
The report, sent to members of Congress on Friday, found that in the 1970s, mass public shootings killed roughly six people a year and injured two. From 2010 to 2013, there were an average of 33 deaths in mass shootings each year, with 28 additional people injured.
The figures come after a particularly grisly July, when five mass killings — including a public shooting at a Chattanooga, Tenn, military office that killed five service members — occurred in a span of eight days.
Mass killings are defined as singular or events with at least four victims who die within a short period of time. In mass public shootings, all the victims are killed with firearms in a public location such as a workplace, house of worship, school or restaurant.
The research found that a dozen mass public shootings since 1970 have had double-digit death tolls. Seven of those have occurred since 2007.
A criminologist who studies mass killings called the report the "most comprehensive" look at the issue in the past 15 years. “It deserves our attention,” said Grant Duwe, a Minnesota criminologist whose own research provided one source of data for the study. "Hopefully their report if nothing else will foster a more honest dialogue about the patterns and prevalence about mass shootings."
Using FBI figures, Duwe's data on mass shootings and an ongoing project at USA TODAY that tracks mass killings, the CRS researchers found that in the 15-year period between 1999 and 2013, there were 317 mass shootings with 1,554 victims. USA TODAY has counted an additional 29 mass shootings since then, with an additional 143 victims.
Among the report's findings:
A flurry of statistics, gun control proposals and rhetoric often come out in the aftermath of the large-scale homicides, particularly public shootings such as the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., and the June killing of nine people at a Charleston, S.C. church.
The report says, however, that federal data is lacking to help guide a public policy conversation. USA TODAY's "Behind the Bloodshed" project, which has tracked mass killings from 2006 to the present, found that the FBI's homicide data on mass killings had an accuracy rate of only 57%, with many major events missing and others mistakenly included through problems with miscoding or counting injured victims among the dead.
"With improved data, policymakers would arguably have additional vantage points from which to asses the legislative proposals that are inevitably made in the wake of these tragedies," the report says.
The report suggests that Congress direct a federal law-enforcement agency to improve the collection of data on multiple-victim homicides, and that it instruct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to annually report on mass shootings, including data on how the suspect acquired the weapon, the victim-offender relationship, and offenders' histories of mental illness and domestic violence.
CRS researchers are non-partisan and don't comment publicly on published reports.
|
b35af0cb8ebbb7398d4d80832c0c506b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/05/4-children-killed-missouri-fire/31149813/
|
4 children killed in Missouri fire
|
4 children killed in Missouri fire
OSAGE BEACH, Mo. — A fire that broke out at a condo complex in central Missouri killed four children overnight. Two adults were able to escape.
The fire erupted just after 11 p.m. Tuesday at the Compass Pointe condominiums complex in Osage Beach, a community about 177 miles west of St. Louis. The Camden County, Mo., town is a popular tourist destination at the Lake of the Ozarks.
The children were two 2-year-old girls, a 4-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
"In my career, about 26 years, we've had a few fatalities, but not multiples like this, and of this age," said Osage Beach Fire Chief Jeffrey R. Dorhauer Sr.
The fire was raging on the top floor, where the children were, and flames were shooting through the roof, Dorhauer told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Firefighters rescued the two adults from a third-floor unit — they weren't injured — but they had to go through a window to reach the children upstairs because the stairwell had collapsed, Dorhauer said. The children were unresponsive and were later declared dead at a hospital.
Dorhauer said the children were on the fourth floor of the condominium where the fire was the heaviest. The chief said two adults were on the third floor of the condo, but were able to escape.
The cause of the fire is under investigation, but Dorhauer said the state fire marshal hopes to inspect the building later Wednesday when a storm passes out of the region.
"The condition of the building is dangerous," he said. "So, while we are investigating, we're hoping to wait for a little sunlight so we can actually see the condition of the building before we do too much."
Roughly 60 firefighters responded to the scene late Tuesday night.
Dorhauer said he believes the children and adults were permanent residents of Osage Beach and not tourists.
|
0b90ae982aa705baa061bba0d37c23b7
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/05/gunman-nashville-movie-theater/31171671/
|
Tenn. movie theater shooter armed with pellet gun, hatchet
|
Tenn. movie theater shooter armed with pellet gun, hatchet
NASHVILLE — A gunman who arrived at a suburban Nashville movie theater armed with a pellet gun, a hatchet and pepper spray had been arrested for criminal assault and had a history of mental health issues, police said. The assailant, Vincente David Montano, 29, died Wednesday, less than an hour after he stormed the cineplex.
Gunshots were reported at 1:13 p.m. CT, just as Mad Max: Fury Road 2D was scheduled to start at the Carmike Hickory 8 theaters at 901 Bell Road in the Antioch neighborhood, according to Metropolitan Nashville Police Department dispatchers and other records. Montano was dead by 1:54 p.m.
Police spokesman Don Aaron said in a 7:45 p.m. press conference that Montano had been arrested on an assault charge in Murfreesboro in 2004. Montano had been committed for mental health care a total of four times, in 2004 and 2007, he said. He had also been reported as a missing person Aug. 3, Aaron said.
A Murfreesboro police missing person report says that Montano's mother said Montano was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2006. The woman told police she had not heard from her son since 2013, but thought he might be near Nashville because of an address on his ID card. He is listed as homeless on the report.
The woman, who could not be reached by The Tennessean, told police her son "had a hard time taking care of himself."
Two officers working a traffic stop were able to respond immediately when witnesses ran over to alert them to the situation inside the theater, police spokesman Don Aaron said. A sergeant outside the theater encountered two women, 53 and 17, injured by pepper spray, and a 58-year-old man identified only as "Steven" sprayed with pepper spray who also suffered a superficial injury to his shoulder from a hatchet.
All three were treated at the scene. No injuries to movie patrons from gunfire were reported.
In a brief but emotional press conference, Steven thanked police for their quick response:
"I'd also like to thank all of the citizens who gathered around us, helped my daughter when we were pepper-sprayed," he said. "That kind of gives me a little more faith in humanity again."
Officers entered the theater showing Mad Max through the projection room and traded shots with the suspect, Aaron said.
"The officer started at the projection room and started clearing down," Aaron said. "He encountered the gunman. The gunman opened fire on the South Precinct officer. That officer returned his fire, and then backed away out of the theater."
The SWAT team responded and confronted the suspect, Aaron said.
"There was gunfire, and the gunman is deceased just inside the movie theater," he said. "So we believe the imminent threat has been ended."
Extra police patrols reportedly were assigned at the Carmike Bellevue 8 theaters, less than 20 miles away along the same road.
Police examined two backpacks, one on the suspect and one left in the theater, to determine whether they were dangerous. They later decided to detonate the backpack the gunman was wearing.
Pam Wright, who said she was inside the theater during the shooting, posted on Facebook she was "shocked."
"Kids having to see the evil that exists in this world up close like this is tragic...heard a child crying saying."Is the boogie man still here.?" she wrote.
Nashville Mayor Karl Dean said in a statement: "I applaud the Metro Police Department for its great work to apprehend the suspect, keep our citizens and visitors safe and prevent a tragedy in Antioch today. ... I'm relieved that no one else was killed, and again, I thank the police for that."
The incident comes almost two weeks after a gunman opened fire inside a movie theater in Lafayette, La., during a screening of the film Trainwreck. In the July 23 shooting, John Russell Houser, 59, killed two people and wounded nine others before fatally shooting himself.
And Colorado jurors now are deciding whether James Holmes, who killed 12 and injured 70 others during a 2012 theater rampage in Aurora, Colo., should receive the death penalty.
Eric Vale, 32, said he was an Uber driver dropping off passengers in the Nashville theater parking lot when shots rang out. He described the scene as "utter chaos."
"I just couldn't believe this was happening again," he said.
Police flooded the Antioch area, about a dozen miles southeast of downtown Nashville, and blocked some nearby streets. Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were at the scene to help with the investigation.
“It’s just one of those things that happens," said Lanny Buchanan, manager of a Sprint phone store near the theater. At one point officers came by to tell people at his store to shelter in place and not admit outsiders.
Jeremy Cardoza, who works at Ford Ice Center nearby, said his business was immediately put on lockdown with no one being allowed to enter or to leave. About 25 people, mostly children, were inside.
Raneshia Morgan and her sister, Ravyn Morgan, were sitting in their car outside a nearby McDonald's when they heard the gunfire.
"It sounded scary because it was back to back," Raneshia Morgan said. "It kept coming."
At the Islamic Center of Tennessee, about a half mile away, eight to 10 worshipers were gathered for noontime prayer when the shots rang out.
"We heard seven or eight gunshots," said Hamza Chaudary, office manager at the center.
The incident did not interrupt their prayers.
"We recognized it was gunshots, but we didn't really react in any way as it wasn't something we could control," Chaudary said. "We didn't think of it as a threat of security to ourselves."
|
5cfaec73e0d74b0562390b6b3a7fa8ff
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/05/norman-hall-waved-and-world-waved-back/31146711/
|
Norman Hall waved, and the world waved back
|
Norman Hall waved, and the world waved back
LAMBERTVILLE, Mich. — He walked out to collect the mail one day, then Norman Hall turned to the traffic and waved.
The extraordinary happened: The world waved back.
For two years, the former U.S. Navy man and bus driver stood amid the stringy grass and chicory along a busy stretch of Sterns Road just north of the Michigan-Ohio state line, waving to strangers with a wide grin. Twice a day. Thirty minutes at a time.
The passing motorists waved back. They honked. They smiled.
But it wasn’t until the 88-year-old died July 28 — and his family propped a life-sized, corrugated plastic picture of him against his mailbox — that it became clear just how much Norman Hall’s smile had meant to people.
Flowers showed up at the mailbox. Drivers stopped to snap pictures. Motorists continued honking. And more than 2,400 people shared his photo on Facebook after Temperance resident Dean Weaver, 48, posted it on Sunday.
“He was out there rain or shine or sleet. I’m a former big-firm corporate lawyer, and I know: Everyone’s out there worried about their busy day, but here’s this man out there every day … sharing his enthusiasm for life,” said Weaver, who owns a stable nearby and who often went out of his way to drive past the man by the mailbox.
A man whose name he never knew.
The fact that his photo was shared so many times, he said, “is mind-blowing.”
Other residents weighed in with tributes, too.
“Each and every encounter that we have (or fail to have) with those around us has an effect on them, on us, and on the world,” one resident wrote on Facebook. “Godspeed My Waving Friend.”
And another: “I’ve seen him many times, you know he loved life by how he gave others a small reason to love theirs.”
A former resident said that although her family now lives in South Carolina, she still thinks of the man with the “good soul” who brightened her day.
No one really knows what made Hall lift his arm to strangers the first time. And it’s not clear that he meant to become a part of the morning and afternoon commute.
It just, well, happened.
“One day he went out there to get the mail and he just started waving,” said Louise Hall, his wife of 62 years.
Even as his legs began to buckle and dementia stripped from him the names of his children, Norman Hall made his way out to the mailbox twice a day to stand and wave.
“He’d go out there no matter what the weather,” Louise Hall said. “There’d be 15 inches of snow and he’d trudge out there.”
The couple met when he was freelancing for the Blade in Toledo. Louise was a teenager. Norman was photographing a high school talent show. He told her she was pretty.
They married in a local Methodist church. The bridesmaids wore pastels.
And then Louise and Norman, who as a boy had been raised in a Toledo orphanage, had 10 children that included a set of twins and triplets. Norman worked two and three jobs to pay the bills. He would freelance photos from his Argus C3 camera. Louise sold Avon.
Norman made sure his children went to church, though he never went himself. He had them memorize John 3:16.
Earlier Tuesday, Louise Hall held the picture of a 17-year-old Norman Hall, wearing a U.S. Navy uniform. He had served in the invasion of Normandy, she said.
“No wonder I fell for him. He was so damn good-looking,” she said, tracing his face. “We had a good life.”
Ironically enough for a man whose last years were noted for his simple, sweet gesture, he’d gone for decades having never told his children “I love you.” Maybe it was being raised without parents himself, suggests his second-oldest son, Matt Hall, now a Florida mechanic and car dealer. Maybe, too, he was so “dog-tired” from his jobs.
But his father changed after oldest son Mark Hall was killed in an auto accident in 1974.
“He made sure he’d say ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m proud of you,’” Matt Hall said.
The kids eventually grew up and moved from the house. Norman Hall retired. He and his wife settled into a quieter life in the red farmhouse that once had been surrounded by apple trees and vegetable gardens and cornfields, but now is hemmed in by subdivisions and retail.
Two weeks ago, Norman made his way out to his mailbox one last time. His family took a chair to him this time. Then for two days, Norman didn’t eat or drink. Louise and her children surrounded his bedside and sang Amazing Grace as he slipped away.
Louise Hall said she knew her husband probably made some people smile, but this response?
“I just hope he’s somewhere in heaven where he can see all of this,” she said.
|
61bc7f20b0f691f63029b5841ec9ccd5
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/05/reward-offered-shooting-near-nj-hip-hop-concert/31147273/
|
Reward offered in shooting near N.J. hip-hop concert
|
Reward offered in shooting near N.J. hip-hop concert
HOLMDEL, N.J. — New Jersey State Police offered a $5,000 reward Tuesday for information leading to the arrest of the gunman who shot and critically wounded two people near a hip-hop concert at the PNC Bank Arts Center the night before.
The victims, identified as Neptune men ages 23 and 24, were each struck multiple times. They were listed in critical, but stable condition at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, said State Police Sgt. First Class Gregory Williams. He declined to release their names.
Williams said detectives had “quite a few investigative leads” they were pursuing, but did not provide a description of the suspect.
The shooting capped a busy evening for law enforcement at the arts center. At least 102 people were arrested, many on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, Williams said.
Six concertgoers were charged with underage possession or consumption of alcohol, Williams said.
The shooting occurred about 11 p.m. in Lot 4. An Asbury Park Press reporter at the scene shortly thereafter saw state police cars roaming the area. Search dogs could be heard barking. Investigators milled about near an area marked with police tape near the corner of Memorial Lane and Perimeter Road. An investigator took photos of an object on the ground.
The arena was hosting the J. Cole: Forest Hills Drive Tour, featuring hip-hop artists J. Cole, YC, Big Sean and Jeremih. The show sold out, the center reported on its Twitter feed.
J.Cole, the headliner, performed until around 11 p.m., according to a voicemail on the arts center’s administration line.
The last major police incidents at the arts center happened in 2007 and 2008. In August 2007, two people died during an Ozzfest concert and 83 people were arrested — 59 of them for underage drinking. The men who died were believed to have ingested cocaine, marijuana and alcohol.
In 2008, 14 people were arrested at a Motley Crue show. One man passed out on Burma Road, on arts center property the night of the show and died of a heart condition, according to State Police.
The 2007 incidents prompted widespread debate about how to crack down on underage drinking and other illegal activity. The arts center enforced an alcohol ban and banned tailgating for concerts performed by bands that attract people under 21.
Calls to the arts center’s administration line were not been returned.
A spokesman for Live Nation, which presented the concert, said in a statement, “An active police investigation stemming from an incident at PNC Bank Arts Center last night is currently underway. Live Nation is not able to comment on the situation at this time. All questions should be directed to New Jersey State Police until their investigation is completed.”
Contributing: Hartriono B. Sastrowardoyo, Asbury Park Press.
|
8ffc2a4b134263b3d939e71c6a3b2af7
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/08/family-drops-lawsuit-over-sfo-runway-death--asiana-crash/31335739/
|
Family drops lawsuit over SFO runway death in Asiana crash
|
Family drops lawsuit over SFO runway death in Asiana crash
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The parents of a teenage girl run over and killed by emergency vehicles after an Asiana Airlines crash landing at the San Francisco airport dropped their lawsuit against the city on Friday.
The parents' lawyers formally dismissed the lawsuit Friday in federal court.
"The parties have reached a confidential settlement on mutually agreeable terms," said Gretchen Nelson, a lawyer representing the Chinese parents of Ye Meng Yuan, 16. Nelson declined to say if the family filed other lawsuits against the airline or Boeing, which manufactured the plane.
The city attorney's office said no money was paid to the family to dismiss their lawsuit.
"We're grateful for a dismissal that will spare everyone involved the added heartache and costs of litigation, which we believed from the beginning to be without legal merit,"city attorney Dennis Herrera said.
Herrera said the "heroic efforts" of San Francisco firefighters and police saved hundreds of lives after Asiana Flight 214 clipped a seawall on approach to San Francisco and burst into flames on the runway on July 6, 2013. Rescuers pulled five passengers from the burning plane that took off from Seoul with 291 passengers and 16 crew members aboard.
In the end, three teenage girls died and 180 others passengers and crew were injured.
Two of the fatalities were sitting in the tail section of the plane, which snapped off when it hit the seawall.
Ye Meng Yuan was run over by two rescue vehicles while she lay injured and covered in foam on the runway. The San Mateo County coroner determined the girl's death was caused by the rescue vehicles.
U.S. safety investigators blamed the pilots, saying they bungled the landing approach by inadvertently deactivating the plane's key control for airspeed, among other errors.
But the National Transportation Safety Board also said the complexity of the Boeing 777's auto-throttle and auto-flight director — two of the plane's key systems for controlling flight — contributed to the accident. The NTSB also faulted materials provided to airlines by Chicago-based Boeing, saying they fail to make clear the conditions in which the auto-throttle doesn't automatically maintain speed.
Dozens of other lawsuits involving the airline and the plane's manufacturer have been filed in the United States, but many foreigners aboard the flight are prevented by international treaty from suing the airliner in this country and must pursue their legal claims in Asia and elsewhere.
In March, 72 passengers settled their lawsuits for an undisclosed amount. Several more are still pending.
|
0499da1159f90d7c29865e417644859f
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/10/navajo-nation-epa-mine-wastewater-spill/31399517/
|
Gold mine's toxic plume extends to Utah
|
Gold mine's toxic plume extends to Utah
FARMINGTON, N.M. — The plume of heavy metals released last week into the Animas River from the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colo., reached Utah on Monday.
As of Monday evening, officials said the plume of contamination was southeast of Montezuma Creek, Utah, and was headed for Lake Powell. Environmental Protection Agency officials say the pollutants in the plume include arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum and cadmium, but have not released any detailed information on the spill that started Wednesday morning and has since been contained.
The Gold King Mine's discharge raises the possibility of long-term damage from the toxic metals falling out of suspension as the plume slowly moves along the river.
"Sediment does settle," said Shaun McGrath, administrator of EPA's Region 8. "It settles down to the bottom of the riverbed."
EPA officials announced Monday afternoon that public access to the Animas and San Juan rivers would continue to be closed until at least Aug. 17.
One rural water user association in San Juan County, where New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez declared a state of emergency Monday, has spent thousands of dollars buying water from Farmington and Aztec because it had to shut down its wells after the toxic mine waste spilled into the Animas last week.
"We don't want to take a chance of contaminating them — and it sure has cost us a lot of money," said Rick Mitchell, Flora Vista Mutual Domestic Water Association general manager.
Mustard-colored water began rushing out of the Gold King Mine in southern Colorado on Wednesday after an EPA team disturbed a dam of loose rock lodged in the mine.
The deluge of polluted water poured into Cement Creek and continued into the Animas River. The plume of pollution, clearly visible from the air and estimated to be more than 80 miles long at one point, reached Farmington, N.M., on Saturday morning.
McGrath said future runoff from storms will kick that toxic sediment back into the water, which means there will need to be long-term monitoring.
He added that "the Animas River has historically been polluted by acid mine drainage."
Chapters within the Northern Agency have started the process of issuing emergency declarations after toxic mine waste flowed down the San Juan River onto the Navajo Nation.
The San Juan River travels west through the Navajo Nation, then converges with the Colorado River at Lake Powell in southeastern Utah. For the chapter communities near the San Juan River, it is the main source of water for crops and livestock.
So far, the chapters of Upper Fruitland, Nenahnezad, San Juan and Shiprock have issued either declarations or resolutions calling for a state of emergency within their boundaries.
The "slug" of pollution, which the EPA says contains metals and is about as acidic as black coffee, is headed toward Lake Powell.
Silverton is surrounded by abandoned mines, and the EPA was checking on one of the worst ones, the Gold King, when the breach occurred. Area residents are furious that the federal agency charged with fighting pollution accidentally caused it.
The Animas has largely returned to running clear below Silverton and into Durango, although some of the orange sediment remains in some puddles and along the shore.
Officials advise residents with wells in the flood plains of the Animas River and the San Juan River downstream of the confluence of the two rivers to have their water tested before using it for cooking, drinking or bathing.
County Executive Officer Kim Carpenter voiced frustration about the delay in getting information about the chemicals in the water. The data, he said, will "give us a big picture of what we are going to deal with and the long-term effects we will have to deal with."
Contributing: Steve Garrison, Joshua Kellogg and Noel Lyn Smith, The (Farmington, N.M.) Daily Times; and Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
|
50ac021f6bd2d9341935574019ef3d52
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/10/polyamorous-relationships-become-more-visible/31439123/
|
Polyamorous relationships become more visible
|
Polyamorous relationships become more visible
LOUISVILLE — Her mother calls him “the man from Kentucky.”
But to Jacque Hanson of Lebanon, Ohio, Jason is more than the boyfriend her mom won’t accept.
He would be her second husband if she could get her way.
“I would marry him today if I could,” Hanson said, adding that she has no intention of leaving her husband, Jim.
Instead, she and Jim have agreed to an open relationship.
Hanson identifies as polyamorous, a brand of consensual non-monogamy — or ethical cheating — in which partners are in more than one committed relationship at once with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.
It is difficult to determine the actual number of people in such relationships because of a lack of research, but they are becoming more visible because of the Internet and social media, according to psychologist Meg Manthos, whose clientele is about 30% poly groups.
“Poly relationships have been around for as long as we’ve had documentation,” Manthos said.
And according to a national Avvo.com study from June 2015, about 4% of the U.S. population admits to being in an open relationship, which amounts to about 12.8 million people.
In Louisville, Hanson’s boyfriend Jason and his wife lead a support group of polyamorous couples. The group started five years ago and has grown from four people to between 10 and 25 at each of the monthly meetings, they said. In addition, the Louisville Poly email list which they also run has 420 people on it.
Jason and his wife, who asked that their last names not be used to avoid any social stigma, said they hope more people will come to understand their lifestyle.
“If we would have been having this conversation 10 years ago, I’d be a lot more nervous about having it at all,” Jason said. “But today, it feels like the tide is shifting toward accepting people for who and what they are. I may be grossly naïve but that seems to be where they’re going.”
How it works
Like monogamous relationships, every poly relationship has a different set of rules. And it takes a lot of work to maintain several healthy relationships at once, Jason said.
He said he and his wife have only two rules: safe sex and “don’t be a jerk.” The latter has taken the place of a longer list they made when they first started exploring outside their marriage.
“At first we had a page or two of rules, ‘Not in my bed,’ ‘don’t spend the night anywhere else,’ over time some of those just fell away,” Jason said. “When she had her first relationship outside of me, the rest of them fell away. People get crazy when they get into a new relationship. It’s no different with poly-folk than the starry-eyed lovers on the street.”
Regardless of how many rules they make, sometimes issues do come up, and it can be hard when there are more than two parties who have to come to an agreement, Jason said.
At each meeting of the Louisville poly group, members write questions on notecards, and Jason’s wife moderates the ensuing discussion over lunch. Perennial topics include scheduling, jealousy and public perceptions.
“The problems of coordinating a two-person relationship are difficult enough, but when you add a third, fourth or fifth, then you start getting in to ‘who gets me on my birthday?’ sort of questions,” Jason said. “It can get overwhelming.”
Polyamorists often see themselves as predisposed to their lifestyle, Jason added. He said that when he was 18, he cheated on a girlfriend, which made him realize that monogamy might not work for him.
When he met his wife, he was up front with her about what was going to work best for him.
“I told her I can’t be monogamous,” Jason said. “I can’t do that. I tried, I failed, and I don’t want to do that again. I think there’s a better way we can do this.”
After a few years of marriage, they opened their relationship.
What the experts say
Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington and a relationship expert for PerfectMatch.com, said acceptance of open relationships is based on an “idealized viewpoint” that would be difficult to manage in real life.
“I think many Americans like to think of themselves as liberal and sexually adventurous,” Schwartz said in the 2015 Avvo study. “It might sound sexy to have an open relationship, especially to young people. But the fact is most human beings are territorial they don’t like sharing, and they especially don’t like sharing someone they are in love with.”
Elisabeth Sheff, author of the book The Polyamorists Next Door, said the key to making polyamory work is communication.
She wrote in a Psychology Today story that polyamorous people “put a lot of emphasis on communication as a way to build intimacy, explore boundaries, negotiate agreements, and share feelings.”
To deal with the problem of jealousy, poly couples talk about what might be causing the feeling, and work to reassure their partners, Sheff said.
“They tend to face jealousy more directly,” Sheff said. “The polyamorous tend to view it as a signal that something else is happening. ... If you’re feeling insecure, it’s not beneficial to have your partner stop whatever they’re doing, but to become more secure in yourself.”
Psychologist Manthos said most of the poly couples she counsels have problems similar to monogamous couples she works with, except poly couples tend to have more issues with how they are perceived. Unlike monogamous couples, people who identify as poly have to worry about judgment from their families, teachers and the public, Manthos said.
Websters Dictionary definitions
Open marriage: A marriage in which both people agree to allow each other to have sex with other people.
Polyamory: The state or practice of having more than one open romantic relationship at a time.
Polygamy: The state or practice of being married to more than one person at the same time.
|
89efc887c6456b3ab3bfb851a9070de9
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/12/transgender-troops-treatment/31537791/
|
Cost of treating transgender troops called negligible
|
Cost of treating transgender troops called negligible
WASHINGTON — Treating the military's estimated 12,800 transgender troops with hormone therapy and surgery will cost about $5.6 million a year, a tiny amount compared with overall spending on military health care, according to an article published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.
The cost of medical care will be a key factor as the Pentagon develops a plan to integrate transgender troops, which it announced last month. Defense Secretary Ash Carter gave his staff six months to work out details to allow them to serve openly, which current policy does not allow.
The article, "Caring for Our Transgender Troops — The Negligible Cost of Transition-Related Care," was written by Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, which researches issues regarding sexual orientation issues in the military.
The military spends nearly $48 billion on health care, Belkin writes. He estimated 188 troops will require gender transition-related care each year at a cost of $5.6 million, or $438 per transgender service member per year.
The relatively cheap treatment should allay concerns about the cost of rescinding the ban, Belkin said in an interview.
"I was particularly surprised at the number in the context of what the military overall spends on health care," Belkin said.
Four years ago, the Pentagon eliminated Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which prohibited gay and lesbian troops from serving openly and is borrowing similar tactics to dismantle the ban on transgender troops. For instance, the Pentagon recently made it more difficult to discharge transgender troops by requiring a high-ranking civilian to make the decision. That tactic effectively acted as a moratorium on dismissals of gay and lesbian troops.
Some transgender troops are serving openly with the knowledge of their commanders and some are receiving treatment, Belkin said.
Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union, a non-partisan government spending watchdog, said the Pentagon should consider cost-cutting elsewhere if it takes on the responsibility of treating transgender troops.
"If transition-related care is deemed a necessity, then preserving other vital health services for the troops should mean finding lower-priority items to cut so service people and taxpayers are protected," Sepp said. The Pentagon should also consider tapping non-profit groups for funding for transition care.
In June, the American Medical Association weighed in on transgender troops, adopting a policy that states there are no valid medical reasons to prevent them from serving and affirming that they should receive medical care.
Belkin relied on data from employers whose insurance plans offered care to transgender workers, including hormone treatment and surgery. It cost just shy of $30,000 for University of California employees and their dependents transition-related care over 6.5 years.
He also noted that the Australian military treats its transgender troops. Over 30 months, 13 of its 58,000 troops received gender transition therapy. Australia is one of 18 countries that allow transgender troops to serve openly, according to the Palm Center.
Moreover, the U.S. government already pays for some transgender therapies. Medicare, federal health care for those 65 and older, provides transgender therapy, including surgery. The Veterans Affairs Department also treats veterans with gender dysphoria, a conflict between a person's sex at birth and the gender he or she identifies with.
|
083c3127cd309aeeb0c56d9d707a6edb
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/13/guns-relocation-law-ptr-newtown/30896025/
|
From boom to near-bust: A gunmaker's cautionary tale
|
From boom to near-bust: A gunmaker's cautionary tale
AYNOR, S.C. — There was perhaps no more attractive small brand in the lucrative U.S. gun industry than PTR Industries.
The semi-automatic rifle maker had just announced its intention to leave Connecticut more than two years ago, when it was besieged by recruitment proposals from at least 44 states. Then-Texas governor Rick Perry made a personal appeal, accompanied by an entourage of PowerPoint-wielding staffers.
All of them sought to lure away the growing gun-maker shortly after the Connecticut legislature — in a political coda to the Newtown school massacre — made it effectively illegal for PTR and some other rifle manufacturers to sell their products anywhere in the state. So restrictive was the new law, Josh Fiorini, PTR's chief executive officer, feared that it exposed employees to possible criminal charges for simply transporting unfinished firearms to assembly contractors just a few miles beyond the company's Bristol headquarters.
"It was the last straw,'' Fiorini said recently. "We were going to have to move.''
Yet what followed for PTR, almost as soon it reopened last year in gun-friendly rural South Carolina, stands as a cautionary tale for the politically volatile industry where some of the biggest names in the business — Mossberg, Remington and Beretta — have recently launched or are plotting moves and expansions outside longtime bases throughout the northeast. Larry Keane, general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the industry's trade association), could not recall a similar period in the industry's recent history marked by so much displacement.
"Never,'' Keane said. "And I've been in or around the industry for 20 years.''
Though firmly rooted in the "New England Gun Valley," where the firearms industry has thrived for decades, PTR's relocation plan was then a surprisingly easy call in the midst of a market boom driven by unprecedented panic buying. Gun enthusiasts emptied the shelves of dealers across the country fearing that even more restrictive federal gun laws would be next.
As quickly as potential back orders for PTR rifles surged to nearly 100,000, the bubble burst, company officials said. Proposed federal legislation to renew the controversial assault weapons ban failed, as did a prospective expansion of background checks for all gun buyers.
The panic that had sustained record sales shifted from buyers to manufacturers who were left with hundreds of thousands of rifles in their inventories. Within six months of what was to be a move full of anticipation for increasing fortunes in the rich former cotton and tobacco fields of the American South, Fiorini and company vice president John McNamara were issuing layoff notices.
The layoffs followed a head-snapping moment at a staff meeting last summer when Fiorini asked McNamara for an update on pending gun orders.
"Zero,'' Firorini said, recalling the day as if it were that very afternoon. "I had never, ever heard that before.''
Just when things couldn't get any worse for the fledgling company, they did.
Earlier this year, the first person PTR hired in South Carolina — a popular county councilman who helped organize the firm's move here — fatally shot himself near the company's new headquarters. Though the shooting was apparently related to chronic health problems and did not involve a company firearm, Fiorini said Bob Grabowski's death represented the company's darkest moment since uprooting from Connecticut.
"It was a perfect storm,'' he said.
NEWTOWN CHANGES EVERYTHING
On the same December day in 2012, when a young gunman stormed the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., PTR's chief executive was meeting with an architect to discuss a long-planned expansion of the growing company.
The rifle-maker, with nearly 50 employees, had outgrown its cramped quarters in Bristol, and Fiorini was anxious to put down a larger footprint in a region that has been associated with gun-making since the Revolutionary War.
The Sandy Hook shooting, just more than 30 miles away, changed everything. The expansion plans were immediately suspended; they were scrapped for good when state lawmakers approved a package of legislation that, among other things, outlawed so-called assault-style weapons PTR and other local manufacturers produced, created a gun-offender registry and banned ammunition magazines containing more than 10 rounds.
Other states, including New York, Maryland and Colorado, enacted similarly strict measures that helped launch the recent assessment of corporate relocation strategies. The new state laws roiled the firearms industry in a way largely unseen since Congress passed the 1994 federal assault weapons ban in the aftermath of an earlier school massacre in Stockton, Calif., where five children were killed and 29 others wounded.
While a raft of proposed federal firearms legislation largely foundered, including an effort to renew the assault weapons ban that had expired in 2004, the state actions generated a recruitment effort by gun-friendly governors that continue to alter the geography of guns.
The commitments followed:
• Connecticut-based Mossberg chose to expand in Texas.
• Sturm Ruger & Co., headquartered in Connecticut and with large operations in New Hampshire and Arizona, selected North Carolina for its first major expansion in 25 years.
• Remington Arms Co., founded in 1816 in Ilion, N.Y., picked Alabama to host its new venture.
• Beretta is set to begin moving much of its entire U.S. operation next month from Maryland to Tennessee, escaping some of the country's most far-reaching gun control laws, also passed in the aftermath of Newtown.
"We started our search by looking only at states that have a consistent history of support for and likelihood of future support for Second Amendment rights,'' Beretta board member Jeff Reh said, announcing its choice of Gallatin, Tenn., last year following a review of 80 sites in seven states.
For many of the industry's biggest names, the moves involved expansions to escape the restrictions, while PTR uprooted its entire manufacturing operation, one of the first to announce its exit following the adoption of the new laws.
Keane said the recruitment continues still.
"We are constantly getting calls from state economic development officials,'' Keane said. "It's not with the frequency that we experienced in 2013, but they still come.''
Like other suitors, South Carolina had a lot to offer its recruits: the promise of a cavernous 58,000 square-foot manufacturing site, a hungry, non-union labor pool and a cost of living that could melt some of the worst memories of doing business in the Northeast.
For PTR, which spent an average of $70,000 per year just to clear the snow from its parking lot, the sunny climate and proximity to Myrtle Beach (about 30 miles to the east) was gravy on a deal that was announced in June 2013.
"Look what happened in South Carolina today,'' Gov. Nikki Haley said then, highlighting the $8 million investment and the promise of nearly 150 jobs. "You have a great American company in PTR Industries that could have picked any state in the country to go to and they chose South Carolina.
"We will never surprise them,'' the governor pledged. "They always know that all they have to do is focus on their profit margins and cash flow and hire more people and expand. We will stay out of their way.''
AFTER MOVE, FORTUNES CHANGE
While the welcome couldn't have been warmer, the realty of the changing gun market sent a shiver through the company's headquarters soon after it opened last year on Aynor's Cool Springs Drive.
With the burst of the rifle market, PTR fortunes nose dived.
Production dropped from 9,600 rifles in 2013 to just 4,000 last year, forcing the layoffs of eight workers just six months after opening amid so much optimism.
Unlike other larger firearm companies with more diverse product lines, PTR struggled mightily.
"We knew a (market) cool off was coming,'' Fiorini said. "But we didn't know how steep or how long it would last.''
The losses were compounded by the cost of physically moving the company, all of its sensitive machinery and 23 of its 46 Connecticut employees 752 miles south to Aynor (population: 647).
The convoy of 42 trucks, including 14 flatbeds, were part of a choreographed operation designed to limit downtime to just five work days. But that efficiency did not come cheap. It cost about $600,000.
"We were not really able to cash in (on the 2013 buying surge) because we had already committed to moving,'' Fiorini said.
PTR was beginning to regain its footing earlier this year when Grabowski, the company's purchasing manager and a popular county councilman, took his own life March 31.
McNamara and Fiorini said they knew Grabowski, who orchestrated much of the company's transition, suffered from chronic back pain. Yet the suicide was something they never saw coming.
"We didn't know how much he really did for us,'' Fiorini said.
MARKET UPSWING
PTR is once again beginning to feel the benefits of a new spike in firearm purchases. The surge, not surprisingly, also follows a spate of deadly shootings across the country, including the June 17 church massacre in Charleston.
Last month marked the third straight month of increasing FBI background checks required of gun purchasers at federally licensed firearms dealers. July's 1.6 million checks were up by nearly 300,000 from July 2013. The number of checks recorded in each of the past three months also marked monthly records. The actual number of firearms sold in recent months is likely higher because multiple firearms can be included in a transaction by a single buyer, and the FBI does not track actual gun sales.
PTR is also looking to capitalize on its new home by offering a new commemorative rifle, with the South Carolina state seal etched on the barrel and stamped with its "Made in Aynor, S.C.'' label.
Although the company is about a year behind on delivering on its promise of nearly 150 local jobs, PTR still enjoys the strong support of the county and the state.
"They are back on the road,'' Horry County Council Chairman Mark Lazarus said. "If you looked at the gun industry overall, it took a pretty significant hit, but it has rebounded and so has PTR. We're very happy with them.''
Republican State Rep. Alan Clemmons, whose district includes Aynor and who helped lead the recruiting effort that landed PTR, said the state would and has pursued other firearm companies just as aggressively. One of them, Stag Arms, is another Connecticut riflemaker.
"We would be delighted for (Stag Arms founder) Mark Malkowski and Stag Arms to call South Carolina home,'' Clemmons said.
Malkowski, who has visited the state, said he regularly corresponds with interested states and will "continue to keep our options open.''
"We will only expand our business in a state that supports what we do,'' he said.
Meanwhile, Fiorini and McNamara said business is now "the best it's ever been'' since the move.
"I don't regret it,'' Fiorini said. "We're still here.''
Follow @bykevinj on Twitter.
|
2750a65b2f9e4c154cb8333c9b64f93f
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/26/sandra-bland-boulevard-texas/32409847/
|
Texas city names road after Sandra Bland
|
Texas city names road after Sandra Bland
PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas — City council members here said they hope renaming a road that leads to Sandra Bland's alma mater in memory of her will serve as a constant reminder of the injustices they say she suffered in Waller County.
They also hope it's a reminder for law enforcement to always follow best practices when making stops on University Drive, which will become Sandra Bland Parkway for three to five years before the council votes on the matter again.
Bland, 28, of Naperville, Ill., was stopped on the same road July 10 allegedly for failing to signal a lane change. When her interaction with Texas state Trooper Brian Encinia escalated into a confrontation, he arrested her on a charge of assaulting a public servant and transported her to Waller County's jail in Hempsted, Texas.
She was found hanging in her cell July 13, three days after her arrest, a death that a medical examiner ruled a suicide.
"I am overwhelmed, and I am just truly thankful to the city of Prairie View," Geneva Reed-Veal, Bland's mother, said in a press conference here after the decision to rename the road.
Bland's name will be seen from the entrance of Prairie View A&M University to U.S. 290 Business. And a park will be dedicated in Bland's honor not far from the college.
"This is the first step, the very first step," Reed-Veal said. "There's still so much more that needs to be done."
Earlier this month, family members filed a wrongful-death lawsuit seeking to hold those who interacted with Bland before her death accountable. Her family maintains that she never should have been stopped and never should have been arrested and also wants the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate.
At least one member of Prairie View City Council, which voted Tuesday night to rename the road, thought the city's action came too soon.
"You have very few citizens that actually live here that are actually here today to see what's going on," said Paulette Matthews-Barnett, council member in this city of 6,000 about 50 miles northwest of Houston. "Maybe it should've been called 'Memorial Parkway,' that way, we'd include everybody and not just one."
But some residents say the gesture is not enough.
"We need to have a very painful discussion to get healing because renaming a street doesn't do it," Darryl Johnson said.
"This is something that in the very least should happen so that her name remains as a symbol of the greater good," David Palmer said.
To many people, Bland's name will forever be synonymous with a struggle on the side of the road that sparked a movement.
"If that starts dialogue to say what it means for police accountability, for jail accountability, for community accountability to speak up, then it's a great thing and I support that," Sylvia Cedillo said.
Related:
|
38914c46edaed5242930fca0b9693e4f
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/26/two-dead-virginia-shooting-live-tv-social-media/32401101/
|
Murder on social media: Killer wanted the world to watch
|
Murder on social media: Killer wanted the world to watch
The Twitter and Facebook accounts were created just last week.
Videos labeled as tests were added.
Then, as the nation learned that two journalists had been shot to death during a live TV broadcast Wednesday, the self-identified gunman used those accounts to post chilling videos showing him approach the scene, raise his gun and fire.
Vester Lee Flanagan II is identified as the gunman in the shooting deaths of WDBJ7-TV reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward. Parker was interviewing Vicki Gardner, a local official, at Smith Mountain Lake, Va., when all three of them were shot at 6:45 a.m. ET on live TV. Parker and Ward died. Gardner had emergency surgery and was in stable condition Wednesday.
Flanagan's tweets began at 11:09 a.m. When he worked for WDBJ7, he went by Bryce Williams on air. Both the Twitter handle and Facebook page were created under that name.
Flanagan, who was tweeting while fleeing the scene, said that Parker made racist comments and that he filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report. He also tweeted that Ward went to human resources about him "after working with me one time!!!"
Then came the videos.
At 11:14 a.m. Flanagan tweeted two short videos and posted a 56-second video to Facebook. The videos show the incident from the gunman's perspective. Chilling and raw, the shooter approaches Parker, Ward and Gardner, and lifts the gun into view. He stands there unnoticed as the live broadcast continues. The shooting occurs about 40 seconds into the video.
“He wasn’t just bent on revenge; he was bent on doing it in a visible, videographic way,” said psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, a professor and chairman of psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.
"It’s applying social media to committing a homicide,” Lieberman said. "This bears all the earmarks of our culture — ready availability of guns and social media-facilitated ability to disseminate this instantly.”
J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and co-editor of The International Handbook of Threat Assessment, notes that many mass killers in recent years have been “copy cats,” inspired by previous murders. But these killers also often want to make their mark by outdoing their predecessors. “They look for something that hasn’t been done before and then do it,” Meloy said. “They may be looking for a higher body count or a new way of killing.”
The first-ever tweets from the account, which was quickly suspended Wednesday, were posted Aug. 19. Multiple tweets showed pictures Flanagan identified as baby pictures of himself and modeling head shots. He also posted a picture of his bedroom. The same day, he shared pictures of himself at what he called "a worker's comp company" in Roanoke, Va., as well as selfies at what he identified as United Healthcare in Roanoke.
In addition to the video of the shooting, the Facebook account showed videos of Flanagan as a journalist. Multiple versions of what appeared to be Flanagan's reporting highlight reel included him holding a gun in a gun store during a reporting assignment. The videos also showed him covering stories on security systems at liquor stores, dead bodies discovered in a bedroom, bears disturbing a neighborhood and winter weather. Multiple videos are labeled as "test," a few show his cats, and one video appears to show Flanagan modeling on a runway. The earliest posts to the account are from Aug. 18.
Most people who commit a violent crime "have a very distorted view that what they are doing is a good thing," said Raymond DiGiuseppe, Ph.D., a psychology professor at St. John’s University. These criminals "want to get the message out to as many people as possible. Social media allows you to get the message out to people you've never met."
Contributing: Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
|
a8e4ec319229f6e54ba7562c4cb5b80a
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/27/residents-journalist-killings/32461065/
|
Journalist killings like deaths in the family for viewers
|
Journalist killings like deaths in the family for viewers
ROANOKE, Va. — The on-air murder of a popular television reporter and her cameraman during a morning live shot Wednesday hit residents like a death in the family in this small city surrounded by rolling mountains and cattle fields.
"Every morning we watch these people on TV, it's like they're part of your family," said Donna Toliver, who lives across the street from WDBJ television station. She spent most of Wednesday afternoon speaking encouraging words to station employees and watching them speak to reporters from around the country and across the world.
WDBJ staff observed a moment of silence Thursday in memory of journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward, who were gunned down while conducting an interview about tourism. The silence, at about 6.45 a.m., was at the same time that the two were shot. The station started broadcasting live for its morning show at 5 a.m. Thursday, beginning the newscast with an image of Parker and Ward accompanied by the words "In Memory."
The two were killed while conducting an interview with Vicki Gardner, an official of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce. Gardner was also shot but survived.
Police identified the shooter as Vester Flanagan, a former reporter at WDBJ known on-air as Bryce Williams. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after crashing the car he was driving while police were in pursuit. Many residents saw the shooting live on the morning news and later saw footage that appeared on Flanagan's Facebook and Twitter accounts that showed the attack from the shooter's perspective.
Shawn Hunter, a community activist in Roanoke, said he saw the Wednesday morning report and at first could not believe that Parker could have been the target. He'd been interviewed by all three journalists involved. Parker, in particular, made herself available to everybody in the community, and both she and Ward were known for their funny on-camera antics, Hunter said.
"You'd always see her in City Market," the downtown mall, he said. "She would be interviewing the mayor and you could walk up to her and say 'How are you doing Alison?' and she would let you take a picture with her."
She also participated in a Roanoke fundraiser, "Dancing with the Stars," where she coached dancers and performed. "She was like a celebrity," Hunter said.
Red heart-shaped balloons wafted in the wind over an array of flowers, plaques and photographs near the entrance to the WDBJ station in Parker and Ward's honor. Nearby, Roanoke resident Pamela Cook wiped tears from her eyes and sniffled as she described her feelings for the slain journalists.
"They had the biggest hearts, and you could tell that they loved the viewers," Cook said.
Watching them in the morning was "hilarious," she said. "They started my day off on a positive note."
Across the street, by a truck serving barbecue, a handwritten sign said "Donations accepted for the families of Alison Parker and Adam Ward at Baum's BBQ, sending love from our families to yours."
Steve Baum, who owns the barbecue truck, said local chef Jason Horn came up with the idea to provide food for station employees but the response was so great it turned into a fundraising effort. Within less than an hour of posting a message on Facebook, 2,000 people shared it, and Baum had 15 volunteers and hundreds of dollars worth of food donated by local grocery stores Sams' Club and Kroger.
"Everybody remembers the Virginia Tech shooting and that's still on their minds," Baum said, referring to the 2007 massacre in nearby Blacksburg, where a lone gunman killed 32 people.
A lot of WDBJ reporters graduate from Virginia Tech or the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, "so they're considered local," Baum said. "You see them shopping… at events and concerts. It's family."
Baum said he'll be back Thursday morning with fresh biscuits smothered in homemade sausage gravy for breakfast, and pulled chicken, rice and beans for lunch. Donations will benefit the families and funerals, he said.
|
3e7495cd0f1cad598916b0bbe94e5d45
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/28/baltimore-convictions-challenged-secret-stingray-surveillance/71279112/
|
Lawyers plan challenge to arrests based on secret cellphone tracking
|
Lawyers plan challenge to arrests based on secret cellphone tracking
Defense lawyers in Baltimore are examining nearly 2,000 cases in which the police secretly used powerful cellphone tracking devices, and they plan to ask judges to throw out “a large number” of criminal convictions as a result.
“This is a crisis, and to me it needs to be addressed very quickly,” said Baltimore’s deputy public defender, Natalie Finegar, who is coordinating those challenges. “No stone is going to be left unturned at this point.”
The move follows a USA TODAY investigation this week that revealed that Baltimore police have used cellphone trackers, commonly known as stingrays, to investigate crimes as minor as harassing phone calls, then concealed the surveillance from suspects and their lawyers. Maryland law generally requires that electronic surveillance be disclosed in court.
Finegar and others said they do not know how many criminal cases they ultimately will seek to reopen because of the secret phone tracking, but she expects it to be “a large number.” The public defender’s office is reviewing a surveillance log published by USA TODAY that lists more than 1,900 cases in which the police indicated they had used a stingray. It includes at least 200 public defender clients who were ultimately convicted of a crime.
Stingrays are suitcase-sized devices that allow the police to pinpoint a cellphone’s location to within a few yards by posing as a cell tower. In the process, they also can intercept information from the phones of nearly everyone else who happens to be nearby.
At least 53 police departments from Miami to Los Angeles own one of the cell trackers, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. But few have revealed when or how the devices are used, in part because they signed non-disclosure agreements with the FBI.
As a result, Baltimore’s surveillance log provides a rare window into the secret surveillance. That log, matched with court records, showed that the authorities had used stingrays to hunt everyone from killers to petty thieves, usually did so without obtaining search warrants, and routinely sought to hide that surveillance from the people they arrested.
“This has really opened the floodgates,” Baltimore defense lawyer Josh Insley said. He said he could start filing challenges to some of his clients’ convictions by next week.
A spokeswoman for Baltimore’s State’s Attorney, Tammy Brown, said prosecutors will evaluate each challenge on its own merits. She agreed that prosecutors are required to tell defendants when the police use a stingray, but “we need to get that information first.”
Overturning a criminal conviction is no small task. Before they can even ask judges to take that step, defense lawyers have to comb through the surveillance log to figure out which of their clients were targets of the phone tracking, then contact them in prison.
“It’s probably going to be a long process,” ACLU attorney Nathan Wessler said. “But now at least you have defense lawyers who know what happened to their clients and can invoke the power of the courts to make sure that the Constitution was complied with.”
The challenges come as top lawmakers are questioning the need to keep stingrays so secret. “Transparency leads to accountability, and by all accounts, the use of this technology and its legal authority could use more of both,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said “secrecy surrounding the use of these devices fosters an environment where abuse and misuse of the equipment is more likely to occur.”
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake sees no problem with keeping the surveillance secret, as long as the police are using the trackers legally. Baltimore — long among the nation’s most violent big cities — is battling a surge of killings this year, and “we’re certainly going to use every tool that we have available” to stop it, she said Wednesday.
“As long as it’s not illegal, it’s not inappropriate,” Rawlings-Blake said.
The city’s prosecutors took a different view. Brown, the spokeswoman for the State’s Attorney, said Maryland court rules require the authorities to tell defendants about stingrays in every case in which one was used. She said the office is working with the police to make sure they inform judges before they use a stingray, and inform prosecutors after they make an arrest.
“It’s something we’re very committed to resolving,” Brown said.
Contributing: Susan Page in Baltimore
|
25d333e4ac32b34ca9d525a08277ccfb
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/28/fema-trailers-brought-shelter-problems-katrina-victims/71342988/
|
FEMA trailers brought shelter, problems to Katrina victims
|
FEMA trailers brought shelter, problems to Katrina victims
JACKSON, Miss. — For several years after Hurricane Katrina, ads selling FEMA trailers were on the Internet and in publications.
At its peak, there were more than 45,000 temporary housing units provided to disaster survivors in Mississippi after Katrina, said Mary Langenbacker, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s recovery office on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
“In response to Hurricane Katrina, FEMA conducted the largest housing operation in our country’s history,” Langenbacker said.
FEMA’s Katrina temporary housing mission ended in February 2012.
“One hundred percent of the housing units have been deactivated, and those households have moved on to more permanent housing,” Langenbacker said.
The government-issued trailers, brought to help the thousands left homeless by the storm, came with problems, however.
They were found to have elevated levels of formaldehyde. Classified as a carcinogen, formaldehyde can cause breathing problems.
Still, Shirley Acker of Pearlington said her family’s FEMA trailer was a “godsend.”
“The FEMA trailers were a blessing, even though we later found out about the formaldehyde,” Acker said. “They were convenient and comfortable. They were just somewhere to live comfortable until we got everything back into order. ... I had no problem with them. A lot of people said their eyes were burning, and they didn’t know what was going on. We were able to stay in them until we got our homes back going or we got new homes.”
The formaldehyde in the trailers led to lawsuits from some Katrina victims and a class-action settlement with manufacturers and some contractors who installed or maintained the trailers. Twenty-one FEMA trailer manufacturers agreed to pay a total of $14.8 million to resolve claims.
Kim King, who lived in a FEMA trailer for more than two years in Waveland, said FEMA asked if she wanted to buy the trailer.
“Two years were enough for me,” King said. “I was happy to turn it back in.”
King said living in a FEMA trailer was difficult, but it was helpful to have one. “I mean the alternative was sleeping out in the elements.”
King said a FEMA trailer needed to be viewed as emergency shelter.
“It was always wild that some people complained as if it was meant as a long-term means of lodging,” she said. “Our trailer had a full-size toilet, a tub, full refrigerator and was fine for us. As we lost everything, we had lots of room.
“We did have the wall fall on us one day as they had been built in a hurry, and we could see where they glued the wall on the frame,” King said.
King said the trailers were “inspected” monthly, which was really a joke since no one really “inspected” anything. “Instead they would just ask for a signature.”
In 2009, FEMA began disposing of the trailers brought to Mississippi, with the General Service Administration acting as the sales agent. GSA conducted Internet auctions throughout the United States.
In February 2009 GSA sold several bulk lots of the Katrina units — 101,802 units on 11 Internet auctions.
Over time, the average amount of proceeds per unit decreased from approximately $2,000 to approximately $1,500 per unit. A portion of the proceeds were to returned to FEMA to offset the cost of purchasing and maintaining them.
|
03a5fad3db0cb9385d2321c03ea0bb38
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/31/rally-alabama-secession/71452364/
|
Rally for Alabama to secede from nation falls flat
|
Rally for Alabama to secede from nation falls flat
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — If support for the secession of Alabama from the United States can be measured in rally attendance, it’s safe to assume Alabama won’t be seceding any time soon.
More than 300 people were expected at the Alabama Flaggers Secession Rally, according to group co-director Freda Mincey-Burton and the event’s Facebook page. On the steps of the Capitol on Saturday, attendance peaked at 30 people — including event organizers — and rain showers after the first hour of the event sealed it as a failure. The five-hour rally ended after about two hours.
“This is really shocking me that these people aren’t here,” said Mincey-Burton.
The rally was originally scheduled for Friday. According to the event’s Facebook page, it was rescheduled to Saturday to improve attendance.
Gaining state majority in favor of separating from the country is one of the biggest requirements for a successful secession. After seeing the turnout for Saturday’s event, Alabama Flaggers co-director Justin Burton acknowledged the difficulty of getting so many people behind his cause.
“Getting the majority is the biggest obstacle,” Burton said. “People don’t understand secession and are scared. They don’t know what is involved, and all they see is civil war.”
Mincey-Burton and her husband Justin said their group is not a radical or racist group. Mincey-Burton pointed to work done building monuments for Confederate soldiers in Gadsden and the state of Mississippi. She said the push for secession stems from the country “treading on” Southern heritage in the wake of the Charleston shooting and subsequent removal of the Confederate flag from the public eye.
“The Civil War happened, and there’s not anything anybody can do to sweep it under the rug,” Mincey-Burton said. “Taking the battle flag down, taking statues of Robert E. Lee down, that’s like taking George Washington out of the Revolutionary War. This happened. Face it, and get over it.”
She and other speakers called out Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley for removing the flag from the Capitol grounds.
“Turncoat Bentley, Benedict Arnold Bentley, he took the flag down illegally, and I think there should be an injunction,” Mincey-Burton said.
While marketed as a secession rally, the event also was used to show appreciation for and continue to protest the removal of the Confederate battle flag. Thomas Taunton, a Montgomery resident, and James Perry, of Macon County, do not support the secession of Alabama and were only present to rally for the right to preserve Confederate history.
“It’s not a slavery flag. It’s not a racist flag,” Taunton said. “It’s to represent our forefathers who died fighting for the Confederacy, and we stand beside them.”
Perry said he had a problem with the media’s preference to publicize black heritage, and said his ancestors are dishonored by the lack of acceptance of Confederate history.
“People have been brainwashed on how to think about this flag,” Perry said. “There are 24 million blacks in this country. There’s 82 million descendants of Confederate soldiers in this country. Why do we have to listen to their heritage all the time? Every time Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King broke wind, (the media) reports it, and it’s on the front page. There’s not a sign down here commemorating the Confederacy, and it was born here.”
As of 2013, the U.S. Census reported a population of about 45 million blacks and estimates on Confederate descendants range anywhere from 50 million to 80 million. Taunton and Perry’s disagreement is not with black history, but the trampling of theirs, they said.
“Jefferson Davis Highway was Jefferson Davis Highway before it was ever Atlanta Highway,” Taunton said. “Why are they going to tear down our heritage, and let the black people go on with their heritage? We don’t have any problem with their heritage, but don’t deny us ours.”
Also in attendance were members of the League of the South, a “Southern Nationalist organization whose ultimate goal is a free and independent Southern republic.”
Speeches at the rally ranged from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to World War II and the frustration of political correctness. In the end, all official messages were centered on Confederate pride and the goal of eventually seceding from the country.
|
49c1becfa069cb5721765cff4980adf3
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/31/voices-scene--burning-man/71453610/
|
Voices: At Burning Man, pretty much anything goes
|
Voices: At Burning Man, pretty much anything goes
Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story overstated the relative size of Black Rock City. It would be among the ten biggest cities in Nevada.
BLACK ROCK CITY, Nev. — A young woman stepped into the dusty glare of my headlights, and I realized she was topless. And pantsless.
The only things she wore:. A playing card strapped around her waist with a clear rubber band — and a giant smile.
"Welcome home!" she said. "Is this your first time?"
Yes. Yes, it is.
I'm spending the week embedded in the annual Burning Man festival, reporting on the newest tech trends, the dust storms and the luxury camps that drew criticism last year. The temporary city we've created is called Black Rock City, and this week it will be one of the largest "cities" in Nevada.
Newcomers like me are pulled from their vehicles to celebrate. In my case, the young woman ordered me to take off my shirt and make dust angels as lights flashed and music drifted on the wind. I banged a bell as my greeters yelled, "Not a virgin," to mark my transition into the encampment.
Burning Man draws approximately 70,000 people annually to the Nevada desert for the almost-anything-goes event. A sign at the entrance warns arrivals that all laws apply, but there's a lot of people and not a lot of cops.
That's kind of the point: Organizers create and encourage a freewheeling experience in which many take illegal drugs, and casual sex is not only common, but widely condoned. Many of the themed camps — the festival encourages people to create "interactive" sites open to all — seem intended to confront and then contort societal norms. But norms are reserved for the outside world, the Default World.
Here, creativity is everywhere. Elaborate sculptures reach toward the sky. Others blast flames. Endless electronic dance music pumps out as neon-lit vehicles circle. Strangers hug you without warning.
And the outfits. The outfits! This is a place for extreme personal expression in a way that might make many Americans feel uncomfortable. Here, lots of people go shirtless, and there's a decent amount wearing even less than my greeter.
Media access is tightly controlled, and the organizers use copyright law to enforce the rules. Photographers, for instance, must sign a contract agreeing not to exploit people's images for personal gain. The last thing Burning Man organizers want is to see participants' images used to sell stuff.
And while it took me a whole day to notice, now I can't stop marveling at the complete lack of stuff being sold or marketed. Corporate logos on rental trucks are usually covered up or altered, and there's no one hawking, well, anything.
It's a welcome relief from the constant pressure of consumerism we face every day. Gone are the messages to buy buy buy. Instead, we're asked to simply be. (There's no official Internet provider, and mobile phone coverage is iffy.)
Don't get me wrong. Virtually everyone has spent a lot of money to be here, and spending a week requires lots of logistics. I watched as participants stocked up on cheap plastic junk in Reno, pouring millions of dollars into that city's economy while allowing Burning Man to maintain its reputation as the world's largest Leave No Trace event.
Here, the entire economy is based on the concept of gifting. People give you things out of the kindness of their hearts, with "gifts" ranging from sculptures to free booze to Tantric massages.
Sunday, a young woman handed me a beaded bracelet she'd made, with each colored bead a piece of Morse code.
Unfurled, if you know how to read it, the bracelet quotes Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
For the next week, this remote Nevada desert is the biggest stage of all.
Hughes is USA TODAY's Denver-based correspondent. You can follow him at @trevorhughes
|
d900c27932daebc3581d8d15b9b8e40d
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/08/annulments-celebrities-catholic-church/71874694/
|
Some high-profile people have obtained annulments
|
Some high-profile people have obtained annulments
The issue of annulments, now in the news after Pope Francis said he wants to simplify the procedure, has bubbled up before amid a swirl of questions including this one: Are they just for the rich and famous or can anyone get one?
One of the most high-profile people to have received an annulment from the Catholic Church was Sen. Edward Kennedy. The Massachusetts Democrat received the annulment from his first wife, Joan, in the 1990s after he reportedly admitted that he wasn't being honest when he vowed he would be faithful. The couple, who married in 1958, divorced in 1983.
Annulments: What you need to know
The annulment didn't become public knowledge until Kennedy took Communion at the funeral of his mother, Rose Kennedy, in 1995, according to Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer.
News that Kennedy's second marriage to Victoria Reggie in a civil ceremony in 1992 was blessed by the church set off another ripple of questions and criticism about whether annulments were for the privileged or easily obtained by anyone, even people at odds with their Catholic faith, as some viewed Kennedy.
Kennedy's nephew, Joseph Kennedy II, had his marriage to Sheila Rauch Kennedy annulled after their divorce in 1991. He argued that he was mentally unable to enter into marriage at the time. In a remarkable turnabout, Rauch-Kennedy sought and won an appeal in 2007 from the Vatican that invalidated the annulment of the 12-year marriage.
The celebrity match of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise also put annulments in the news when the 10-year union between the actors dissolved in 2001. Experts said Kidman didn't need an annulment because in the eyes of the Catholic Church her marriage to Cruise, a well-known Scientologist, didn't happen. The wedding was performed in the Church of Scientology and wasn't recognized by the Catholic faith.
An annulment is a ruling that a marriage is not valid because certain conditions are not being met, such as free choice, psychological maturity and willingness to have children. The ruling is based on a finding that the marriage contract was fundamentally flawed from the start and invalid in the eyes of the church. On Tuesday, Pope Francis announced a more streamlined procedure for speeding up the process.
Pope Francis to reform marriage annulments
|
f157960e51397317a1212d483525700c
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/09/embattled-county-clerk-needs-rest/71922770/
|
Embattled Ky. county clerk to return to work Monday
|
Embattled Ky. county clerk to return to work Monday
MOREHEAD, Ky. — Kim Davis, the embattled Kentucky county clerk at the center of a dispute over gay marriage and religious liberty, is resting at home with her family and won't return to work until next week.
"I am deeply moved by all those who prayed for me. All I can say is that I am amazed and very grateful," she said in a statement issued through her lawyers. "I am enjoying spending time with my husband, my family, and my three dogs. I have also been spending time reading boxes of letters expressing support and prayers from people around the country."
The Rowan County clerk was jailed on Thursday for refusing to comply with a federal judge's order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. During her six days in the Carter County Detention Center, her deputies complied with the order, which satisfied the court.
On Wednesday, the county clerk's office opened at 8 a.m. on schedule without Davis, its highest elected official. Three protesters were there holding signs. Deputy clerk Brian Mason, noting that the office would issue licenses to anyone seeking them, said 10 had been issued since Friday, seven of them to same-sex couples, the Associated Press reports.
U.S. District Judge David Bunning released Davis from jail Tuesday on the condition that she does not interfere with her deputies issuing the licenses.
Her attorneys, however, say the licenses issued in her absence are not valid and that Davis still refuses to authorize the forms, despite her detention. However, Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, which represents her, never directly addressed whether Davis would try to re-establish the policy upon her return.
"I love God, love people, and love my work. I hope we will continue to respect these values and that America remains a place where all three can live in harmony," Davis said in her statement Wednesday afternoon.
Ky. clerk Kim Davis thanks supporters on release from jail
Bunning said he was satisfied that the county clerk’s office would comply with his order. But he warned Davis she would be sanctioned again if she violates the conditions of her release and ordered the court-appointed lawyers for her deputy clerks to report every 14 days on whether they are continuing to comply with their sworn pledge to issue licenses to all couples.
Five of her six deputy clerks — all except her son Nathan — said under oath they would do so.
Mason, who has worked in the office about 18 months, said he hasn't spoke to Davis since her release but plans to continue issuing the forms even if she objects. He said he doesn't have concerns about losing his job.
As far as backlash in the community: "I've seen comments on the videos online, but I pay not attention to them," he said.
Huckabee, Cruz plan to meet with Ky. clerk ahead of rally
Licenses are issued in Kentucky under the authority of the county clerk, and one couple returned to the courthouse Wednesday to file their completed forms.
The dispute has served as a rallying cry for religious groups who championed Davis' actions as an expression of her religious liberty. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was on hand in front of the detention center Tuesday to escort her to a podium for a rally of about a thousand supporters.
“I just want to give God the glory,” she said, as Christian groups from around the region roared in support of her release. “His people have rallied, and you are a strong people.”
Davis, who took the stage as Eye of the Tiger played over a speaker system, urged the crowd to keep pressing because “he is here,” but she declined all comment at an earlier news conference. When a reporter asked whether her time in jail was worth it, Davis only nodded her head yes for a moment.
Staver told reporters that she had not abandoned her conscience. “We are pleased that Kim Davis has been ordered released,” he said in a statement. But "she can never recover the past six days of her life spent in an isolated jail cell like a common criminal because of her conscience and religious convictions.”
John Kasich: Ky. clerk Kim Davis 'should follow the law'
Staver said in an email Tuesday night that "we need time to speak with Kim about the order, and she needs time to rest."
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents four couples who sued her, said its goal has been achieved.
“This case was brought to ensure that all residents of Rowan County, gay and straight, could obtain marriage licenses,” William Sharp, legal director for the ACLU of Kentucky, said in a news release.
The Rowan County Rights Coalition, which has been protesting Davis' no-license policy for weeks, was not planning any events outside the courthouse Wednesday.
"Licenses are being issued, that's all we wanted," said coalition member Nashia Fife. "This is not about Kim Davis. We support Judge Bunning's decision to release her."
DeWayne Barnett, a local resident who stopped by the office Wednesday, said Davis has provided excellent service and has been helpful anytime he has had a problem. Still, Barnett said he is ashamed of the stance she has taken with same-sex couples.
'Free Kim Davis': This is just what gay rights groups wanted to avoid
"That is not the official I elected," he said. "That is not the kind of people I want representing me in my hometown. What's wrong with other people wanting to live their lives. Why shouldn't they be allowed — the gays and lesbians — the same misery that I have in my marriage?"
Randy Smith, a local evangelist who has organized supporters of Davis, said the matter isn't over and he accused Bunning of political posturing. He said he would be surprised if Davis complied with Bunning's order.
"I don't see anything that has changed," he said. "She was not willing to comply in the courtroom, and I don't think five or six days in the jailhouse is going to make a difference."
If anything, Smith said, the issue has only emboldened Christians, and "they understand that this thing is far from over."
|
d220603f766d283adb085f8d577bf759
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/09/former-nfl-players-fight-sparks-als-research/71952616/
|
Former NFL player's fight sparks ALS research
|
Former NFL player's fight sparks ALS research
Former NFL player Steve Gleason’s fight against the disease trapping him inside his once-athletic body has helped inspire a groundbreaking research project that aims to defeat ALS.
The project, announced Wednesday, will be spearheaded by Johns Hopkins University’s Robert Packard Center for ALS Research, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Regenerative Medicine Institute and the Massachusetts General Hospital Neurological Clinical Research Institute. It represents the research initiative of Answer ALS, which grew out of a summit for an advocacy group Gleason founded and has been described as the largest single, coordinated effort to end the fatal neuromuscular illness.
“The bottom line is this will teach us about ALS…We hope this will teach us the pathway to an effective drug,” says physician Jeffrey Rothstein of Johns Hopkins, executive director of Answer ALS. Now, there’s only one federally approved drug that slows the disease a little bit, and “at a minimum, we need a drug to slow the disease (more.) What we aspire to are drugs to reverse the disease, but we’ll take it one step at a time.”
MLB to honor Gehrig on anniversary of famed speech
Experts estimate that around 30,000 Americans are living with ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, at any given time — with a new diagnosis, and an ALS death, every 90 minutes in the United States. The disease causes the gradual degeneration of motor nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, resulting in difficulty swallowing and breathing and eventually paralysis.
Gleason, who played for the New Orleans Saints from 2000-2008, was diagnosed in 2011. He and his wife, Michel, formed the non-profit Team Gleason to inspire other patients to thrive after their diagnoses, provide them with technology, equipment and services, raise awareness of the disease and find ways to end it.
The Team Gleason Summit was held in 2013, bringing together more than 200 world-renowned researchers, as well as patients, caregivers and advocates, says Clare Durrett, associate executive director of Team Gleason. Durrett says Gleason and other patients asked researchers to come back with research plans.
At the same time, Rothstein says he and other scientists were working on research funded by the National Institutes of Health involving "induced pluripotent", or iPSC cell lines from ALS patients, which are adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells. But that initiative involved less than 20 subjects. Rothstein says this line of research and the summit were “two intersecting paths” that resulted in the initiative announced Wednesday.
Former Saints player Gleason wins Halas Award
To better understand ALS and discover therapies, scientists plan to “urgently” evaluate at least 1,000 ALS patients, collecting data at 5-7 clinics in various areas of the country over several years, in part using wearable technology. Scientists also hope to greatly widen the cell research, generating iPSC-derived brain cells from this large group of patients; and combine big data, biological analytics and technology. To speed up progress, all of the data will be available for free to the ALS research community.
“The idea is to bring solutions for patients now, and for patients in the future,” Durrett says.
So far, $20 million has been raised for Answer ALS in a funding effort led by the Leandro P. Rizzuto Foundation and the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research. Donors include the National Football League, the PGA TOUR and others, including insurer Travelers, where CEO Jay Fishman recently announced he has ALS.
Organizers are still hoping to raise another $5 million for the first phase of the project, which will be coordinated for the ALS Finding a Cure Foundation through the Robert Packard Center and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Gleason, who now expresses himself using technology that allows him to type through eye movements, writes that it’s inspiring to see how much money has been raised in a short time. “I believe that if we commit to this effort, on this scale," he adds, "we will have meaningful results in our lifetime.”
|
879f00c48cb2511d8a8a402a1e4a56ae
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/09/newborn-switched-reunited-family/71921234/
|
Dallas couple reunited with child after baby swap
|
Dallas couple reunited with child after baby swap
DALLAS — A Dallas couple who said their child was switched in El Salvador have been reunited with their biological child.
And they have named him Moses.
Rich Cushworth and his wife, Mercy Casanalles, of Dallas were reunited with the baby Monday after they were given the wrong baby by a private hospital in El Salvador.
“They are overwhelmed with happiness,” said James Read, a close friend of the couple. “He sent me a text message … and the text message simply said, ‘Dude, they found my child.' "
Read and other friends at the Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas — where the couple met and fell in love — see God’s hand in all this. They are calling the outcome an answer to prayer.
Dallas couple says newborn was switched in El Salvador
“They will never get over that,” said John Hollar, director of the institute. “They will never get over that other baby. It will always be a part of their memory. On the other hand, they got their baby back and they have a story to tell of God’s delivering power.”
The family’s El Salvadoran attorney and friends in Dallas also say the reunion comes with a bittersweet feeling, because they had to give up a child they had grown to love. The couple is expected to remain in El Salvador for a few more weeks as they iron out the details to bring their child back to Texas.
Controversy continues to swirl around the doctor and the hospital in the Central American country. The hospital calls it human error and not something more nefarious, according to El Salvadoran media accounts. Authorities there, however, are investigating how it happened. The doctor still faces criminal charges over the situation, at least for now.
The couple’s dramatic international saga began in May when Casanalles gave birth to the little boy in her homeland. They named him Jacob. A day-and-a-half later, doctors brought her a baby that she was certain was not hers.
“I understand that they’re claiming at the hospital that it was just a mistake, but she was resistant at the very first,” Hollar said. “She told them, ‘This is not my baby. I think you’ve given me the wrong baby.’ And they said, ‘No, no no,’ and she tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t hear her at all.”
Casanalles, an El Salvadoran national, returned to Dallas several weeks ago to continue her studies at the institute.
Once in the United States, the couple decided to have DNA testing. Those tests showed the child they brought back with them could not be theirs. So they returned to El Salvador to find their baby.
The couple also had publicly said that they hoped to keep the other child, but that was not to be. That child was reunited with the other family.
Hollar said Casanalles was suspicious that it might not have been an accidental switch because prior to the birth of the child, the midwife kept saying, “Your baby’s going to be dark.”
DNA testing was conducted on all of the male babies that were born in the hospital on the same days as theirs, which led to the reunion Monday.
Word quickly began to spread among their friends in North Texas.
Late Monday night, Hollar received a text message from his secretary. It read: “Did you hear? Mercy found her baby. He’s in her arms now.’’
He woke his wife up to tell her about it.
“We had a little hallelujah party over the answered prayer,” Hollar said. “Usually in countries like most of the countries in Central America, when a baby disappears, he’s gone forever. To have this kind of result, we just feel like God answered our prayers.”
Read, who originally introduced the couple, said Cushworth is a man of few words, while Casanalles is driven and passionate. The couple currently live on the campus of Christ For the Nations Institute in Dallas. Cushworth — a Zimbabwe-born British citizen — is a graduate of the institute.
“They are missionaries at heart,” Read said. “They’re such a sweet couple. They balance each other out.”
The baby was Cushworth’s first. Casanalles has a 12-year-old son from a prior relationship.
Hollar and Read said the outcome comes with mixed emotions.
“She’s a mom. She’s a mother, and she loved this baby,” Hollar said. “It was just terrible to have to turn loose of a baby she has learned to love over three months.”
But both men see a Biblical message, too.
“I mean, what’s the chance of them naming their baby 'Jacob,' from the Hebrew word meaning 'the replacement?' " Read asked. “And then — three months later — finding baby Moses ... exactly the same as what happened in the Old Testament scripture."
|
e58c5564c22c62e94b08dd9d20c6a3f9
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/10/bioterrorism-military-labs-specimens-mistakes-plague-encephalitis/71888694/
|
Latest military lab concerns involve plague bacteria, deadly viruses
|
Latest military lab concerns involve plague bacteria, deadly viruses
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon's most secure laboratories may have mislabeled, improperly stored and shipped samples of potentially infectious plague bacteria, which can cause several deadly forms of disease, USA TODAY has learned.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flagged the practices after inspections last month at an Army lab in Maryland, one of the Pentagon's most secure labs. That helped prompt an emergency ban on research on all bioterror pathogens at nine laboratories run by the Pentagon, which was already reeling from revelations that another Army lab in Utah had mishandled anthrax samples for 10 years.
Army Secretary John McHugh ordered the research moratorium on Sept. 2, Pentagon officials say, out of an abundance of caution.
Moreover, officials point out that continuing testing has shown the suspect samples of plague contain a weakened version, and not the fully virulent form that was of concern to lab regulators at the CDC.
There is no danger to the public from the plague and encephalitis specimens found in the labs, said Army spokesman Dov Schwartz. After extensive testing, no danger has been found to scientists and researchers who have worked with the vials, he said. Final test results are expected by the end of the month.However, for the first time since the scandal broke in May about an Army lab's botched handling of anthrax, the Pentagon is now acknowledging that worries now extend to other lethal agents that it studies. In addition to the plague samples and some additional anthrax specimens, the CDC has raised concerns about military labs' handling of specimens created from two potentially deadly viruses that are also classified as bioterror pathogens: Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and Eastern equine encephalitis virus, which can cause rare but serious illnesses in people, including deadly inflammation of the brain.
The bacteria that cause plague, Yersinia pestis, can cause several types of serious and potentially fatal illnesses: bubonic plague, which has symptoms that include swollen lymph nodes; pneumonic plague, which involves the infection spreading to the lungs; and septicemic plague, which may involve skin and other tissues turning black and dying. It's the pathogen often blamed for the Black Death that killed millions of people in Europe during the 14th century. Today antibiotics can be used to treat the diseases, but plague still kills about 11% of those sickened, according to the CDC.
Untreated pneumonic plague has a fatality rate of about 93% and can be spread from person to person through aerosols generated during coughing.
The suspect specimens, which may be live despite being labeled as killed or weakened, indicate a wider range of dangerous bioterror pathogens being handled using sloppy safety practices at laboratories operated by the U.S. military. They also further illustrate the risks faced by other scientists who rely on pathogen "death certificates" to know whether or not a provided sample is still infectious and can be worked with safely without special protective equipment. An ongoing USA TODAY Media Network investigation has revealed numerous mishaps at government, university and private labs that operate in the secretive world of biodefense research prompting growing concern in Congress and among biosafety experts.
The revelations about plague and other specimens only add to bipartisan concerns in Congress about the effectiveness of safety practices and federal regulation at military and other labs working with dangerous pathogens.
The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Fred Upton, R-Mich., and ranking Democrat, Frank Pallone of New Jersey, in a joint statement on Thursday said: “Anthrax being mishandled is disconcerting enough, but now the mishandling also includes other potentially dangerous viruses including plague. The committee has zero tolerance for these widespread mishaps and will continue working to ensure that the Department corrects these failures so that the nation’s bioterrorism response efforts are not hampered further."
Last week's announcement on the moratorium failed to note the CDC's concerns about the plague and equine encephalitis. Instead the Pentagon traced the ban to the mishandling of anthrax at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, called a "massive institutional failure" by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. An ongoing international investigation has found that Dugway used an ineffective irradiation method and unwittingly shipped live anthrax — labeled as killed specimens — for more than a decade that ended up in research facilities in all 50 states and several foreign countries. Although no illnesses have been reported as a result of the mistakes, several researchers who handled the specimens were put on antibiotics as a precaution.In a statement this week to USA TODAY, Schwartz said the CDC's concerns about the plague and encephalitis directly contributed to McHugh's ordering of the moratorium. An Aug. 17 CDC inspection at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland raised questions as to whether a strain of Yersinia pestis, the organism that causes plague, was infectious even though it was stored in an area designated for non-infectious material.
Concern grows over Pentagon's handling of anthrax
The new CDC investigation is focused on specimens created and stored by Dugway, Edgewood and two other military labs for further distribution by the Defense Department's Critical Reagents Program, a scientific materials supply group that offers a catalog of what are supposed to be "inactivated" and other pathogen specimens for researchers to use in developing and testing biodefense products, such as detection equipment and diagnostic tests.
Lab regulators at the CDC declined to be interviewed but acknowledged they are investigating issues at the four labs and the Critical Reagents Program. "CDC has identified a number of transfers of concern involving multiple organisms," the agency said in a statement in response to USA TODAY's questions.
Most of the shipments of the specimens went to other Defense Department facilities, the CDC said, and the agency's investigators are "working to track shipments and confirm the safety of those working with these materials." It is uncertain at this stage of the investigation, the CDC said, whether the material in the shipments contained live "select agent" pathogens, or a killed or weakened version that doesn't pose a severe risk to public health and is exempt from federal regulation.
Select agent is the government's term for certain viruses, bacteria and toxins that are regulated because of their potential to be used as biological weapons and the potential risks they pose to public health and agriculture.
"At this time, there is nothing to suggest risk to the health of workers or the general public," the CDC said.
Pentagon halts work with bioterror germs at 9 labs
Vials of plague specimens were the first to draw the CDC's concerns during an Aug. 17 inspection at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center. How those samples were being handled prompted lab regulators to conduct a review of the labeling of specimens offered to other labs through the Critical Reagents Program's catalog, the Army's Schwartz said.
"The CDC raised questions about the labeling of some material listed within the catalog, including a strain of Bacillus anthracis and derivatives of equine encephalitis viruses, and consequently, whether this material was properly handled and shipped by the Department," Schwartz said. Bacillus anthracis is the bacterium that causes anthrax.
Gregory Koblentz, director of the biodefense program at George Mason University in Virginia, said the mounting issues at Pentagon labs show the need for a review by independent experts — not just the current peer review of safety that the military is undertaking during its moratorium.
“Since there are now concerns about the biosafety practices at multiple DoD labs there needs to be an independent review of the military's biosafety policies and practices,” Koblentz said Thursday. He said the Critical Reagents Program is an important biodefense resource. “It’s crucial that all problems with handling and shipping inactivated samples be resolved quickly so the program can resume its important role in strengthening U.S. biopreparedness.”
Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist who has testified before Congress on federal lab safety problems, said that in the wake of the Defense Department’s bungling with anthrax samples “it is unsurprising that similar misfeasance occurred in the DoD programs for producing killed versions of other bioweapons agents.”
Ebright said mounting questions about biosafety practices at Pentagon labs should be a warning to researchers that they need to independently verify the specimens they receive from military labs because the “death certificates” sent with supposedly killed samples “are not worth the paper they’re printed on.”
Last week USA TODAY was the first to report that the Pentagon had ordered an immediate moratorium on work with a wide range of potential bioterror bacteria, viruses and toxins at nine biodefense laboratories while they perform safety reviews to ensure they are properly handling select agent pathogens.
Inside America's secretive biolabs
McHugh issued his order for the sweeping safety review two days after lab regulators at the CDC on Aug. 31 ordered Dugway’s labs to suspend work will all types of select agent pathogens because of new revelations about sloppy biosafety practices at the Utah facility. Dugway officials, in testing surfaces in their laboratories, detected anthrax bacteria on the floors of two rooms where staff had worked with the deadly pathogen — an area where it shouldn't have been found.
The military labs covered by the safety review and moratorium include the four that produce specimens for the Critical Reagents Program: U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Dugway, the Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center and the Naval Medical Research Center's Biological Defense Research Directorate. McHugh's Sept. 2 order also called for "validating" current inventories, catalog items and record keeping for the military's Critical Reagents Program (CRP) and "ensuring that all materials associated with the CRP are properly accounted for." The labs were given 10 days to report back the findings of their safety reviews, according to McHugh's memo.
Read full coverage of USA TODAY's ongoing investigation of safety issues at labs nationwide: biolabs.usatoday.com.
Follow USA TODAY reporters Alison Young and Tom Vanden Brook on Twitter: @alisonannyoung and @tvandenbrook
|
b864c6364b7dbf4955078d3e30bcccd3
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/10/obama-iran-nuclear-agreement-congres/72003758/
|
Obama thanks veterans who back Iran deal
|
Obama thanks veterans who back Iran deal
President Obama thanked a group of veterans Thursday for backing the Iran nuclear agreement, saying they understand it is a good diplomatic alternative to the prospect of a military confrontation with Tehran.
"They know the consequences when we rush into war," Obama said after meeting with veterans who support the Iran deal. "They understand what it means when we act without broad international support and when we fail to consider unintended consequences."
Obama and aides have repeatedly warned that war could result if congressional Republicans somehow block the deal in which the U.S. and allies end economic sanctions on Iran as it gives up the means to make nuclear weapons.
It seems likely the deal with go through. This week, the Obama administration secured enough support in Congress to sustain a veto of any resolution of disapproval, should Republicans be able to pass one.
House, Senate split on Iran nuclear deal strategy
Republicans and other critics say the agreement leaves too much room for Iran to cheat and pursue nuclear weapons it could use to back up its threats against Israel. They have called for intensified sanctions on Iran.
Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry met at the White House with veterans and Gold Star mothers who have lost friends and children in combat. His guests have lobbied lawmakers to support the Iran deal, the president said.
The supporters do not trust Iran, Obama said, but see the deal as "strong and principled diplomacy" that can head off any kind of war against Iran's nuclear program.
"We have to try to solve problems without resort to military force," Obama said.
|
dfdbb939363dc989f710275755fb5297
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/11/after-14-years-911-memories-still-sear-heart/72054898/
|
After 14 years, 9/11 memories still sear the heart
|
After 14 years, 9/11 memories still sear the heart
NEW YORK — It still sears the heart. And the memories still send shivers down spines and raise the hairs on arms.
On Friday morning, crowds gathered once again at the site of the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center to confront those 14-year-old memories and remember those who died when terrorists plowed two hijacked planes into the city's tallest buildings.
Inside the memorial to the victims of those horrific hours, family members, officials and dignitaries observed six moments of silence as the names of the dead were read by their loved ones.
Organizers of the Ground Zero ceremony decided in 2012 to stop letting elected officials read names, though politicians still can attend. Over the years, some victims' relatives have invoked political matters while reading names — such as declaring that Sept. 11 should be a national holiday — but others have sought to keep the focus personal.
Under a cover of fast-moving clouds, a mixture of commuters, New Yorkers and tourists gathered at the entrance to the memorial ceremonies, many of them drawn by the anniversary.
New Yorker Matt Johnson, a student originally from California, said he felt he had to come down to the site on the anniversary. "I've always been really impacted by the events of 14 years ago," he said. "It's a really important part of our history and always makes me emotional, so I figured today was an important time to come down and remember what was lost."
Johnson was only six at the time of the attacks but says he "vividly" remembers Sept. 11, 2001.
"I was brushing my teeth and my mom came upstairs, and she was crying … and I remember going downstairs and seeing what was going on. I didn't fully understand it because I was six, but I remember realizing that this was a big deal."
Being at the site itself, he said, provides a picture of the enormity of the attack. "It puts it all in perspective rather than feeling that all this happened 3.000 miles away."
Johnson's friend Robert Gray, 20, also a student, grew up in suburban New York and said his father worked just a couple of blocks from Ground Zero.
"I remember waiting an extensive amount of time for him to come home that day… I remember my mother bursting into my bedroom crying. I remember afterward the smell for a very long time because it wafted over the water from the city."
Gray said several students in school were inspired by 9/11. "I have friends of mine … who are now in the military, who have now become firemen or policemen in New York as a result of that."
He said he felt it was important to visit the site on the anniversary. "Let's go pay our respects. Be with the rest of New York and memorialize it."
14 years after 9/11, lower Manhattan is rising as WTC work nears its end
For William Nipper, visiting from Charlotte, N.C., it was his first visit to the site of the Twin Towers attack.
"I was doing jury duty," he said, recalling when he first heard about the attacks, "and we heard the news of the first plane and were taken into a courtroom and we were unable to see news until we got out."
He said he felt "shock, unbelief – just amazement that it had happened."
Looking back, he said the events reminded him that "we live in a world that is full of hate and sin … and I understand that America is not sheltered from the world – bad things happen everywhere – and this is something that happened to us."
A large contingent of police, some of them with dogs and some from the NYPD anti-terrorism squad, guarded the entry, fielding questions from members of the public. At the side, commuters streamed from the PATH train, which links to the New Jersey suburbs. They dodged among the camera-toting tourists, many of them from Britain and other parts of Europe.
Paul Troth, a visitor from Birmingham, England, said he was drawn to the site to mark the anniversary. "I feel an emotion around here," he said, "It makes it a lot more real."
9/11 death and injury total still rising
Troth said his country was accustomed to terrorism, particularly attacks by the Irish Republican Army in the 1970s and '80s, "But this was something on a global scale. This wasn't a localized event – it was something that would have an impact for years to come."
He said he was impressed by the transformation of the site. "I think it's fantastic, he said. "We've got his huge landmark … that everyone can see from miles away. It's a positive step to rebuild something quite so magnificent. It's like defiance in a way."
In the background, work continued in the shadow of the almost completed One World Trade Center, also known as the Freedom Tower. At the patriotically chosen height of 1,776 feet, it rises – 48 feet higher than even the top of an antenna on the North Tower of the two buildings it replaced – thrusting defiantly into the morning sky.
Now being constructed is a giant transit center that will bring together several New York City subways as well as the suburban PATH system. Topping this building is a giant crown that resembles that on the Statue of Liberty, which towers not far away in the waters between New York and New Jersey.
Visitors to the site talked about how the new buildings, especially the Freedom Tower, represented the resiliency of Americans in the face of terrorists.
Peter Erbe, from Concord, N.C., a suburb of Charlotte, said he felt it was important to visit the site and "feel the experience."
He said he felt "a lot of emotion. … It's hard not to be moved by being here," and that the transformation of the site "shows the resilience and ability of Americans to bounce back and say 'Nuts to you guys.'"
Inside the memorial, loved ones remembered the nearly 3,000 lives lost in the surrounding blocks. Lives of office workers, firefighters, police officers, delivery workers. Rich people, poor people and in between, they all became equal in death.
The solemn occasion called for a pause in the reading of the name six times to mark the critical moments of that tragic day.
At 8:46 a.m., a moment of silence marked the moment when the first plane arrived, plowing into the North Tower with a never-forgotten cacophony of disintegration and explosion.
In Washington, President Obama accompanied by first lady Michelle Obama, stepped solemnly from the White House onto the lawn Friday morning for a brief commemoration service at that precise moment.
Against a backdrop of an honor guard and a crowd gathered for the occasion, the Obamas stood apart with heads bowed and hands over their hearts as a bell tolled to mark the moment the first plane hit the towers. In the silence, a bugler played Taps.
Children of 9/11 want to focus on the future
Then they turned and walked slowly back into the White House as a flag above the building flew at half-staff. The president was also scheduled to observe the anniversary with a visit to Fort Meade, Md., in recognition of the military's work to protect the country.
The five other critical moments of 9/11 framed the day that will linger long in the nation's memory:
• At 9:03 a.m. came the second attack, when an airliner roared down the Hudson River and pierced the South Tower.
• At 9:37 a.m., the aerial attack on the Pentagon.
At the site on Friday, officials and family members observed a moment of silence, followed by brief remarks from Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stood in front of seven American flags fluttering in a constant breeze.
Carter expressed his condolences to family members, and said that after the tragedy of 9/11, "We come back stronger than ever.
World Trade Center's painful transformation to Freedom Tower
"Terrorists who hope to intimidate us will find no satisfaction or success in threatening the United States," he said.
"After 14 years and forevermore, terrorists who threaten us will learn this simply but unbending truth: No matter how long it takes, no matter where they hide, they will not escape the long arm of justice."
• At 9:59 a.m. the collapse of the South Tower only 56 minutes after it was struck.
•At 10:03 a.m, the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa., as brave passengers confronted hijackers on another plane, forcing it down and preventing another attack in Washington, D.C.
Hundreds gathered for a ceremony Friday to honor the 33 passengers and seven crewmembers aboard the flight.
• At 10:28 a.m., the dust-spewing implosion of the North Tower.
Another onlooker, Andre Ellis Jr., of Neptune, N.J., commutes to an office close to the site.
14 years later, young Millennials still remember 9/11
He said he was in his middle school math class when he heard about the attacks. "The teacher stopped everything suddenly and told us to call our parents. … And I later found out we were under attack.
"I was devastated because I had family members and friends who had parents who worked in the city, and it was just unclear what was happening. We were uncertain of their health at the time. It was a very sad time."
Ellis said it is "sort of surreal" to work near the attack site. "I pass through here every day and I just imagine what is was like being here during that time when it happened. What would I have done? It just always crosses my mind."
"My condolences go out to the families mourning every 9/11 that comes along. They have to remember what has happened. We as a country have to remember what happened. It will always be there."
Contributing: Doug Stanglin in McLean, Va.
|
f03d0c98d27efcd2ee49bc6587ea469a
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/12/man-dies-working-tulsa-state-fair-ride/72162434/
|
Man dies working on Tulsa state fair ride
|
Man dies working on Tulsa state fair ride
A worker died Saturday morning while repairing a gondola ride at the Tulsa, Okla., fairgrounds.
The worker and a partner were 90 feet above the ground replacing a pulley on the ride when the maintenance bucket they were in broke loose and plummeted to the ground, Tulsa Fire Department captain Stan May told USA TODAY.
“They were harnessed up so it left them dangling about 85-feet in the air,” May said. “One of the workers had a traumatic head injury, went unconscious on the way down and went into cardiac arrest.”
May said the man, whose name and age were not released, died a local hospital. The second worker was alert and in stable condition.
Firefighters raised a ladder platform to retrieve the men shortly before noon Saturday.
A reporter with KOKI-TV in Tulsa captured the rescue on video as the men hung in their harnesses.
The Tulsa fair is scheduled to open on Oct. 1.
|
6eb97d4b85795a719dde526a768e96bf
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/15/california-wildfires-valley-fire-butte-fire/72292512/
|
Firefighters race to contain Calif. wildfire before hot weather returns
|
Firefighters race to contain Calif. wildfire before hot weather returns
MIDDLETOWN, Calif. — Firefighters made slow progress against two fast-moving wildfires in Northern California early Tuesday, although forecasts for rain midweek signaled temporary relief in what has become a costly, intense wildfire season.
The Valley Fire and Butte Fire, the most severe of more than a dozen wildfires roaring throughout the state, have destroyed more than 750 homes and hundreds of other buildings in less than a week.
The Valley Fire has sprawled across three counties, including the wine-country counties of Napa and Sonoma, scorching 67,000 acres with only 15% containment, said Cal Fire public information officer Daniel Berlant. While the fire swept unchecked across miles of rolling, drought-parched hillsides, any progress was remarkable: as of Monday morning, the third day of the fire, containment had been zero.
Almost 2,400 firefighters were battling the blaze, part of a 11,000-person web of firefighters charged with containing all the fires. California's extreme drought, the worst on record, has led to rapid escalation in the size and destruction of the state's fires — and the resources used to fight it.
The Valley Fire led to one death. The body of Barbara McWilliams, an elderly woman suffering from advanced multiple sclerosis, was found late Sunday in her burned out home. Four firefighters have been injured.
In and around the hot-springs-resort town of Middletown, Calif., it destroyed at least 400 homes as well as a popular resort. Before the weekend's destructive blazes, Gov. Jerry Brown's administration estimated the cost from this wildfire season topped $212 million.
Nude hot springs retreat burns down from wildfire
The Valley Fire did most of its damage in eight hours on Saturday, and firefighters are preparing for a monumental battle over the next several days, fearing it could roar to life again.
Cooler temperatures reduced the fire's intensity Monday, and firefighters hope to significantly increase containment before temperatures rise again this weekend.
"We've got to take advantage right now and get containment built," Berlant said. "We will not really be able to breathe a sigh of relief until we get that containment line in place."
Firefighters typically halt the spread of wildfire by robbing them of fuel, often by digging or cutting a line through vegetation to bare ground with hand tools or bulldozers.
On Monday it rained in Sacramento, about 90 miles away, and the National Weather Service forecast intermittent showers for southern Lake County.
Southeast of the state's capital, in the Sierra Nevadas, the Butte Fire in Amador and Calaveras counties burned 71,660 acres — an area twice the size of San Francisco — and was 37% contained.
More than 4,500 firefighters are battling the fire, which has destroyed 166 residences and more than 100 other buildings.
'Gone, absolutely gone' is refrain of California wildfire
Manny Gomez spent Monday anxiously checking his phone every hour, as he visited clients for his family’s business, Apollo Heating, in San Francisco.
If the winds start blowing south in Calaveras County, his family’s vacation home near Murphys, Calif. could be in the path of the Butte County fire.
Gomez, 59, cleared brush near the house to create a 30-foot “defensible perimeter” around the property over the weekend. “You’ve got to get everything that the fire could catch. Though if the fire’s too high, there’s nothing you can do,” he said.
The fire was burning just two ridges over from their property.
“The whole side of the mountain was lit up with flames and embers. It smelled bad. The smoke was so strong, my eyes hurt, my throat was raw,” he said.
Elizabeth Weise in San Francisco contributed to this report. Follow Trevor Hughes @trevorhughes and Elizabeth Weise @eweise.
|
470b7b11badf533967d200aeab342138
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/16/jesuit-schools-thrive-pope-francis-america-trip/72314018/
|
Jesuit schools thrive in USA ahead of Pope Francis' trip
|
Jesuit schools thrive in USA ahead of Pope Francis' trip
As he studied for the priesthood in Argentina in the mid-1960s, Jorge Mario Bergoglio followed a tradition that has long been key to members of the Society of Jesus: He served as a teacher — specifically, literature and psychology at a local Catholic high school.
Fifty years later, Bergoglio is Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pontiff, and he is arriving in America as that tradition of Jesuit education not only survives but thrives. Twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities dot the landscape from Boston to Berkeley, Calif. Even as other religious institutions struggle to remake themselves, Jesuit schools persevere.
Teaching, for lack of a better term, seems to be in the Jesuits’ blood. They’ve been educators for virtually all of their 475 years. Their schools were operating in Europe long before the USA was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. The first students of a Jesuit school were attending class in Italy nearly 200 years before the birth of George Washington.
The schools are first and foremost Catholic institutions. Yet they weren’t necessarily established to train young people for the clergy, but rather for lives outside the church.
Pope Francis in America | USAToday.com
In some ways, historians say, the Jesuits’ fate as the world’s schoolmasters was a case of being in the right place at the right time. The place was Sicily and the time was 1548. The Society of Jesus had received papal approval just eight years earlier, and the small group — at the time, it had just 10 members, including its founder, Ignatius of Loyola — had been looking for a way to serve. Education wasn’t something they’d considered seriously.
“If you’d asked St. Ignatius in 1540, ‘Would you be working in schools?’ he would have given you a confused look,” says the Rev. David Collins, a Georgetown history professor and a Jesuit. “It just wasn’t on their radar screen.”
But families throughout Europe wanted their children to be educated and literate and able to engage in public discourse, Collins says. Monastic schools did a fine job teaching young men to be priests. What most families wanted, though, was “a kind of liberal arts education that helps you become a better citizen,” he says.
“There was a population that was interested in it. There was a new demand and no supply — and the Jesuits stepped in.”
Pope Francis will face a fractured U.S. Catholic Church
By 1547, the orders had grown to several hundred members, and they began offering instruction to the younger members. The original Jesuits had all studied at the University of Paris, and they realized that they had a distinct advantage: They had learned pedagogical methods that were essentially unknown in Italy.
The so-called “Parisian method” is common in schools these days, but at the time it was novel, wrote Georgetown theology historian John O’Malley. The Parisians divided students into classes, with progress from one class to a higher one in a graduated system. And the Jesuits found that the best way to teach good writing and speaking — this was less than 100 years after the debut of Gutenberg’s printing press and Bible — wasn’t simply to have students read works by great authors, but to promote “active learning” by having students write speeches, then deliver them in class.
The Jesuits also didn’t settle for just reading great dramas; students acted, sang and danced. The Parisian method, O’Malley wrote, “would give the Jesuits an edge in Italy that made their schools more attractive than the alternatives.”
In a way, it represented a new kind of missionary work, Collins says. The Jesuits didn’t necessarily push their students to become priests. They wanted them to become “thoughtful, active, engaged people in their communities.” They opened their first school for outside students in Sicily in 1548, and its success inspired them to “a massive rethinking of what kind of works would be good for them to do as a religious order.”
Within a few generations, every town in Europe either had or wanted a Jesuit school. Each one offered what we’d now think of as a solid, basic high school liberal arts education. The Jesuits soon came to be known as “the schoolmasters of Europe.”
In the USA — or what would become the USA — the Society of Jesus, like other Catholic groups, found its greatest welcome in Maryland. They opened their first school in southern Maryland in 1640. Nearly 150 years later, in 1789, in what was then part of Maryland, America’s first Catholic bishop, John Carroll, broke ground on land bordering the Potomac River to build Georgetown College. Its first student arrived two years later. He was 13.
Like many “colleges” of the era, which offered the equivalent of college-prep coursework, Georgetown later evolved into a full-fledged college (and it’s location became part of Washington, D.C.). Like many other Jesuit colleges, it eventually expanded into a university, with a law school, medical school and other professional specialties. But in its early days, Georgetown actually focused on producing a much-needed supply of priests to the growing nation. While it didn’t train them specifically for the priesthood, it prepared them for seminary.
Where is Pope Francis? A schedule of his U.S. visit
“There weren’t more than a baker’s dozen or so of priests in the whole country,” says Philip Gleason, a professor of history emeritus at Notre Dame.
In New York City in 1846, John Hughes, the bishop of New York, took a foundering five-year-old diocese school in the Rose Hill section of the Bronx and sold it to a group of exiled French Jesuits from Kentucky. It became Fordham University.
Throughout the mid-19th century, Jesuit schools — both high schools and colleges — tracked the movement of Catholics in America, as immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland and elsewhere spread out: Saint Louis University in 1820; Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., in 1830; Xavier University in Cincinnati in 1831.
In 1851, on the site of a former Franciscan Mission, Santa Clara College became California’s first institution of higher learning. Like Georgetown and other early colleges, it originally operated as a prep school.
“The Jesuit schools get founded, in a sense, to follow this new Catholic population,” Collins says. The schools not only provided a good education, they Americanized their students. “To the extent that there was an emphasis on foreign languages,” he says, “it was Latin and Greek.”
Gleason of Notre Dame says the Jesuits actually set themselves apart for more than a century by insisting that Latin was at the core of a liberal arts education. “That became more and more detached from what was happening in American higher education generally,” he says.
“The transition to an acceptance of the American system was a tough business, because the Jesuits were, more than any other group, married to this classical system,” Gleason says. “The colleges continued to maintain a very strong classic language major, and they were very much at pains to claim, ‘No, we’re not seminaries. We’re aiming to give people a liberal education, and certainly not vocational.’"
Voices: Pope Francis a ray of hope for struggling Catholics
The Jesuits were also famously tough taskmasters. Political satirist Mark Russell, an alumnus of Canisius High School in Buffalo, once quipped, “After the nuns and the Jesuits, (Marine) boot camp was anticlimactic.”
Until just the past few years, the colleges were regional institutions. Collins says that in the 1950s, you could draw a 100-mile circle around most of the Jesuit colleges and find the hometown of just about every student. Now they recruit nationally. “Some of Georgetown or Boston College’s biggest recruiting efforts are in California,” he said.
The past decade has taken a bite out of the percentage of college instructors who are Jesuits. In 2004, it was 2.1%. Now it’s just 1.5%, according to the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. Of 21,733 faculty members at the 28 Jesuit colleges, just 320 are Jesuits.
Why a plush doll is an official pope visit souvenir
Nonetheless, Deanna Howes, communications director for the association, says, “We’re very confident that our schools are in a great position to keep carrying out the mission and sticking to their Jesuit roots for a very, very long time.” She notes that Loyola University Chicago just this past August opened the first-ever Jesuit community college, Arrupe College, on its campus.
“If it’s successful, perhaps that could be replicated on other Jesuit campuses,” she says, “but it’s too soon to say.”
While many Catholic K-12 schools have struggled through closures, consolidations and the exodus of Catholic families to public charter schools and suburbs, the USA’s Jesuit colleges number exactly as many as they did a decade ago: 28.
Actually, Collins notes, when he entered the order 25 years ago, there were 47 Jesuit high schools. Today there are 64.
1. Seattle University (founded 1891)
2. Gonzaga University (1881)
3. University of San Francisco (1855)
4. Santa Clara University (1851)
5. Loyola Marymount (1911)
6. Regis University (1877)
7. Creighton University (1878)
8. Rockhurst University (1910)
9. Marquette University (1881)
10. Loyola University Chicago (1870)
11. Saint Louis University (1810)
12. Spring Hill College (1830)
13. Loyola University New Orleans (1912)
14. Detroit Mercy (1990; created from merger of University of Detroit, Mercy College)
15. John Carroll University (1886; founded as St. Ignatius College; renamed in 1923)
16. Xavier University (1831)
17. Wheeling Jesuit University (1954)
18. Canisius College (1870)
19. Le Moyne College (1946)
20. College of the Holy Cross (1843)
21. Boston College (1863)
22. Fairfield University (1942)
23. Fordham University (1841)
24. Saint Peter’s University (1872)
25. University of Scranton (1888)
26. Saint Joseph’s University (1851)
27. Loyola University Maryland (1852)
28. Georgetown University (1789)
|
d47205f04a72cb2c6c8f36c1f74ac23d
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/17/arabic-baptist-church-tennessee/72362202/
|
Arabic Baptist Church fights confusion, grasps evangelization
|
Arabic Baptist Church fights confusion, grasps evangelization
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — The cadence of Sanaa Shehata’s prayer quickens as it goes on, her Arabic words foreign to some in Arabic Baptist Church’s pews, but her rising enthusiasm and volume obvious to all. The English translation, transmitted through an earpiece, more reflects the church’s rural Tennessee setting — measured, quiet, delivered in a Southern drawl.
But white or Arab, English-speakers or not, members of the congregation have the same mission: Evangelizing Muslims in a language many of them understand.
It’s what prompted Pastor Raouf Ghattas and his wife, Carol, to put off retirement five years ago and instead start visiting area churches, explaining Islam and leading strategy sessions on how to reach its practitioners. He held services in living rooms, eventually sharing space with Grace Baptist Church near Murfreesboro’s southern city limits. It sits next door to Murfreesboro’s Islamic Center and made news by filling its yard with 23 huge crosses after the center opened in 2012.
Now, Arabic Baptist has its own building in the wide-open spaces between Murfreesboro and Smyrna and about 30-50 people attending Sunday services each week. They meet in the former Scenic Drive Baptist Church, which closed after dwindling attendance made it impossible to continue. But evidence of Scenic remains. King James Version Bibles in the pews still bear memorial inscriptions inside the front covers, placed next to brand-new, bright green New Testaments in Arabic.
It is the sole Arabic-speaking congregation in the Tennessee Baptist Convention’s church network. There are 51 Arabic-speaking Southern Baptist congregations in the entire U.S., said Roger S. “Sing” Oldham, the Southern Baptist Convention’s vice president for communications. That’s only an estimate since congregations aren’t required to be counted.
At the evening service on Sept. 13, the congregation belted out hymns in Arabic, with Carol Ghattas pausing in her translation duties to provide piano accompaniment. Raouf Ghattas’ sermon in Arabic was about seeing the true light, but he used crystal clear English for his not-too-subtle admonition to the Tennessean reporter and photographer: “If you tell the truth, you will succeed. If you don’t tell the truth, you might be successful, but not with the Lord.”
He prayed for refugees from Syria’s years-long, bloody civil war and suggested that God might bring thousands of them to Nashville as a mission for the church. This week, Kellye Branson of Catholic Charities of Tennessee said there’s been only one family brought to Nashville so far, but she anticipates several hundred Syrian refugees to arrive in the coming year, split between her agency and two other nonprofit resettlement groups.
Arabic Baptist’s immigrant members say they’re grateful to hear preaching in their own language. Longtime Tennesseans say they appreciate the church’s lack of pretense.
“I come here because of the sincerity, the walking the walk,” said Ted Chesnutt, whose parents were Southern Baptist missionaries. “We emphasize that the Bible is as relevant for the human condition today as it was in the first century.”
Change of heart
Ghattas, 69, was raised in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Egypt, Synod of the Nile, and came to the U.S. in 1976 to work in nuclear engineering.
“I was not really a believer, I did not have a personal relationship with God,” he said. “That happened when I moved here. I took some time to search many different churches and denominations, but when I accepted the Lord, he filled my heart with the passion to go and share my faith with the lost people, my people.”
He said he settled on Southern Baptist because of its conservative bent and bans on smoking and drinking. He met his future wife at a church in Fort Worth, Texas, and learned she was a fellow student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary — and a fellow Arabic speaker with a heart for missionary service. The two were soon married and off to spend the next two decades evangelizing in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia and later training others who wanted to do the same.
He taught the student missionaries to be gentle and considerate, no matter what.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘convert.’ My goal is not to change their religion but to change their hearts,” Ghattas said. “That’s why our approach in our church is so different. We don’t condemn Islam, we don’t condemn Muslims. On the other hand, we show them what Jesus and Christianity can offer them. It’s for them to make the decision which one to follow. Being negative and putting them down all the time, it will be really hard for them to listen to me.”
Tennessee homecoming
The Ghattases moved to Carol’s hometown of Murfreesboro after leaving missionary work, arriving to find Tennessee a far more diverse place than Carol left. While there’s no formal count, the president of the Nashville’s interfaith Faith & Culture Center estimates the number of Muslims in Tennessee at 65,000. Much of that number is driven by resettlement of Kurds and Somalis in and around Nashville.
For now, Arabic Baptist reaches out to them primarily through offering English classes.
Ghattas said some neighbors confused his congregation for Muslims when they first moved in, so they added another cross — a big one out front — in addition to the signage in Arabic.
The confusion doesn’t surprise Chris Turner, spokesman for the Tennessee Baptist Convention. Many natives simply don’t grasp the state’s burgeoning multi-ethnic nature, he said. Never mind sorting out more sophisticated issues of racial, national and religious connections.
“I don’t think most Tennesseans, Baptist or not, realize that we have 146 different global people groups living in our state,” Turner said. “(Tennesseans) still see us as black and white. That probably would have been true 40 years ago.”
Sharing space with Arabic Baptist helped Grace members understand multiculturalism in the Southern Baptist church, said its new pastor, Terry Wilkerson. He said he arrived a month after the guest congregation left, but the lingering positive effects were apparent.
So far, it hasn’t much affected the relationship with the mosque next door, he said. Everybody keeps to themselves.
|
9bbc7ef66ec1a54a958ebc5471a308e6
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/23/indiana-state-fair-stage-collapse/72711736/
|
Fair stage collapse damages before Ind. court
|
Fair stage collapse damages before Ind. court
INDIANAPOLIS — The question of whether the state of Indiana may still be on the hook for untold amounts of damages from the deadly stage collapse at the 2011 Indiana State Fair now rests with the Indiana Supreme Court.
The court's five justices heard arguments Wednesday morning from attorneys representing the Indiana State Fair Commission, which says it should be excused from damage claims against a sound company being sued for the collapse — claims officials argue the commission never agreed to in the first place.
But the production company, Mid-America Sound Corp., says the indemnification contract it entered into with the commission was clear and valid. And in the wake of the tragedy, which killed seven people and injured dozens of others, Mid-America Sound attorneys say the commission is now obligated to help pay liability costs.
While both sides stated their cases Wednesday, the justices won't make a decision just yet. And even if they side with Mid-America Sound, it won't bring the case to an immediate close. Such a ruling would send the case back to the trial court, where Mid-America Sound would be able to use its indemnification argument before a Marion County jury.
If the case heads back to trial court, "we have a lot of work to do, and we have to prove a case," said Robert MacGill, who represents Mid-America Sound.
Injuries minor in Ind. school stage collapse
As the case has worked its way through the Indiana court system, rulings have landed in favor of both sides. In March 2014, Marion Superior Court Judge Theodore Sosin ruled that Mid-America Sound could not shift its liability to the commission.
A year later, however, the Indiana Court of Appeals overturned that ruling. In a 2-1 opinion, the justices said the sound company could use its indemnification argument in trial court.
That's the decision that lead the commission to appeal, landing the case before the Supreme Court. Arguments on Wednesday hinged on a number of issues.
Chief among them:
Was the contract Mid-America Sound says it entered with the State Fair Commission — consisting of indemnification language written on the back of an invoice — a valid one?
And if the State Fair Commission is a government entity, doesn't that protect it from these kinds of damage claims in the first place?
Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, who represented the commission, called Mid-America Sound's invoice contract a "gotcha claim" — one that constitutes an unfair expectation based on an agreement that officials never willingly entered.
"This has all been done by invoice, and the printing on the back of an invoice," Fisher said. "There is no negotiation on any of this."
Besides, Fisher argued, the commission is a government entity. He said such a contract would violate state contract law.
In a statement released shortly after arguments concluded, Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller said: “This company’s assertion that it can shift its responsibility for money damages and legal fees onto the taxpayers of Indiana violates the clear principle of sovereign immunity behind the Tort Claims Act and other statutes the Legislature passed, which limit the financial liability that taxpayers and state government face."
MacGill disagreed.
Indiana not liable for firm's claims in stage collapse
"The state is not a party to this dispute. The Indiana State Fair Commission is a party to this dispute," he said, adding that there is a "fundamental distinction" between the commission and state entities that the state says are entitled to immunity from indemnification.
"The State Fair Commission is largely a commercial enterprise," MacGill said, adding that it sells food and entertainment and is paid by consumers in return.
As for the contract, MacGill said it was a legitimate one that had been signed into for years before the 2011 collapse.
"They call it boilerplate" language, he said. "We call it a negotiated contract."
If the case does go back to trial court and a jury rules in favor of Mid-America Sound, it's still not clear how the commission would pay out such a liability, or even how much that liability would cost.
Asked during arguments where the money would come from — whether it be taxpayer dollars or some other fund accessible by the State Fair Commission — attorney John C. Trimble, who also represented the commission, couldn't give an answer.
The terms of Mid-America Sound's settlement with the collapse victims, meanwhile, remains confidential. Last December, the law firm representing victims of the collapse announced that it had settled with 19 companies, including Mid-America Sound, for an amount totaling nearly $50 million.
But the firm did not provide much of a breakdown except to say that the amount included the $11 million already paid out by the state.
State officials paid the maximum obligation of $5 million and an additional $6 million in public funds freed up by the Indiana General Assembly.
The $5 million cap was recently the subject of its own Indiana Court of Appeals case. In that case, attorneys for the only victim who did not accept settlement money from the state asked the court to throw out the law that limits the amount of damages the state can give out after a tragedy. The court upheld the $5 million cap as constitutional, and state Supreme Court justices decided not to hear an appeal, keeping that appellate ruling intact.
Contributing: John Tuohy and the Associated Press
|
f7471b8afd02bf6f948da14444850146
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/23/nypd-traffic-queen-pope-obama-united-nations/72673690/
|
For NYPD 'Traffic Queen' pope, president and UN pose a challenge
|
For NYPD 'Traffic Queen' pope, president and UN pose a challenge
NEW YORK — The cop known as “the Traffic Queen’’ faces her greatest gridlock challenge over the next week — visits by the pope, the president and about 200 foreign leaders leaders here for the UN General Assembly, all with police-escorted, street-clogging, mind-bending motorcades.
Since 2004, Lt. Sallie Norris has formulated and executed the Police Department’s traffic plan for such occasions. She’s never missed a single presidential visit, of which there have been scores, and in 2008 regularly came to the office at 5 a.m. to help plan for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI.
“Traffic isn’t a big deal until you’re the one stuck in it,’’ she says. “Some (cops) say, ‘It’s just traffic.’ But I try to think, ‘What if it was my mother sitting there?’’’
Obama, Pope Francis praise each other on climate change
Norris has been on the force for 28 years — half her life. She’s essentially a traffic cop on a massive scale; for the pope’s visit, she will determine who drives where and when on Manhattan island, who can park and who gets towed.
When a motorcade is ready to roll, Norris stands near the lead, or “pilot’’ police cruiser. About 10 minutes before the motorcade rolls — or, more precisely, before Norris thinks it will roll — she gives the order to begin closing down streets ahead on the motorcade route.
As soon as the motorcade moves, Norris – pausing briefly, in President Obama’s case, to acknowledge his usual wave — races to the back of the motorcade (30 to 40 vehicles away) and hops in the passenger seat of her own as it slowly accelerates. “Quite a comical sight,’’ she says.
As the motorcade moves forward, she calls or radios police control posts ahead to close intersections, and posts behind to reopen them, allowing traffic to resume at a safe distance.
Where is Pope Francis? A schedule of his U.S. visit
The motorcade rolls along city streets at 20 mph inside a 20-minute bubble, with empty road 10 minutes ahead and 10 minutes behind.
These rolling, temporary street closures lessen the impact on civilian traffic. “You might be stuck,’’ she says, “but you won’t be completely stopped.’’
There is an alternative tactic, often employed in other cities, that causes much more traffic disruption: Block off the entire motorcade route for a given period of time, regardless of the motorcade’s location or progress.
But by calibrating the motorcade’s progress, Norris says, she can reduce the time a given intersection is closed from 45 minutes (the average, she says, when she started her job 11 years ago) to about 20 minutes.
Her personal best: Plotting and clearing a route that allowed a bus carrying Democratic officials (who were considering the city for the 2016 convention) to make it from the Palace Hotel in midtown to the Barclay Center in Brooklyn in an incredible 12 minutes.
She’s worked for months selecting and preparing the pope’s route, which is a secret. Although she’s prepared a series of detailed maps, she says she internalizes the plan, memorizing the route block by block, including the location of each command post and the name of each commander.
Some commanders – many of whom outrank Norris – find it easier to keep streets closed longer than necessary. She says she knows how to get them to get with the plan.
“I’m very nice,’’ she says.
“She’s like the conductor of an orchestra,’’ says Peter Donald, the NYPD's communication director.
President Obama welcomes Pope Francis for his first White House visit
“Gridlock Sam’’ Schwartz, the traffic columnist, consultant and former city transportation official, says the NYPD is so good at large-scale traffic control partly because, with the possible exception of Washington, no place else in America has nearly as many important official visitors.
And from a traffic control standpoint, the official can be the biggest problem.
There was, for instance, the time Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev ordered his limousine to stop in Times Square so he could get out and shake hands with bystanders. Since his car was about 10th in line, what had been one motorcade suddenly became two.
Pope Francis’ spontaneity and love of human contact has Norris a little worried. “I hope he is a punctual gentleman,’’ she laughs.
If the pope’s departure for an event is suddenly and unexpectedly delayed, Norris may already have begun ordered street closings. Standing there by the pilot car in such cases, waiting for the motorcade to actually roll, is torture for Norris: “It feels like an eternity.’’
Some dignitaries are more punctual than others. Norris gives Obama and George W. Bush high marks. But President Clinton? When he wasn’t late, he was early.
Once, his motorcade left an event on Wall Street two hours ahead of schedule. Cops stationed along the route were still eating dinner. At her post, Norris recalls, “I helplessly watched the president’s limo go up the FDR Drive side by side with a Dunkin Donuts truck.’’
Now, she’s the one in control.
A few years ago President Obama was leaving the UN after a speech. When the president is on the move, everyone is supposed to stay inside the building. Yet Norris saw a short, dapper man, trailed by aides, brushing past police as he left the UN.
The Traffic Queen says she told French President Nicolas Sarkozy to halt.
“He said, ’You’re a big shot. You got to stop the president of France.’’’
Her reply: “Sir, if President Obama is ever about to step in front of your motorcade, I’ll stop him, too.’’
Follow @rickhampson on Twitter
|
40912f8235e983fd9a2b7bff2efe6a2c
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/25/students-killed-bus-duck-vehicle-crash/72806212/
|
Bus-Duck vehicle crash kills students from 4 countries
|
Bus-Duck vehicle crash kills students from 4 countries
SEATTLE — International students from four countries were killed Thursday in the collision of an amphibious tour vehicle and a charter bus on a bridge north of downtown, authorities said Friday.
North Seattle College, where the students were to begin classes Monday, released the names of three of the victims, saying they came from Austria, China, Indonesia and Japan. Students at the two-year college had a private memorial service before Seattle officials had a news conference there.
"We didn't have a chance to develop a long-term relationship with these students," college President Warren Brown said. "But for someone to come from another country to learn here, to be excited about an opportunity to see the city, ... it's painful."
One student, Claudia Derschmidt, 49, of Austria, had come to Seattle about two weeks ago with her 15-year-old son, Brown said. A Chinese girl, whose name was not released because she was a minor, was 17; Privaudo Putradauto, 18, was from Indonesia; Mami Sato, 37, was from Japan.
Duck vehicle crash survivor: I heard the driver say, 'Oh, no'
One patient remained in critical condition Friday morning at Harborview Medical Center, where the most seriously injured were taken after the 11:15 a.m. PT crash. That’s down from 12 Thursday; 11 others are in serious condition and three are satisfactory and out of the intensive care unit. About 50 patients were treated at Seattle-area hospitals after the accident.
Those injured ranged from a 17-year-old girl to a 61-year-old man, hospital officials said.
About 45 students and staff from North Seattle College were traveling Thursday to the city’s iconic Pike Place Market and Safeco Field for orientation events when witnesses said the Ride the Ducks boat suddenly swerved into their oncoming charter bus.
Four killed in crash of bus, Duck vehicle
The National Transportation Safety Board is leading an investigation into the crash that shut down the George Washington Bridge over Lake Union, often called the Aurora Bridge, for nearly 12 hours. The wreckage was removed for investigators, and the bridge was determined to be safe at about 11:15 p.m. Thursday and reopened.
The NTSB, whose team of investigators arrived Friday afternoon, has scrutinized the military-style vehicles several times when they've been in accidents on water but this is the first time it has looked into a land crash of the Duck boats, board member Earl Weener said. Thirteen people died in 1999 when an amphibious boat sank to the bottom of Lake Hamilton in Arkansas in an accident the NTSB blamed on inadequate maintenance.
"It's too early to draw any conclusions as to cause of this accident," Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O'Toole said. Witnesses reported seeing the front left wheel of the Ducks vehicle pop off before it swerved into traffic.
Ride the Ducks of Seattle has suspended its tours until accident investigators get further information.
Keith Holloway, an NTSB spokesman, said the agency does not have national statistics for accidents involving Duck boats, whose name is derived from the designation DUKW, six-wheeled amphibious vehicles used as U.S. military landing craft during World War II.
Contributing: The Associated Press
|
829c7df50e4a52f0a40ab7e738304ef0
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/26/sunday-nights-blood-moon-prediction-irksome-some-mormons/72883024/
|
Sunday night’s blood moon prediction irksome for Mormon Church
|
Sunday night’s blood moon prediction irksome for Mormon Church
Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story referred to "astrological" instead of "astronomical" in the second paragraph.
Sunday night’s blood moon has generated at least one end-of-the-world prediction that’s proving irksome for the Mormon Church.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently issued a statement distancing itself from the prediction by one Mormon author linking the rare astronomical event to an apocalypse.
"For it to filter up to that level and for them to decide to send out a policy letter means that they felt there was something they needed to tamp down," Patrick Mason, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California told the Associated Press.
What you need to know about the supermoon lunar eclipse
A blood moon occurs when there’s a full moon in close proximity to the Earth — a so-called super moon — in combination with an eclipse of the moon, which happens when the Earth passes between the sun and moon.
The two events will produce a reddish glow around the somewhat darkened moon for about an hour Sunday night. The last blood moon occurred in 1982 and the next one won’t occur until 2033.
Mormon author Julie Rowe is getting heat for her prediction linking the blood moon and recent calamities to the end times. Rowe issued a statement on her website Sept. 10 acknowledging that her story “is not intended to be authoritative nor to create any church doctrine.’
Sunday's lunar eclipse will also feature a 'Supermoon'
“It is simply part of my personal journey that I have chosen to share in hopes that it can help people to prepare for the times we live in by increasing their faith in Christ and by looking to our Prophet and Church leaders for guidance,’’ she wrote.
Rowe writes about and speaks to audiences about a near-death experience in 2004 when she says she crossed over into the spirit world and was shown tragic upcoming world calamities and told she would be expected to tell others in the future, the Associated Press reported.
"That time has come," her website says.
Mormon Church spokesman Eric Hawkins emailed USA TODAY a statement sent earlier this month to teachers in the church's religious education system for high school and colleges.
“The writings and speculations of individual Church members, some of which have gained currency recently, should be considered as personal accounts or positions that do not reflect Church doctrine,’’ the statement said.
The Mormon Church statement noted members are encouraged “to be spiritually and physically prepared for life's ups and downs’’ and leaders “have counseled members that, where possible, they should gradually build a supply of food, water and financial resources to ensure they are self-reliant during disasters and the normal hardships that are part of life, including illness, injury or unemployment."
However, the statement adds, "This teaching to be self-reliant has been accompanied by the counsel of Church leaders to avoid being caught up in extreme efforts to anticipate catastrophic events."
|
0c6d439c19291be96c8d5e219a9a2602
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/01/officials-active-shooter-oregon-college/73153610/
|
Ten killed in shooting at Ore. community college
|
Ten killed in shooting at Ore. community college
ROSEBURG, Ore. — Ten people were killed and another seven injured Thursday after a 26-year-old gunman opened fire in a classroom at a community college here in southern Oregon.
Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said the gunman was shot and killed during an exchange of gunfire with officers at Umpqua Community College. Hanlin refused to name the killer, saying, "I will not give him the credit he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act. You will never hear me mention his name."
A federal law enforcement source identified the gunman as a local Oregon man, Chris Mercer. The official said Mercer was armed with up to four firearms, including one rifle. Investigators were interviewing his mother to try and determine what caused his rampage.
Authorities were investigating whether Mercer, who is believed to have some connection to the school, specifically targeted victims, rather than engaging in random gunfire.
Andy Parker: Oregon shooting shows we are at war
The attack - the fourth shooting at a U.S. college campus since August - prompted a visibly angry President Obama to note that the USA is "the only advanced country on earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months."
Speaking from the White House, Obama said the gunman was clearly troubled, but said, "It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun."
Obama vowed to continue pushing new gun policies that he said would prevent further mass shootings.
"Each time this happens, I'm going to bring this up," he said.
Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg said on its Facebook page that it received a total of 10 patients from the shooting. The conditions of patients weren't disclosed. PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center in Springfield, about an hour north, said on its Facebook page that it received three patients and could get more. Both hospitals were holding blood drives on Friday.
Roseburg Police Sgt. Aaron Dunbar told USA TODAY that the incident was contained to one classroom on the sprawling campus.
Hannah Miles, 19, was in her fourth day of college Thursday, attending a writing class, when a loud noise came from the classroom next door. It sounded like a ruler hitting a blackboard, she said.
When two more loud noises came from the room, Miles' teacher, Amy Fair, opened the door between the classrooms to see if everything was OK.
It wasn't. Fair turned back to the class and immediately hustled them outside. As they ran down the hall to leave the building, Fair banged on classroom doors and yelled for everyone to leave right away, Miles said.
Hundreds gather to mourn Ore. shooting victims
Once outside, the class ran to the school bookstore, locked themselves into a back room and called police, Miles said.
Miles' mother, meanwhile, was at work as a respiratory therapy nurse at nearby Mercy Medical Center. Sandy Miles heard about the shootings and, knowing her daughter was at the school, began to worry. But then patients from Umpqua Community College began arriving and she kicked into action.
"All I could think was, 'This could be my daughter,'" Sandy Miles said.
Sandy's husband was able to call her and let her know that Hannah was safe. Like others, Hannah was bused off campus to the Douglas County Fairgrounds.
BEHIND THE BLOODSHED: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA'S MASS KILLINGS
According to The Oregonian/oregonlive.com, a 911 call came in at 10:37 a.m. local time.
"UCC this is going to be the Snyder hall,": the caller said. "The ... somebody is outside one of the doors shooting through the door there is a female in the computer lab. We do have one female that has been shot at this time. We're still (incomprehensible) to get further."
Umqua Community College English Professor Jillanne Michell said the shooting erupted in Snyder Hall, apparently in a writing and speech class, oregonlive.com reports.
"That is the building where the shooting did take place," she said, adding that it's possible additional shots were fired elsewhere. "I heard the shots," said Michell, who was in Snyder Hall at the time. "It was a lot."
Jared Norman, a nursing student at UCC, told The (Roseburg) News-Review that he heard shots "and then everyone was running."
He was initially locked down in a cafeteria with 50 other students. "They've heard there is a shooting, but they don't know what's going on. And they're scared," he said.
"We locked our door and I went out to lock up the rest rooms and could hear four shots from the front of campus," UCC Foundation Executive Director Dennis O'Neill told the newspaper.
The News-Review also reported that an automated phone call went out to parents at Roseburg School District at 11:42 a.m. PT, informing them of the shooting.
Sara Mattison, a reporter for KVAL television, said she could see a female student covered in blood get into a car and leave the campus. Mattison also saw parents crying and looking for their children at the campus.
Shortly after the gunfire broke out, Kayla Marie, a music student at the school, tweeted: "Students are running everywhere. Holy God."
Lorie Andrews, 57, who lives across the street from the campus, said she heard several shots while sitting on her back porch, oregonlive.com reports. She estimated that some 20 ambulances and 75 police vehicles responded to the incident.Six Life Flight helicopters were dispatched to help the victims.
The school was placed on lockdown while police went building to building. Students eventually were allowed to leave, but were not permitted to take their own cars. "Everybody is in shock. Very very shocked," Andrews said.
Sean Clark, a spokesman for Roseburg Health Care System, told KATU television that the hospital called in extra doctors and other staffers from other shifts to care for wounded in the attack.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweeted that it had special agents at the college and was sending additional agents, as well as a K-9 team, to the scene. Officers from the federal Department of Homeland Security were also sent to the college.
"While it is still too early to know all of the facts, I know I am joined by my fellow Oregonians and Americans in profound dismay and heartbreak at this tragedy," Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told reporters before leaving for Roseburg.
2015 school year off to a violent start
The college, 6 miles north of Roseburg, normally has 3,000 full-time students and 16,000 part-timers. Authorities quickly spread the word and called on residents and students not to go to the campus.
Umpqua Community College was established in 1964, has 16 buildings, and the campus includes a track, tennis courts, an outdoor pool and a vineyard.
The 100-acre campus is situated on verdant pasture along the North Umpqua River. In 2010, the school started construction on a $6.7 million viticulture building that now houses the Southern Oregon Wine Institute, which is a state of the art wine production and teaching facility.
Sarah Cobb, 17, was in the classroom next to the shooter. Her family hunts, so she knew immediately what the noise was.
"I was one of the first out the door," she said. As she ran, she warned people milling about on campus. Cobb said she kept her head until she was safely locked in the student center. Then she broke down.
By the time she arrived at the fairgrounds, she had regained her composure, and spent the rest of the day helping the Red Cross take names of people who had not yet been located.
Cobb's family moved to Roseburg from Eugene a couple months ago, and it was her first week of college.
"I don't even know what to think," she said. "I'm terrified. I don't want to go back there for a long time."
The shootings are the first mass killings – an incident in which four or more people die, excluding the suspect – on a school campus this year, according to USA TODAY's database of mass killings since 2006. On Oct. 24, 2014, Jaylen Fryberg, 15, shot five students, four of them fatally, at Marysville-Pilchuck High School in Marysville, Wash., before dying at the scene of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Hanlin, the Douglas County sheriff overseeing the investigation, has been vocal in opposing state and federal gun-control legislation.
Hanlin registered his opposition this year as state lawmakers considered requiring background checks on private, person-to-person gun sales.
Hanlin told a legislative committee in March that a background-check mandate wouldn't prevent criminals from getting firearms.
He said the state should combat gun violence by cracking down on convicted criminals found with guns, and by addressing people with unmanaged mental health issues.
Hanlin also sent a letter to Vice President Joe Biden in 2013, after the shooting at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school. Hanlin said he and his deputies would refuse to enforce new gun-control restrictions "offending the constitutional rights of my citizens."
Contributing: Aamer Madhani, Kevin Johnson, Bart Jansen, and Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
|
c45f60c6dd2b721ff198f95e20b8879f
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/10/surfer-critical-condition-after-shark-attack-hawaii/73723960/
|
Surfer loses left leg after shark attack in Hawaii
|
Surfer loses left leg after shark attack in Hawaii
A 25-year-old Oahu man lost his left leg to a shark attack Friday while surfing off Oahu's North Shore, according to local media reports.
Colin Cook was straddling his board with both legs dangling in the water when the 10- to 12-foot shark latched onto his lower leg, media reports said. He punched the animal until it let go, screamed for help and was assisted to shore by another surfer and a kayaker, his family told reporters.
Rescuers used a surfboard leach as a tourniquet on Cook's leg until paramedics arrived. Doctors at Queens Medical Center in Honolulu later completed the amputation on his leg, Chris Webster, Cook's cousin, told KHON 2, a Hawaii television station.
"During the attack, the shark got him below the knee ... but they had to take his leg above the knee so that was a little heart-breaking," Webster told the television station. Cook's left hand was also injured.
Cook is a native of Rhode Island who moved to Hawaii three years ago and learned to create custom surfboards, according to Hawaii News Now.
The attacked occurred about 10:30 a.m. near a popular surfing area known as Leftovers Beach Park. It was the fifth shark attack in Hawaii this year.
Lifeguards in the area were warning visitors to stay out of the ocean, and signs have been posted along the beach, according to the Associated Press.
|
f55e3265924ec51b10a1ce83466a0556
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/20/newser-lee-harvey-oswald/74264150/
|
Verdict is in on whether Lee Harvey Oswald photo is a fake, thanks to 3D tech
|
Verdict is in on whether Lee Harvey Oswald photo is a fake, thanks to 3D tech
For decades, conspiracy theorists have claimed the famous "backyard photo" of Lee Harvey Oswald, which shows him holding the same type of rifle used to assassinate JFK, is a fake — a claim that Oswald himself made when he was arrested. But thanks to a scientist who has studied this photo before and stated previously it was "highly improbable that anyone could have created such a perfect forgery with the technology available in 1963," that claim has now been debunked.
A new study out of Dartmouth, published in the Journal of Digital Forensics, Security, and Law, used sophisticated 3D imaging technology to analyze key details of the photo, including Oswald's pose, and found that the photo is indeed authentic, a press release notes.
"Our detailed analysis of Oswald's pose, the lighting and shadows, and the rifle in his hands refutes the argument of photo tampering," said Hany Farid, the study's senior author.
Both the Warren Commission and a special House committee on assassinations had already found photo tampering hadn't taken place, and Farid had done studies in 2009 and 2010 that determined the photo's lighting and shadows were indeed feasible, per Phys.org. But some said that Oswald's pose in the photo, in which he appears to be standing somewhat off-balance, was a physical impossibility, so this time around Farid and his team put the photo through a rigorous 3D stability analysis. By adding appropriate mass little by little to each section of a 3D model of Oswald, they were able to examine Oswald's balance to show he certainly could have stood that way. The study also found, once again, that the lighting, shadows, and rifle length were also plausible.
"With a simple adjustment to the height and weight, the 3D human model that we created can be used to forensically analyze the pose, stability, and shadows in any image of people," Farid says in the release.
(The CIA has admitted to covering up JFK's assassination, though.)
THIS STORY ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON NEWSER:
The Verdict Is In on a 45-Year-Old Conspiracy Theory
MORE FROM NEWSER:
It Looks Like Lamar Odom Is Going to Make It. Here's What the Road Ahead Looks Like
A Decomposed Body Was Found in a Queens Apartment. The Work That Followed Is Incredible
A Teen in the Pickup Screamed 'Red Light, Red Light!' Death Followed
Newser is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
|
f59b19c5494c13692945124fb3f4ef44
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/27/firearms-national-tracing-center-atf/74401060/
|
Millions of firearms records languish at National Tracing Center
|
Millions of firearms records languish at National Tracing Center
MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — Millions of firearm purchase records, potentially critical to tracing guns used in crimes, languish here in scores of cardboard boxes and shipping containers awaiting processing at the government's National Tracing Center.
Officials estimate that 1.6 million paper documents and other records arrive every month from defunct firearm dealers who are required to ship their business records, some barely discernible, to this Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives facility for eventual inclusion in a digital repository.
Up to 50 times a day, document examiners comb through everything from 1970s-era microfilm to hand-written cards in an effort to satisfy sometimes urgent pleas for assistance from law enforcement agencies from across the country, ATF information specialist Neil Troppman said.
The avalanche of records is a little-noticed yet critical component of a newly escalating firearms debate that underscores both the strained operations of the federal government's chief gun enforcement agency and the strength of a powerful gun rights lobby intent on preventing the creation of a national gun registry, law enforcement analysts say.
The dysfunctional document management system exists even as ATF examiners are faced with a steadily increasing demand for tracing guns used in crimes — 364,441 requests last year — and as the agency seeks to assist local law enforcement authorities in a number of U.S. cities, including Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee and Baltimore, where there have been dramatic spikes in gun-related violence.
Troppman said there is no uniform method for delivering gun purchase records from defunct businesses. Consequently, some arrive in the form of bundled hand-printed index cards, on tracing paper, in weathered notebooks and on password-protected hard-drives that appear to have been hastily swept off shop counters and into boxes before the dealers shuttered their doors.
"In some of the boxes, we have found garbage and dirty laundry,'' he said.
Local leaders frustrated by violent crime surges in some cities
Ben Hayes, a former ATF official who for more than a decade oversaw parts of the tracing center's operations, characterized the ever-mounting caches of paper and the archaic records system as something resembling the aftermath of a biblical flood.
"It's really sad," Hayes said. "It's pathetic."
Although the paper records are eventually transformed into digital images, investigators' use of the computerized system is strictly limited by federal law that prohibits the creation of a searchable database based on firearms' purchasers.
Gun rights advocates said the system is merely a reflection of what the government requires defunct gun dealers to do.
"I agree that there is a substantial amount of paper to process, but they (dealers) are providing what is required by law,'' said Larry Keane, general counsel for the firearm industry trade association National Shooting Sports Foundation. "There were a lot of mom-and-pops (dealers) out there that didn't have computer records.''
On the prohibitions against creating a searchable repository of gun owners, National Rifle Association spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said federal authorities already have "the necessary tools to trace firearms used in the commission of crimes.''
Feds returning to local crime fight
"Eliminating search warrants would make it easier for law enforcement to prosecute criminals, but no one is suggesting that we violate the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens in the name of efficiency,'' Baker said.
Until 2013, when the Senate confirmed B. Todd Jones as the agency's director, the ATF had been without permanent leadership for seven years, in part due to opposition mounted by gun rights groups to previous nominee Andrew Traver. Earlier this year, Jones announced his resignation, leaving the job back in the hands of an "acting'' director.
David Chipman, a former ATF special agent, said that much of the agency's inefficiency is tied to the political sway of the powerful gun rights groups who have sought to contain the authority of the ATF. "The gun lobby has been very successful at keeping the ATF as inefficient as possible,'' Chipman said.
In most cases, gun traces begin with the submission of basic descriptions of guns recovered at crime scenes to tracing center examiners based in this scenic crease of the Shenandoah Valley, about two hours west of Washington. It identifies a chain of custody that generally runs from manufacturer to the point of sale, if the firearm is purchased at a federally licensed dealer.
For dealers still in business, examiners can then obtain the identity of the purchaser by contacting dealers and providing specific gun identifiers, including serial numbers. But tracing requests for purchases at defunct dealers require a much more involved search.
If the out-of-business dealer's records have been converted to the ATF's electronic database, examiners can attempt to locate purchasers by tabbing through digital folders organized by former dealer names and then sort through individual sales records to identify individual buyers.
But thousands of trace requests each year — as many as 18,000 last year, according to the ATF — require document examiners to hand-sort through unprocessed boxes of paper records or attempt to unlock the password-protected hard-drives of newly received computerized documents to establish a gun's chain of custody. Still hundreds of other requests require examiners to search a darkened library containing 50,000 rolls of microfilm, a repository for tens of millions of purchase records.
Troppman said a California film company is in the process of converting the archaic microfilm library to digital images. But until that project is completed sometime next year, examiners continue to dutifully check individual rolls for analysis on decades-old readers. Because new readers are no longer mass-produced, breakdowns require harvesting parts from older machines or doing without.
As recently as this month, examiners were required to hand-sort through paper records to complete a "urgent'' trace request from local authorities. Officials declined to identify the case, though in urgent matters, which involve the highest-profile firearm crimes in the country, examiners attempt to complete the trace within 24 hours. At least once a month, Troppman said, examiners are searching through paper or other raw records in attempts to complete urgent requests. Other "routine'' traces take an average of three to five days.
"We're handcuffing law enforcement by not giving them the tools to do their jobs,'' said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. "This is a gigantic issue. It's endemic to the problems law enforcement has to deal with in their enforcement of gun crimes. The way we do this is so antiquated.''
Follow @bykevinj on Twitter.
|
5b9987f398e4b2dfacd1bfc1a27979ca
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/07/record-siberian-snow-could-bode-ill-northeast/75224060/
|
Record Siberian snow could bode ill for Northeast
|
Record Siberian snow could bode ill for Northeast
There is a theory about snow in Siberia during the month of October: If there is a lot, it can mean a particularly wicked winter in the northeast United States.
Last month, Siberia experienced record snowfall and the worst blizzard in a decade.
Above-average snow cover in Siberia is believed to affect the now-famous polar vortex and send bitterly cold temperatures to the Northeast. This happens when the Arctic Oscillation, a climate pattern, shifts.
10 things to get your home ready for winter
When its winds are strong, the Arctic Oscillation keeps a tight hold on temperatures swirling around the North Pole. When it becomes weakened, or what meteorologists call “negative,” it allows arctic air masses to creep into the mid-latitudes.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describes it this way: “Air pressure is higher than average over the arctic and lower than average over the mid-latitudes. The jet stream shifts southward of its average latitude.” That steers frigid, polar air southward into North America.
Above-average Siberian snow cover points to a negative oscillation pattern. But not always. And it is especially not certain that will happen this winter. Myriad factors, not the least of which is the strong El Niño being experienced globally, come into play.
When can you expect your first snowfall of the season?
Atmospheric and Environmental Research scientist Judah Cohen, who tracks the Arctic Oscillation and its correlation to U.S winters, wrote on his blog: “It is challenging to anticipate how the final outcome of competing forcings from the tropics and the high latitudes will influence mid-latitude weather.”
He explains that while October snow cover was above normal in Siberia this year, it did not advance as much as the previous two Octobers. Moreover, Arctic sea ice extent remains below normal. Cohen is expecting important pattern changes this month will provide better clues to the winter ahead.
At the moment and for the short-term, he is forecasting a mild pattern. Still, it’s worth checking Arctic Oscillation reports (the Climate Prediction Center provides 14-day forecasts) and taking steps to prepare for the worst.
Here are some things you can do:
• Stack up on wood for your fireplace, ready space heaters and store extra heating fuel. (Always store fuel in a well-ventilated place.)
• Keep winter clothing and extra blankets handy.
• Insulate walls and attics. Weather strip windows and doors. Consider installing storm windows.
• Clear overhanging branches and weak trees. The extra weight of ice can break branches and topple trees.
• Know where water valves are and learn how to close them in case of pipe bursts.
• Have your roof examined to ensure it can withstand the weight of ice and snow. Just one cubic foot of snow can weigh 20 pounds.
• Make sure propane tanks and other hazardous liquids and materials are stored properly in vented areas.
• Find out where local shelters are set up ahead of time. Organizations such as the Red Cross will often provide shelters during cold months.
• Turn your thermostats to 68 degrees. This habit will help you conserve fuel during long-lasting cold spells.
Thomas M. Kostigen is the founder of TheClimateSurvivalist.com and a New York Times bestselling author and journalist. He is the National Geographic author of "Extreme Weather Survival Guide: Understand, Prepare, Survive, Recover" and the NG Kids book, "Extreme Weather: Surviving Tornadoes, Tsunamis, Hailstorms, Thundersnow, Hurricanes and More!" Follow him @weathersurvival, or email [email protected].
MORE FROM THOMAS M. KOSTIGEN:
Extreme weather: Is it all in your mind?
Fire lessons abound for everyone as Alaska, Canada burn
Get your jiu-jitsu tactics ready for the 'Bruce Lee' El Niño
|
2664a8ddc031dfc3b7dc7bf48768b8e4
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/29/laquan-mcdonald-chicago-police-shooting/76502818/
|
Burger King: Chicago shooting video altered
|
Burger King: Chicago shooting video altered
A Chicago Burger King manager says that he testified before a grand jury this week about police deleting surveillance video that may have captured images of a black teenager in the moments before he was shot by a white officer there, according to local media reports.
Officer Jason Van Dyke has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of Laquan McDonald. Court-ordered release of squad car, dashcam video of the Oct. 24 confrontation shows Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times.
Jay Darshane, the Burger King manager, has accused police of erasing the restaurant's surveillance tape. He also told the Chicago Tribune that the FBI seized the video recorder containing all of its surveillance images.
Hundreds protest as Chicago releases video of cop shooting teen 16 times
Lawyers for McDonald's family told the paper that the video likely would not show footage of the shooting but may have shown his movements just prior to his death. After police examined the video the night of the shooting, Burger King employees said there was an unexplained 86-minute gap in its footage that covers the time of the shooting.
Authorities in Chicago, including the police superintendent, have labeled untrue allegations that police deleted key video footage.
Release of the dashcam video sparked several days of demonstrations in downtown Chicago. Protesters demanded reforms to Chicago police, and sought to disrupt Black Friday shopping on Chicago's glittering Magnificent Mile.
|
9b0b77bd11a46b4590510dba78c8e4e0
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/30/bus-driver-charged-crash-injured-34-virginia-college-students/76567184/
|
Speed linked to bus crash that injured 34 students
|
Speed linked to bus crash that injured 34 students
Speed was a factor in the crash of a bus that toppled off a Virginia highway ramp, injuring dozens of college students and the driver, authorities said Monday.
Bus driver Thomas Chidester, 58, was charged with reckless driving in the crash Sunday night just outside Richmond, Virginia State Police said in a statement. The investigation was continuing, and the National Transportation Safety Board had been contacted.
Chidester lost control of the bus in a turn on the ramp, causing the bus to overturn. The bus, operated by Abbott Bus Lines of Roanoke, Va., was bound for the University of Virginia in Charlottesville from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Police said Chidester and about 34 of the 50 students — returning to Virginia Tech, Radford University and the University of Virginia — were transported to six Metro-Richmond hospitals for treatment of minor injuries.
One passenger was still being treated for serious injuries Monday, police said.
“It seemed like we were going way too fast" entering the turn, Emily Beneke, a Virginia Tech freshman, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. She said she fell between two seats and on top of another passenger but emerged unscathed.
"When you have a bus of this size with that many students on it that overturns like this in a crash, we're very fortunate that there were not more injured," Chesterfield County fire Lt. Jason Elmore told NBC News.
|
a959f06e1caabd0192ec8bb1ee7fb9e5
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/30/newborn-found-buried-alive/76562500/
|
Newborn found buried alive
|
Newborn found buried alive
(NEWSER) – Two sisters were out taking a walk in Compton, Calif., on Friday afternoon when they heard a baby crying —or was it a cat? Evangelina McCrary and Angelica Blount weren't sure, but two deputies soon responded to their call and found a newborn buried alive under rubble and pieces of asphalt on a bike path by a riverbed, CBS News reports. The child was inside what's being described as a crevice. "The baby was wrapped in a blanket and cold to the touch," says Sgt. Marvin Jaramilla of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. CBS Los Angeles notes that officials later confirmed the blanket was the type provided by hospitals. Paramedics took the baby to the hospital, where she's reported to be in stable condition.
"I know we living in some bad times, but damn," says a nearby resident and grandfather. "They need to catch this person. You know, you need to go to jail. That's the place for you." Indeed, ABC7 reports that the person who discarded the child could face attempted murder and child endangerment charges. The baby was likely born no more than 48 hours before being discovered, which NBC Los Angeles points out falls within the "Safe Surrender window": Parents can leave a newborn at a hospital or fire station, no questions asked and without the prospect of prosecution, within 72 hours of birth. The AP reports that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was continuing to search for the girl's mother. (Police were able to track down the mother who left her newborn in the manger of a Nativity scene.)
This article originally appeared on Newser
Newborn Baby Found Buried Alive Under Asphalt
One Country Mulls New Plan: Give Heroin to Heroin Addicts
More from Newser
You Probably Always Get Sick During Your Time Off, Right? This Might Be Why
Who Is DB Cooper? Writer Offers Fascinating New Theory on Unsolved Hijacking
Newser is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
|
17536753e11b9122877937b91da2adb0
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/12/01/mayor-juneau-dead/76597078/
|
Mystery swirls around death of Alaska mayor
|
Mystery swirls around death of Alaska mayor
Authorities in Alaska's capital city on Tuesday were investigating the mysterious death of Juneau's new mayor – and trying to tamp down intrigue swirling around the case.
Mayor Greg Fisk's adult son, Ian, found the body at his dad's home Monday afternoon and called 911, Juneau Police Department (JPD) spokesman Erann Kalwara said.
"JPD is aware of rumors that an assault occurred in connection with Fisk’s death," Kalwara said. "Those rumors are speculation. Detectives are actively investigating facts of the incident, and all evidence is being preserved and documented."
Kalwara said authorities hoped an autopsy would determine the cause of death for Fisk, 70, who owned a fisheries consulting firm.
The Juneau Empire reported that locals had speculated on Facebook and other social media about a possible assault. Fisk's death came two weeks after a double murder shocked the city of about 32,000 people. Police Chief Bryce Johnson told the Empire there was no apparent connection to the Nov.15 shootings.
Last month, Fisk easily defeated then-mayor Merrill Sanford. Fisk lived in Alaska since 1959 and was a 34-year resident of Juneau, a city at the base of Mount Juneau where the terrain is so rugged the city can't be reached by roads. Planes and ferries provide access.
Gov. Bill Walker issued condolences via Twitter: "My thoughts and prayers are with the family of Mayor Greg Fisk. He will be remembered for his dedicated service to the community of Juneau."
|
be235bf494f63473d1c73f093559a6e9
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/12/02/women-mass-killings/76701974/
|
Unusual detail in San Bernardino shooting: One suspect is a woman
|
Unusual detail in San Bernardino shooting: One suspect is a woman
Out of the horror that played out in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday from a shooting rampage at a social services center emerged one compelling detail: One of the suspects killed by police was a woman.
Women are suspects in just 6% of mass killings in the U.S., according to "Behind the Bloodshed," a USA TODAY analysis. The average age of a female mass killing suspect is 33; the youngest is 18, according to the report. That compares to men with an average age of 31.
On Wednesday, police said attackers burst into a meeting room at the Inland Regional Center, an agency that provides services for the developmentally disabled. The attackers opened fire, killing at least 14 people, and quickly retreated. Officers following up on a tip zeroed in on the suspects at a home. When the suspects fled in an SUV, police pursued and a gunfight ensued.
Obama mourns passing of Saudi king
"One male and one female were killed," San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. He said the attackers were dressed in military-style garb and were armed with assault rifles and handguns
Late Wednesday Burguan identified the female suspect as Tashfeen Malik, 27. He said she had some type of relationship with the male suspect who was also killed, Syed Farook, 28. They were either "boyfriend, girlfriend, husband and wife," Burguan said.
Obama mourns passing of Saudi king
The involvement of a woman in the attacks marks a rare turn for similar domestic shootings, which have largely involved lone male assailants, a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Wednesday night.
However, the involvement of a woman is not unheard of in recent years. Amanda Miller and her husband, Jerad, committed a shooting spree in Las Vegas on June 8, 2014, in which five people died, including the couple. The two embraced extremist anti-government views. Jerad was killed by police; Amanda committed suicide after being wounded.
On Jan. 30, 2006, Jennifer San Marco shot and killed a former neighbor then drove to a mail processing plant where she had worked in Goleta, Calif. San Marco, who believed she was the target of a conspiracy at the postal facility, shot and killed six employees before taking her own life.
Contributing: Kevin Johnson, Mike James
|
010ee305afe982a5df11889d2c996ba7
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/12/03/women-in-combat-defense-secretary-ash-carter/76719938/
|
Military will open all combat jobs to women, Defense secretary announces
|
Military will open all combat jobs to women, Defense secretary announces
WASHINGTON — All U.S. military combat jobs, including infantry units and special operations, will be open to women beginning next year, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Thursday.
Carter said the decision was part of his commitment to build a force of the future. The ban will be lifted in 30 days, he said, and the services have until April 1 to accommodate women in all roles.
"In the 21st Century, that requires drawing strength from the broadest pool" possible, he said, adding that the Pentagon can't successfully defend the nation by eliminating half of the U.S. population from combat roles.
The decision was immediately blasted by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and a member of the Armed Services Committee as a politically motivated move that will erode the ability of the military to fight. Hunter pointed to a study done by the Marine Corps that showed that infantry units with women performed worse than all-male ones.
"No. 1, this is being done for political reasons," Hunter said. "What is it going to do to our ability to be lethal at the small-unit level? It degrades that ability."
The armed services had been given a Dec. 31 deadline to allow women into all of its units, including elite special operations ground combat position, or to request a waiver. Those exceptions had to be backed by data showing why women would not be able to accomplish the necessary tasks.
Carter acknowledged that the Marines asked for some exceptions, Carter said, "but we are a joint force."
"There will be no exceptions," Carter said.
Carter appeared alone at the Pentagon briefing room to make the announcement. Absent was Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and who had been Marine Corps Commandant prior to his promotion. Under Dunford, the Marines had requested to keep 48,779 slots open to men only. Dunford was not at the briefing, Carter said, because the decision to open all jobs to women was his.
The Marine Corps said it would comply with the order. "The Marine Corps has received the secretary's decision and will immediately commence the process of further implementing the policy change, to include sharing plans and lessons learned with the other services," the service said in a statement. "We remain steadfast in our commitment to ensure the men and women who earn the title "Marine" will be ready to fight and win."
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Congress will use the 30 days to review the implications of the decision.
"Secretary Carter's decision to open all combat positions to women will have a consequential impact on our servicemembers and our military's warfighting capabilities," McCain said. "The Congress has an essential constitutional role to make rules for the government and regulation of our nation's armed forces."
Dakota Meyer, who earned a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for bravery, as a Marine in Afghanistan, said he has some concerns about the Pentagon’s decision.
“In my opinion that decision was based on a political push and not a realistic thought-out study,” Meyer said.
He pointed out that women have served effectively in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Pentagon may not have done enough research into what impact integrating women will have on all-male units, such as the infantry.
“Once again politicians aren’t listening to their counterparts in the military,” he said, referring to Carter’s decision to reject the Marine Corps’ request for a waiver.
There are 213,600 male-only jobs in the military in 52 specialties, most of them in infantry units in the Army and Marine Corps. Many fields have been opening to women in the last year, including the Army's elite Ranger school, its premier light infantry course. Three women have passed the grueling tests and have earned coveted Ranger tab.
Carter's decision comes almost three years after his predecessor Leon Panetta announced that he had lifted the two-decade ban that prevented women from most combat jobs.
Since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 280,000 women have served in those combat zones out of a total of almost 2.5 million troops, Pentagon records show. In both wars, 152 women have died from combat or non-combat causes, records show, and 958 have been wounded in action.
Sen Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, saluted Carter's decision.
"Change will not happen overnight," Reed said in a statement. "It will likely take some time before women are assigned to certain combat occupations. But going forward, the combat effectiveness of our forces will increase as integrated units are able to take advantage of the very best talent available for military service, without restriction."
|
20ff4ab7d97a43945e7b4a3a5005093d
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/12/14/connecticut-marks-3rd-anniversary-sandy-hook-horror/77277876/
|
Connecticut marks 3rd anniversary of Sandy Hook horror
|
Connecticut marks 3rd anniversary of Sandy Hook horror
State and U.S. flags across Connecticut were flying at half-staff Monday to honor the memory of the 20 children and six school staffers fatally shot at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown three years ago.
The town and the school district were handling the anniversary in a mostly low-key manner. The Newtown Public School District website made no mention of the anniversary Monday morning. The town's website included a brief mention of an Interfaith Gathering for Prayer and Comfort set for 7 p.m. at a local church.
"Faith leaders from the various Newtown religious communities will guide the community by reading from our sacred texts, offering prayers for our community and allowing for times of silence for each individual to reflect and/or pray in his or her own way," the Rev. Matt Crebbin of Newtown Congregational Church said of the event.
Earlier Monday, the Newtown Recovery and Resiliency Team was providing counseling and a "quiet place to reflect or find support."
The tragedy unfolded shortly after school opened on Friday, Dec. 14, 2012. Adam Lanza, 20, fatally shot his mother in the home they shared in Newtown, then went to the school where she once taught. Lanza, armed with a semiautomatic rifle and other armaments, shot his way into the front door and quickly encountered Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach. Lanza killed them both before continuing his rampage.
Most of the students who died were first-graders in the same classroom when Lanza stormed in. Lanza, who once had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, fired more than 150 shots in less than five minutes. Police arrived to find the carnage and Lanza, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No officers fired a shot.
The school has been torn down, and a new one is being built on the site.
The shootings prompted heated debate over gun control, but no federal legislation was passed. Connecticut, however, in 2013 adopted one of the nation's strictest gun laws, requiring universal background checks for gun buyers and limiting magazine capacity to 10 rounds. The bill added scores of assault-style weapons to the state's list of weapons people are banned from possessing and created a registry for dangerous weapons offenders.
Connecticut continues to lead the fight for gun control. Last week, in response to the terror attack that left 14 people dead in San Bernardino, Calif., Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said he will sign an executive order banning people on federal terrorism watch lists from buying guns in the state.
Gabby Giffords was a congresswoman from Arizona when she was wounded in a mass shooting that left six dead in 2011. She has since co-founded Americans for Responsible Solutions, "engaging millions of people about ways to reduce gun violence and supporting lawmakers willing to take a stand for responsible policies."
Her tweet Monday: "Thinking of the 26 taken at #SandyHook Elementary School 3 years ago today. We honor their memories through action."
"My heart still breaks with yours," reflecting on Sandy Hook shooting anniversary:
|
15ec803e3cccbc2cf54e8745ba7b1dfe
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/12/23/russian-rocket-debris-fireball/77796850/
|
Fireball across western sky was debris from Russian rocket
|
Fireball across western sky was debris from Russian rocket
A white ball of light with a fiery tail that streaked across the night skies over Arizona was debris from a newly launched Russian rocket re-entering the earth's atmosphere, the U.S. Strategic Command said Wednesday.
The fireball, seen over Arizona, Nevada and California late Tuesday, triggered its own firestorm on social media, as observers on the ground shared videos and photos of the fireball flying through the sky and pondered whether it was a meteor or space debris from a fallen satellite.
The strategic command, which follows some 16,000 "on-orbit cataloged objects," said it could not accurately track where the debris ended up because of the "damaging effects" of re-entry.
In dry military-speak, the command noted on Twitter that it had "removed the SL-4 rocket body from the U.S. satellite catalog" after the "decayed object" entered the atmosphere.
The SL-4 rocket was launched by Russia on Monday, Strategic Command said.
|
3b40464a2b57e435411321375b41461f
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/01/07/funding-ban-needle-exchanges-effectively-lifted/78420894/
|
Funding ban on needle exchanges effectively lifted
|
Funding ban on needle exchanges effectively lifted
Congress effectively lifted the nation’s long-standing ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs, which allow intravenous drug addicts to trade dirty syringes for clean ones in the hope of preventing disease.
The measure was quietly tucked into the omnibus spending package signed by President Obama last month. Though federal funds still can’t be used for the syringes themselves, they can go toward the costlier expenses associated with these programs, such as staff, vans, substance use counseling, referral to treatment and outreach in at-risk communities.
“We think this is fantastic news,” says Leana Wen, health commissioner in Baltimore, which has distributed more than 8 million clean syringes through a needle exchange operating for two decades. “We know needle exchanges reduce the transmission of disease. … Congress has made a critical first step in helping every state implement this evidence-based policy that has proven to save lives.”
Opponents have long argued that needle exchanges enable addicts to keep using. Congress first banned the use of federal funds for these programs in 1988, lifted the prohibition in 2009 and reinstated it in 2011. The latest change came at the suggestion of U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., ensured the language remained in the Senate version of the spending bill, their spokespeople say.
“The opioid epidemic is having a devastating effect on communities throughout Kentucky and the nation," McConnell's office said in a statement. "As more people inject drugs like heroin, rates of Hepatitis C and HIV have been on the rise. To help address this issue, Senator McConnell worked with Chairman Rogers to pass legislation to provide flexibility so that certain counties in Kentucky may be able to access federal funds for their treatment and education efforts.”
“Congressman Rogers supports efforts in Kentucky and elsewhere to mitigate the spread of devastating diseases, like HIV and (hepatitis) C, and the associated health care costs," says Danielle Smoot, communication director for Rogers. Though he still doesn't want federal money going to the needles themselves, she says, "he believes federal resources can effectively be used for needle exchange programs that focus on education and treatment to help end the cycle of dependency and curb an outbreak of needle-related diseases."
Under the law, she says, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will work to identify at-risk communities where federal funds can be used.
It's likely that parts of Kentucky will be determined to be at risk. The state has been hit hard by prescription drug and heroin abuse and suffers more than 1,000 drug overdose deaths each year. Nearby Indiana experienced its worst-ever HIV outbreak last year — 184 cases in the southeastern region, most linked to addicts shooting up the powerful painkiller Opana. The center of that outbreak was Austin, Ind., which has a population of 4,200 and a higher incidence rate of HIV than any country in sub-Saharan Africa, according to CDC Director Tom Frieden.
A recent Indiana state law allows needle exchanges under certain circumstances when a community, such as Austin, is wracked by an epidemic of HIV or hepatitis C. Indiana officials declined comment on the recent change of the federal funding ban but have said needle exchanges can effectively slow the spread of disease but only as part of a comprehensive strategy against addiction and IV drug abuse.
Nationally, there are at least 194 needle exchanges operating under budgets ranging from $100,000 to $300,000, says Monica Ruiz of George Washington University, who led research on Washington’s exchanges last year. Ruiz and Wen say needles are by far the least expensive component of any programs.
Ruiz praised recent developments as reflecting "a sea change in people’s thinking” — a realization that addiction and drug-related diseases affect families everywhere and need to be addressed based on what science shows will work.
“I’m delighted this is coming from our Republican congresspeople,” she says. “It’s an incredible development ... a long, long time coming.”
|
89243feb1277a9133a31adbb2d69068a
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/01/11/coming-america-el-chapo-could-fight-extradition-years/78622760/
|
Coming to America: Why the El Chapo extradition could take years
|
Coming to America: Why the El Chapo extradition could take years
It took six months of hard work for Mexican authorities to track down notorious drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán. It could take years of hard work to extradite him to the United States.
José Manuel Merino Madrid, who oversees extradition efforts in Mexico for that nation's attorney general, told Mexico's Radio Formula on Monday that lawyers for Guzmán could drag out the extradition process for up to a year. Juan Masini, a lawyer who has served as a U.S. federal prosecutor and attache to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, says that may be a conservative estimate.
Masini told USA TODAY he's confident the U.S. Justice Department ultimately will win the battle to ship Guzmán to the U.S. to face myriad murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking and organized crime charges. But he counsels patience.
"Theoretically the (Guzmán) lawyers could waive a hearing and the Mexican government could send him right away," Masini said. "But if he wants to fight it, under Mexican law he is entitled to challenge a lot of procedures. It could take years."
Guzmán made world headlines in July with a dramatic escape from Mexico's maximum security Altiplano prison. A massive international manhunt wrapped up Friday with his arrest following a deadly shootout in Los Mochis, a Mexican coastal city of 250,000 in Guzmán's home state of Sinaloa.
Mexico: Sean Penn interview helped nab 'El Chapo'
Pentagon expands training of Mexican military
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a University of Texas political science professor specializing in Mexican affairs, said the Mexican government feels pressure from the U.S. government as well as its own people to support the U.S. extradition effort. In 2014, then-attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam said Guzmán would go to the U.S. after serving his sentence in Mexico — in "about 300, 400 years.” That was before the great escape.
"Before the escape, the Mexican people were split. Some people supported the nationalistic idea that he had to pay for his crimes here," she told USA TODAY. "But after the escape, that totally changed. People don't believe in their institutions."
Still, the Mexican courts must be persuaded. Juan Pablo Badillo, a lawyer for Guzmán, has made it clear his client won't go quietly, telling Milenio TV that the first paperwork to block extradition has been filed.
One hurdle that should easily be cleared is the issue of capital punishment, Masini said. Mexico has no capital punishment and will require an assurance from U.S. officials that no effort will be made to execute Guzman. But lawyers can challenge whether the extradition documents provide probable cause, they can challenge the reliability of witnesses — and they can pick through the paperwork for every possible weakness, Masini said.
"They don't have to raise the challenges all at once, either," Masini said.
Masini noted Mexican elections take place in two years. Currently, Mexican officials have made it clear they support extraditing Guzmán to the U.S. But the political winds could change as elections draw near, he said. Even if the courts approve extradition, renewed nationalistic fervor could prompt the government to have a change of heart and block it.
Correa-Cabrera said Guzmán could well have friends in high places in Mexico — friends who don't want Guzmán mentioning their names to prosecutors in the U.S.
Masini noted that the cost of litigation likely won't be an issue for Guzmán. U.S. indictments claim the El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel has netted billions of dollars.
"It all depends on how hard his lawyers want to push it," Masini said. "I have been involved in extraditions that took months. But others have taken years."
Guzman was captured Friday morning after marines raided a home in the city of Los Mochis. Attorney General Arely Gómez González said Guzman wanted to make a biopic and reached out to actors and producers. That tipped off investigators to his location.
Gómez said a journey to the rugged Sierra Madre mountains by American actor Sean Penn and a fellow actor was “essential” to tipping them off to the drug lord’s whereabouts, Reuters reported.
The Mexican newspaper El Universalreported that Mexican intelligence officials had been tracking the meetings since August 2014, when Guzman ordered his lawyers to contact Mexican actor Kate del Castillo.
|
9953484ba2f259fb487a041051893673
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/01/26/fresno-man-could-key-stunning-california-jailbreak/79337272/
|
Fresno man could be key to stunning California jailbreak
|
Fresno man could be key to stunning California jailbreak
The manhunt for three Southern California men who escaped an Orange County jail last week entered its fifth day Tuesday with much attention focused on an escapee who has been compared to the brutal film character Hannibal Lecter.
Hossein Nayeri, 37, had been held without bond since September 2014, charged with kidnapping, torture, aggravated mayhem and burglary. Nayeri and two other men are accused of kidnapping a California marijuana dispensary owner in 2012, driving him to a spot in the desert where they believed he had hidden money and then torturing him.
Deputy District Attorney Heather Brown told the The Orange County Register that Nayeri was a likely candidate to have planned the escape. She described him as diabolical, sophisticated, violent and cunning.
“My first reaction was 'Oh, my God, they let Hannibal Lecter out,'" she told the newspaper.
A lawyer representing one of Nayeri's codefendants in the 2012 case told the Los Angeles Times that when he heard about the escape, he immediately thought that Nayeri was the mastermind and had recruited the others.
Manhunt for California escapees enters fourth day
Lawyer Robert Weinberg said the savagery of the kidnapping case was an indication of how dangerous Nayeri could be while on the run.
Nayeri, Bac Duong, 43, and Jonathan Tieu, 20, were discovered missing from the Orange County Central Men's Jail in Santa Ana on Friday, about 15 hours after they were present for an early morning head count. Authorities say the men cut through steel into duct work, climbed to the jail roof, but through a section of razor wire and rappelled down using makeshift rope apparently made from bedsheets.
Sheriff's Lt. David Sawyer said the men should be considered extremely dangerous and may be hiding in the area. All are accused of violent crimes, and at least one is connected to Vietnamese gangs in the area, Sawyer said.
"We feel that they may be embedded somewhere in the community, and that is why we are reaching out to the community," Sawyer said.
Sawyer said someone in the area must know where they are or where they are headed. He said the identity of anyone who provided information could be protected. Rewards for information leading to their capture total about $50,000.
"We understand that you are in danger. We understand that you are fearful," Sawyer said. "But it's an obligation that you come out and let us know" where they are.
He said there was no indication that any prison employees were involved in the escape. No suspensions had been issued, he said.
Duong was being held without bond since last month on charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, shooting at an inhabited dwelling, being an ex-felon in possession of a firearm and other charges.
Tieu had been held since October 2013 on $1 million bond on charges of murder, attempted murder and shooting at an inhabited dwelling. His case is believed to be gang-related.
|
7cb60cc8d7b398af2607278e98862b29
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/01/28/pentagon-unveils-family-friendly-initiatives/79462998/
|
Pentagon unveils family-friendly initiatives
|
Pentagon unveils family-friendly initiatives
WASHINGTON — Female troops in all services will receive 12 weeks of maternity leave as part of a series of personnel initiatives Thursday aimed at making military careers more appealing, especially to millennials, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced.
The moves, unveiled under the banner of Force of the Future, are designed to recruit and retain a new generation of troops, Carter said.
Carter's announcement sets the same standard for maternity leave for all services. But the move will also reduce the leave for the Navy and Marine Corps from 18 weeks to 12 weeks. The Army and Air Force will increase from six weeks to 12. Paid paternity leave will be expanded to 14 days from 10, Carter said. About 200,000 women in the services will be eligible for the benefit.
"This puts (the Defense Department) in the top tier of institutions nationwide," Carter said. "It will have significant influence on decision making for our military service members."
The reduction in maternity leave for female sailors does not represent a "downshift," Carter said. However, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who announced the expansion to 18 weeks last year, believes that level is appropriate, said Capt. Patrick McNally, a Navy spokesman.
"Secretary Mabus has been clear since he announced 18 weeks of maternity leave for sailors and marines in July," McNally said "He feels that meaningful maternity leave when it matters most is one of the best ways that we can support the women who serve our county and also serves as a safeguard against losing skilled service members."
Twelve weeks, Carter said, balances the needs of new mothers and the military.
“I concluded that 12 weeks of maternity leave across all of the force establishes the right balance between offering a highly competitive leave policy while also maintaining the readiness of our total force,” Carter said.
The level is likely the best compromise Carter could reach with senior military commanders, said Todd Harrison, a military budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a non-partisan think tank.
"Keep in mind that these initiatives encountered fierce resistance from senior military leaders a few months ago when they were initially being considered within (Defense Department)," Harrison said. "Senior military leaders are on the opposite end of the demographic spectrum than the future leaders these reforms are intended to attract, so it's not surprising that some senior military leaders would oppose them. Twelve weeks is probably the best Carter could do at this time."
The services will also extend day-care center hours by at least two to 14 hours a day, Carter said. In addition, posts with 50 or more people will be required to set aside rooms for new mothers. Other benefits: trading the ability to remain at a base with their families for extending their time in the military; and covering the cost of freezing sperm or eggs for active-duty troops.
Carter, who has held office less than a year, has been making a mark on the Pentagon’s personnel policies. In December, he announced all combat units will be open to women this year, allowing them to compete for 200,000 military roles, most of them in the infantry. That move has been opposed by the Marine Corps, which commissioned a study that units with mixed gender would suffer greater casualties than male-only counterparts.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter's historic personnel changes irk generals
Carter last year announced his intention to rescind the Pentagon’s ban on transgender troops serving openly. A committee of military brass and civilians is close to forwarding recommendations to Carter on the issues, including health care for transgender troops that will have to be addressed when the ban is lifted. The panel’s recommendations will likely be made in the next few weeks.
A 401(k)-style retirement plan for troops was also introduced last year. It affords all troops, regardless of time in the military, to accrue retirement benefits. The old system, which has grandfathered in those already serving, granted benefits only after 20 years of service.
|
c2f03a36cc7bf2c09a5783d36f3a4daf
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/02/04/kik-messaging-app-scrutinized-wake-va-teens-murder/79826224/
|
Kik messaging app scrutinized in wake of Va. teen's murder
|
Kik messaging app scrutinized in wake of Va. teen's murder
Federal authorities and parents are scrutinizing a popular teen messaging app following the murder of a Virginia teen who may have met her killer via the anonymous chat system.
Police arrested two Virginia Tech students in connection with the death of Nicole Lovell, 13, whose body was found three days after she snuck out of her home Jan. 27.
Authorities declined to discuss how the college students met the teen. Lovell’s mother said her daughter likely connected with the suspects online. The Roanoke Timesreported Lovell shared her Kik username on at least one online teen dating site and friends told the Associated Press she was using the app to chat with an 18-year-old man.
The company confirmed Thursday it turned over data to the FBI and local police investigating the case, but declined to specify what information it had provided.
"Kik cooperates with law enforcement to combat child predators anywhere in the world, either upon provision of a court order, or in emergency situations such as this one," the Ontario, Canada-based company said in a statement.
"We are in frequent dialogue with law enforcement authorities to further ensure that our channels of cooperation are as open as they can be while respecting user privacy.”
Child-safety experts say focusing on Kik alone won't solve an ever-changing problem.
“It’s not about the latest app. Because it’s not the app that’s dangerous. It’s the decisions, the actions they’re taking on these apps that are dangerous,” said Ju’Riese Colon, executive director of outreach at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "It’s not about teaching kids not to use a specific app. It’s about teaching them not to give this kind of information out."
Why do teens love Kik?
Kik is popular with kids because it offers almost no effective parental monitoring and lacks controls to prevent children from using it. The messages cannot be automatically duplicated or “mirrored” to another device and only the authorized user has access. That means there’s no way for a parent to see the message exchanges without getting the password from their kid.
While the app says it's limited to anyone 13 or older, there’s no age verification process: users only need an email address and can pick whatever birthdate they want to use. The company said it uses "typical" industry standards for age verification and will delete accounts of anyone younger than 13 if it finds them, or it a parent requests it.
"It is not plausible to have perfect age verification for users," the company said in a statement. "However, Kik believes that its registration process played no role in the unfortunate death of this child."
Unlike many phone-based messaging apps, Kik doesn’t require a phone number, just a user-selected name. That means it can be used on non-phone devices such as Kindles, iPads or iPod Touches, making it harder to monitor.
“Now, because of anonymity, any 60 year-old-guy can pretend to be a 15-year-old-kid,” said Robert Lotter, the creator of the "My Mobile Watchdog” service, which helps parents monitor internet use. “You can basically connect to anybody.”
When you give your kid a phone, "it’s almost like taking your front door off your house," he added.
How can parents protect their kids?
A newly updated guide for parents posted on the company's website Thursday explains how the app works and offers suggestions for monitoring its use. Among the recommendations: Parents should ask their children for the password, review recent messages and block anyone sending inappropriate messages.
"We understand that our Kik users need to feel safe and respected when they use our services, and we take the safety of our users very seriously,” the company said. "Unfortunately, inappropriate behavior is a risk with any kind of communication platform."
The company also offers guidance on how to report suspected illegal activity to police, and explains how parents can request an account be deleted.
Colon said kids love using the Internet because they receive attention they might not be getting elsewhere. In those cases, parents need to be extra careful to ensure the conversations are appropriate, and to teach kids that unsupervised meetings with strangers they've found online is “a recipe for disaster."
“They want to be loved and want to have friends and don’t see the dangers we might see as adults,” Colon said. "A lot of kids feel a lot more comfortable online.”
Kik's Safety Guide for Parents
How many people use the app?
Kik, founded in 2009 by Canadian college students, says 40% of its 240 million users are U.S. teens. The company was valued at $1 billion during a round of investment-capital expansion last summer, when it drew a $50-million investment from a Chinese internet company.
Lotter said parents need to ensure they're monitoring kids' Internet use and regularly talk about what's appropriate. Several people recently posted on the Kik download page on iTunes asking the company to change the way the app works to improve child safety.
“There’s thousands of apps like this, and the reality is that Instagram isn’t much different than Kik, once you understand the underlying technology," he said. "Last year we were talking about Snapchat. Next year we’ll be talking about something else.”
|
e4a98191caa39be0d19c62c323874a42
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/02/05/medicaid-across-us-matter-when-not-if-says-federal-health-chief/79887926/
|
Medicaid across U.S. a matter of when, not if, says federal health chief
|
Medicaid across U.S. a matter of when, not if, says federal health chief
The 4 million new people who signed up for insurance on the federal HealthCare.gov exchange for 2016 are one of several signs the open enrollment period that ended Sunday was a success, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said Friday.
Burwell's comments marked her last press briefing to summarize an Affordable Care Act open enrollment. By this time next year, there will be Obamacare but no more Obama administration.
As further evidence of the administration's successes, Burwell also pointed to her continued discussions with states considering expanding Medicaid to all of those earning too little to get subsidized ACA plans.
These talks, she says, show it's not if states will expand Medicaid but rather "a question of when." She cited two main factors for this: The higher rate of hospital closures in states that haven't expanded Medicaid and howmany people left without coverage are working.
"Helping people who are working and playing by the rules is something that is an important concept most people agree on," she said.
Brian Blase, a former Republican congressional aide now with the free market Mercatus Center, says he's "surprised 20 states still haven’t expanded Medicaid" since the federal government is paying states for all of the new enrollees.
The remaining states haven't expanded Medicaid, Blase says, because they worry the cost "trajectory is unsustainable" and HHS could eventually cut its money to states, which would in turn force them to drop people from Medicaid.
Burwell says she will be leaving the ACA enrollment process in far better shape than she found it in. The technological problems that hurt the website when it opened in October 2013 are mostly a memory, identity verification has been improved, and the final tally for signups on the federal and state exchanges was 12.7 million people.
The number of new enrollees addresses a complaint from insurers that their customers have more health problems than expected and that they game the system to get care and then drop their plans once they receive treatment.
These "news," as Burwell called them, "can leaven the risk pool. They weren’t the people who were most in need."
Next steps for the agency will be to continue to reform the costly way health care is delivered in this country, including by testing ways to incorporate social services into the efforts, Burwell says. This includes new research into the benefits of linking patients to social services, which she says builds on the move towards healthcare that focuses on quality and value over the quantity of treatments.
Feds examine health benefits of screening and linking to social services
"We need to fundamentally think about how we can deliver health care differently," she said.
That includes "helping people connect with services differently," she said. One of the most important hires many doctors and hospitals make, she said, are people who make sure people take their medications, connect them with behavioral health providers or help them with housing or food.
Many of hospital costs are driven by people who need such social services, use emergency rooms frequently and are enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. She cited hospitals that have reduced ER visits by linking people with housing and other services.
"We are on this path towards change," she said.
Nearly 13 million people enrolled in ACA plans for 2016
Burwell also said "quality and affordability" of health care remains a concern of hers and must be a goal of consumers as they continue to shoulder more of the costs of their own care.
Quality is getting hard to find, however. A report out Friday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found more than half of hospitals reduced the number of insurance networks they were in for 2016. The percent of hospitals that were only in-network with one ACA exchange plan increased from 7% in 2015 to 20% in 2016. When compared to U.S. News & World Report's most highly-rated hospitals, RWJF found nearly all were in-network with at least one exchange plan.
|
e645a0ee555eda9d6a1c37dc5b0cd166
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/02/08/new-hampshire-state-police-lab-swamped-heroin-opioids/79876578/
|
New Hampshire State Police: Lab swamped by heroin, opioids
|
New Hampshire State Police: Lab swamped by heroin, opioids
CONCORD, N.H. — Apart from the growing body count, there is no more powerful evidence of the enormous supply of heroin and fentanyl that continue to inundate this state than the thousands of yellow case files arrayed on an examination table in the state's crime laboratory.
The mountain of work represents a backlog of 3,700 cases awaiting analysis, a task that would take seven months to clear, only if authorities stopped taking new cases.
But the pipeline continues to surge with 750 new requests for drug analysis each month in a lab equipped to process just slightly more than 500 such cases.
Heroin 'apocalypse' shadows New Hampshire primary
It used to be, said Col. Robert Quinn, director of the New Hampshire State Police, that seizures amounted to baggies of individual doses. It is now more common to recover 10-gram "fingers'' of heroin or crudely mixed rolls of fentanyl (the significantly more potent synthetic opioid) capable of dispensing more than 300 individual doses.
Last year in Manchester, police recovered 28,676.6 grams of heroin, enough for 955,887 dosage units or nearly enough to distribute to the state's entire population of 1.3 million, according to Timothy Pifer, director of the laboratory operated by the State Police. It is so plentiful and powerfully addictive, Quinn said, that dealers are often extending credit to addicts, knowing that the unrelenting craving will bring them back.
Fentanyl, however, has been emerging as the most deadly in the current drug epidemic that has ravaged New England.
Last year, fentanyl, between 30 and 50 times more potent than heroin, was responsible for 151 of the 400 drug deaths in New Hampshire. (A final 2015 death count is pending the examination of more than 30 other cases.)
It is so potent — death can result from accidental inhalation or absorption through skin abrasions — that the lab is ordering stocks of naloxone or narcan, now commonly carried by firefighters and some police to reverse the effects of potentially deadly heroin and opioid overdoses, to guard lab examiners against exposure.
"Before 2012, we never saw this (fentanyl) in the lab,'' Quinn said. "The lethal nature of this stuff is off the charts.''
|
fe515acd09662c7b655d59d60a22926d
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/02/12/ferguson-justice-department-lawsuit/80248170/
|
What Ferguson faces in fighting the Justice Dept.
|
What Ferguson faces in fighting the Justice Dept.
WASHINGTON — The first time a Justice Department lawsuit to reform a local police department was challenged, the odds seemed stacked against Columbus, Ohio.
Federal authorities alleged that police officers had engaged in false arrests and excessive force. The actions, officials said at the time of the 1999 lawsuit, were effectively sanctioned because detailed incident reports were forwarded to superiors who took no action.
Yet after municipal leaders argued in 2002 that they had begun implementing improvements on their own, Justice took the unusual step of dropping the case in favor of an out-of-court resolution.
Fourteen years later, Ferguson has embarked on a similar course, but few believe that the fraught Missouri town has the capacity to overcome what federal authorities contend is decades of systemic discrimination that has enveloped the community’s entire criminal justice system. The Justice Department sued the city Wednesday after municipal leaders sought to revise a long-negotiated settlement, citing prohibitive costs of executing such a deal.
“If they (Ferguson) go to court, they will lose,’’ University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris said. “There is one way Ferguson doesn’t end up paying and that is if the town goes out of business.’’
The professor's assessment is harsh, but it is a sentiment shared by many analysts, including some policing advocates, who believe that the millions of dollars it will likely cost to mount a legal challenge would be better spent on reforming the operations of the troubled police agency that was thrust into the uncomfortable national spotlight 18 months ago after the disputed shooting of an 18-year-old unarmed black teenager by a white officer.
Feds sue Ferguson to force police reform
The officer was not charged, but the incident and the sustained civil unrest that followed prompted a broad Justice Department examination of the city's criminal justice system. That examination, published nearly a year ago, offered a searing indictment of policing operations, asserting that African Americans were disproportionately subjected to arrests and stops. At the same time, investigators said the city sought to use policing operations to boost revenues in fines and fees, often at the expense of poor and African American residents who had little means to contest such sanctions.
"The findings seem to be pretty clear cut,'' said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank. "This is a department with very serious problems. A lawsuit only seems to prolong a contentious relationship with the Department of Justice and with the community.''
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in announcing the legal action Wednesday, suggested that the city had wasted 26 weeks at the negotiating table only to reject a deal "approved by their own negotiators.''
"Their decision leaves us no further choice,'' Lynch said.
Since then, Ferguson officials have been unmoved, saying they remain anxious to resume negotiations after the City Council voted late Tuesday to revise a tentative agreement reached with Justice last month. The amendments, in part, removed language, which local leaders asserted, mandated big raises for police officers to draw a more qualified and diverse candidate pool.
Local leaders also sought to free the city from its obligations under the agreement should Ferguson shutter the police department and enlist another agency to provide public safety services.
Providence one of many U.S. police forces feeling Ferguson aftershocks
Harris also raised the prospect that by inviting the lawsuit Ferguson may be gambling that within a year a new administration in the White House may be more sympathetic to the city's plight.
"The city stands by to re-start negotiations to approve (an agreement) with the amendments that have the support of an overwhelming majority of the public,'' Ferguson spokesman Jeff Small said. He added that there was "no consideration'' of a political calculus to wait out the current administration.
"It didn't get that far,'' he said.
Robert Driscoll, a former chief of staff in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division who worked on the Columbus case during the Bush administration, said Ferguson's decision — while rare — may not be "a terrible idea.''
By moving quickly to file a lawsuit, Driscoll said, Justice officials may have lost some leverage to cajole a settlement and begin the process of reform.
"They effectively killed their hostage,'' Driscoll said.
It will now be up to the court's decide, the former official said, whether Justice may have over-stepped its authority by trying to dictate such things as the physical makeup of the police department and how officers should be paid.
While formidable, Driscoll also said Justice's legal action is not guaranteed to succeed.
Last year, a North Carolina federal judge ruled that the government "failed to demonstrate'' that the Alamance County, N.C., Sheriff's Department engaged in discriminatory policing of Hispanics.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder rendered the decision after a 10-day bench trial.
"A lawsuit is not a slam dunk,'' Driscoll said.
But James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union, said that it's generally in the "best interests'' of troubled police departments to seek an agreement short of a lawsuit.
"Justice can keep this going in court for years,'' Pasco said, referring to the enormous legal fees Ferguson will likely face in pursing such a challenge. "You would have to be in serious denial to say that this course Ferguson is taking is the result of good advice.''
|
d1023eb99d1845df5b602982566a0e7f
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/02/13/sue-klebold-columbine-shooting/80332022/
|
Mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold breaks silence
|
Mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold breaks silence
The mother of one of the two perpetrators of the one of the worst school shootings in United States history is breaking her 17-year silence, saying she has been wracked with pain and guilt since the incident.
Sue Klebold spoke to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer on Friday about the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in which her son, Dylan Klebold, and his classmate, Eric Harris, fatally shot 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. The interview on a special edition of 20/20 came three days before the Monday release of Klebold’s book, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy.
"The one thing that I want to say is I am so sorry for what my son did, yet I know that saying ‘I’m sorry’ is an inadequate response to all this suffering," a tearful Klebold, 66, said during the interview. "There is never a day that goes by that I don’t think of the people that Dylan harmed."
Sawyer asked Klebold about using the word "harmed." Klebold said she could not bring herself to use a stronger word for what happened that morning, when Dylan Klebold, then 17, and Harris, then 18, arrived at school and started mayhem.
Both arrived at the school shortly after 11 a.m. that morning, placed a propane bomb in the cafeteria, then went outside to wait for it to detonate. When the bomb did not go off as scheduled, both began shooting outside, then took the rampage indoors.
Along with the 13 they shot dead, 24 more were hurt, the incident characterized by pictures on television of children running out of the school and tearfully embracing each other outside. Columbine seemed to kick off a spate of school shootings in the country in the years since, the deadliest taking place in 2007 when a gunman opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va., killing 32.
Sue Klebold recalled the horror of that morning in her interview with Sawyer. She said she was at work when she received a telephone call from her husband, Tom, saying something was happening at the high school and that their son might be the shooter.
"His voice sounded horrible, jagged, breathless," she said.
She remembered hyperventilating and, later, when she learned more about what was going on, praying that her son would die. "I prayed that God would stop this. ‘Please make it stop, don’t let him hurt anybody,' " Klebold recounted to Sawyer.
Investigators later learned that Dylan Klebold and Harris had been planning the incident for a year and that Klebold, in a journal, lamented that nobody accepted him even though he wanted to be accepted.
Sue Klebold said there were small signs that her son was troubled but she wrote them off to teen growing pains and angst. "I remember asking him, ‘Are you OK? Are you sure you’re OK?' "
But she said she could have never imagined that the boy she once thought of as her "happy, precocious, brilliant little child" could overnight become a "hate-crazed gunman."
Klebold told Sawyer her life has seen its ups and downs since that incident and she was battled depression. She and her husband divorced, unable to cope together with their grief, and she survived a bout with breast cancer. In fact, it was dealing with the harsh treatment that forced Klebold to decide she would live.
The proceeds from her book will go toward research and foundations focused on mental illness.
Sometimes, Klebold told Sawyer, she goes to visit the Columbine Memorial.
"I feel kind of unwelcome there, like perhaps I’m intruding," she said. "Sometimes I just sit there and think – and I tell them I’m sorry."
|
bb2d98504b62eda4aec0b7f12ec66b7b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/02/21/scandals-dog-bolivias-evo-morales/80697326/
|
Scandals dog Bolivia's Evo Morales ahead of referendum
|
Scandals dog Bolivia's Evo Morales ahead of referendum
LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — An influence-peddling scandal involving a former lover and a deadly incident of political violence could not have come at a worse time for Bolivian President Evo Morales.
Bolivians decide in a referendum Sunday whether to amend the constitution so Morales can run for a fourth consecutive term in 2019.
Voters were about evenly split — with some 15% undecided — on whether to give Bolivia's first indigenous president another shot at governing before the bombshell hit.
Two weeks ago, a journalist revealed that an ex-lover of Morales in 2013 was named sales manager of a Chinese company, CAMC Engineering Co. Ltd, which has obtained nearly $500 million in mostly no-bid state contracts.
Morales denied any impropriety, and said he last saw the woman was in 2007 when a child they conceived died under circumstances that neither has explained.
The case deepened doubts about the integrity of Morales' governing Movement Toward Socialism, which has been dogged by scandal.
Adding to Morales' woes were last week's asphyxiation deaths of six municipal officials in El Alto, the teeming city adjacent La Paz run since last year by an opposition mayor.
Pro-Morales forces are accused of setting the fire that provoked the deaths, sacking the building where the slain officials worked and torching documents that allegedly incriminate the previous mayor in payroll corruption.
Both developments threatened to eclipse Morales' achievements in cutting poverty and empowering Bolivia's indigenous majority during a decade in office.
South America's left has recently been sullied by scandal but Morales had personally remained unscathed.
His ruling circles have been discredited, however, by the skimming of millions from the government-managed Fondo Indigena, which runs agricultural and public works in the countryside.
Morales presided over Bolivia's biggest economic boom as prices for raw materials soared just as he took office, constructing airports, highways and the pride of La Paz, an Austrian-built aerial tramway system, while putting a Chinese-built satellite into space. In 2014, he won re-election with 60 percent of the vote.
But that boom is over.
Bolivia's revenues from natural gas and minerals, making up three-fourths of its exports, were down 32% last year.
Economists say Morales leaned heavily on extractive industries to pay for populist programs and failed to diversify the economy.
At the same time, judicial corruption became endemic, jail overcrowding worsened and health care did not improve. Meanwhile, Morales suffocated the opposition and independent media just as his late ally Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela.
|
3b8e0a7f96ad55fa994608e0d6f20a32
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/02/29/almost-20-top-medals-awarded-secretly-since-911/81119316/
|
Almost 20% of top medals awarded secretly since 9/11
|
Almost 20% of top medals awarded secretly since 9/11
WASHINGTON — Nearly 20% of the military’s most-treasured medals have been awarded for classified missions since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, according to data obtained by USA TODAY.
The secrecy surrounding more than 200 Service Cross and Silver Star awards reflects the reliance on special operations forces involved in classified missions to capture or kill terrorists and free hostages, according to a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because officials were not authorized to characterize the commendations.
Last month, the Pentagon announced that officials are reviewing 1,090 awards of Service Crosses and Silver Stars awarded since Sept. 11, 2001 to determine if any should be upgraded to the nation’s highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor.
Since 9/11, the 216 medals were awarded in secret for missions that cannot be publicly discussed, according to the records. One Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest medal awarded to soldiers, and three Navy Crosses, the equivalent medal for sailors and Marines, have been issued for courageous acts during classified operations. The Navy awarded 112 Silver Stars, and the Army 100 more for undisclosed actions. The Air Force has not issued a Service Cross or Silver Star in secret since 9/11.
The data, current as of last week, could change slightly as medals continue to be reviewed.
That one in five of the nation’s highest medals has been issued in secret is likely due to the reliance on special operations forces undertaking stealthy missions, said the official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. Along with drone strikes, what are called “direct-action raids” conducted by commandos in secret have become a hallmark of the war on terror, the official said.
On Monday, President Obama talked about one of those secret missions when he awarded a Navy SEAL the Medal of Honor. Senior Chief Petty Officer Edward Byers earned the medal for his role in springing an American doctor held hostage by the Taliban in 2012. Byers’ surpassing heroism is the reason details of the mission were made public. Medals of Honor are not awarded in secret.
Obama underlined the reason for secrecy in his remarks at the ceremony.
“Given the nature of Ed’s service, there is a lot that we cannot say today,” Obama said. “Many of the operational details of his mission remain classified. Many of his teammates cannot be mentioned. And this is as it should be. Their success demands secrecy, and that secrecy saves lives.”
Dramatic Taliban hostage rescue earns Navy SEAL the Medal of Honor
The rescue of Dilip Joseph also cost the life of Byers’ SEAL teammate, Nicolas Checque. He was killed by a Taliban guard as he burst through the door of their stronghold. Cheque was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions in the mission. Cheque is among 70 Navy special operators, 55 of them SEALs, to be killed in action since the 9/11 attacks, Obama said.
The ongoing review of medals for upgrade could increase the number of Medal of Honor ceremonies, said Dwight Mears, a former West Point history professor who researched the awards process. Some Service Crosses awarded during the Vietnam War were classified because they were from previously secret operations in countries such as Laos.
Political and practical reasons can limit the number of Medals of Honor awarded for wars like Vietnam and the current conflict, Mears said in an email.
Pentagon may upgrade hundreds of troops to possible Medals of Honor
“There may be both overhead pressure to downgrade in order to keep the operations out of the public eye for strategic reasons, and also pressure from the lower echelons responsible for originating the award recommendations,” Mears said. “Recommending a (Medal of Honor) effectively removes a special operator from any future tactical operations by revealing his identity and making him into a celebrity, and it also brings increased public scrutiny into the unit itself.”
The nature of the secret missions — often quick, violent raids — has led to some of the most intense hand-to-hand fighting in American military history, said Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. A senior special operations general told O’Hanlon that some of his soldiers had been engaged in more close combat with the enemy than any soldiers in U.S. history.
“I had to think about that awhile before realizing he was probably right,” O’Hanlon said.
|
eda8b156ae37db18d028ebe313a8802b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/07/pain-loss-infant-may-linger-forever/81351272/
|
The pain from the loss of an infant may linger forever
|
The pain from the loss of an infant may linger forever
Five years after her third child, Eleanora, died at five months old of a congenital abnormality, Joyal Mulheron still goes to occasional therapy to process the grief and has trouble speaking publicly about her loss.
The former health policy adviser to the National Governors Association felt her loss so profoundly that she quit her job two years ago as chief strategy officer for the Partnership for a Healthier America, the private offshoot of first lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign. She launched a non profit to help other families grappling with the loss of a child at any age and to push for policies, like paid leave for people who lose children, that recognize the grief they are dealing with.
The organization, Evermore, uses the tagline "Because losing a child ... changes everything." Mulheron realized that if she was suffering so much, how could parents cope if their children died in the military, due to suicide or perhaps even in an accident they caused?
"There's guilt and grief regardless, but if it's something unexpected like SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) and they think there's something they should have done, those parents are the most vulnerable," says Mulheron, who lives in Quantico, Va. "That makes it very hard to function in daily life."
Huge racial disparities persist despite slow infant mortality drop
Mulheron believes the mental health and grief resources for people who lose children are woefully inadequate, even for relatively well-to-do families like hers with two incomes, employer-provided insurance and a mother with a master's degree who worked for years in health policy. She notes there are only 100 physicians in the United States who are board-certified in pediatric palliative care and more than 40,000 children under 18 die a year, about half of them under age 1.
She can only imagine the struggles of low-income minority mothers, who are often single and are at higher risk of fatal complications.
"After Eleanora died, it’s not even just being numb; it was a complete inability to cope," says Mulheron. "I didn't even know to put a coat on because it was cold outside."
Her insurance would only cover $72 of the $250 it cost for the 90-minute therapy sessions she needed twice a week. When the money ran out, she borrowed money from family
Whatever is lacking in support now, it's far better than it was when Cathy Teulings' first child, Lisa, died 17 hours after she was born 30 years ago. It was three years before she found a support group that met to talk about children they lost.
"That’s when I started my healing," says Teulings.
Healing, but not forgetting. Teulings keeps a photo of the infant, with tubes coming out of her body, on the mantel of her Hamden, Conn., home next to her other children. Every year on Lisa's birthday, Cathy and husband Dave bring red roses to the baby's gravesite. And the high school art teacher makes ceramic memory hearts when anyone she knows loses a child.
Even if you have other children — three in Mulheron's case, including 13-month-old Holden, four for Teulings — the pain is always there and the baby isn't replaced. In fact, the guilt over not paying enough attention to the other children can compound the grief.
Mulheron was driving her teenage daughter to a gymnastics camp in Alabama two years ago when her daughter broke down crying and finally told her mother that she thought she caused Eleanora's death by dropping a hairbrush on her. Mulheron couldn't believe she hadn't realized how much her oldest daughter was hurting for the previous three years.
"I was so invested in one child that I left the others behind," says Mulheron.
Teulings was laid off from her commercial interior design job a year after Lisa's death and was told, basically, "to go home and figure this out," she says.
"I was just expected to get over this and move on," says Teulings. "Once I had my other children, people just assumed I did that."
But she hadn't — and then tragedy struck again. Teulings' 53-year-old younger brother, Doug Page, died in January of last year of an aortic dissection. He was buried on the same day as Lisa. On the one-year anniversary of his death this January, Teulings' extended family didn't mention how they were all thinking of Lisa too, as it would have been her 30th birthday. They said they didn't want to make Teulings sad, but that was a mistake.
"It would have been so comforting to know they were thinking of Lisa," says Teulings.
And it's that kind of empathy that Mulheron is hoping to draw from people when they read the stories on her site that people are telling are of their life-altering loss.
|
7e228d4eaf40322f6737efc933d6af87
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/08/feds-call-prescription-drug-price-2014-ncrease-remarkable/81490820/
|
Feds call prescription drug price 2014 increase 'remarkable'
|
Feds call prescription drug price 2014 increase 'remarkable'
Fast-rising drug prices coupled with the use of costlier specialty drugs were the main reasons for a nearly 13% uptick in prescription drug spending in 2014, federal health officials said Tuesday.
The Department of Health and Human Services called drug growth in 2013 “subdued,” but said 2014’s increase was “remarkable” and that it remained elevated during 2015 based on preliminary estimates.
HHS estimated prescription drug spending in the U.S. was about $457 billion in 2015, or 16.7% of overall personal health care services.
That's far higher than the 10% of health care spending the pharmaceutical industry typically estimates it is responsible for, says Peter Bach, a physician and the director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Bach says drugmakers do that to suggest there is a "divine balance" in health spending as such a large portion of spending is attributable to factors beyond their control.
"If you look across healthcare,,,you won’t find another major sector that can set their own prices," says Bach.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services proposed a possible solution Tuesday to the high cost of drugs administered in doctors' offices or hospitals' outpatient departments, which are those the federal government covers as part of Medicare Part B.
The proposed rule would test ways to encourage doctors to prescribe the most effective drugs and reward the best results for patients. Among the options to be tested: Reducing or eliminating patient cost sharing to make it possible for more patients to get the drugs that will work best for them.
For drugs with very high costs, such as oncology drugs, and no good substitutes, the government should regularly disseminate information about the utility and safety of these drugs, says Linda Cahn, president of Pharmacy Benefit Consultants
"Doctors rarely tell their patients that many oncology drugs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per person, but often do nothing but make people far sicker while extending life for only a few short weeks or months," says Cahn, who also heads the National Prescription Coverage Coalition, which analyzes prices and encourages its members to use lower priced drugs.
Patient groups funded by drugmakers are largely mum on high drug prices
HHS said it doesn't expect prices to continue to rise as fast beyond 2015 as they have, but Bach says "I'm not sure that's right." He cites drug companies "maneuvers that will cause increased spending," such as repackaging existing drugs, and the new cancer drugs expected out this year.
Do drug benefit managers reduce health costs?
Cahn says her coalition reduced prescription costs or kept them flat for all of its members in 2015. She says all insurance plans and federal and state governments could do the same.
"The federal government’s conclusion that national drug spending rose 12.6% in 2014 and remained elevated in 2015 reflects that those paying for the bulk of drugs’ costs are not taking the appropriate steps to control drug costs, says Cahn.
At a Johns Hopkins University symposium on solutions to drug pricing Tuesday, experts discussed possible solutions to the soaring pharmaceutical costs. Tricia Neuman of Kaiser Family Foundation said polls by Kaiser show people blamed pharmaceutical companies, rather than insurance companies, for the high prices.
And no matter what their political party, people overwhelmingly said the federal government should be able to negotiate Medicare drug prices with drug makers.
But former House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., now a visiting policy scholar at Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health, said "competition is one of the best cures for the over pricing of drugs."
"I don’t think the government would have any better luck" than the pharmacy benefit managers corporations use for their drug plans, he said. "We’ll just have to keep looking for some things we can try out," said Waxman. "Every solution you get will lead to other problems."
|
3edacd64db3b35166ad1d6c030e9f888
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/09/pentagon-developed-unique-policy-ensure-drones-used-legally/81540412/
|
Pentagon has a 'unique' policy for legal use of drones in U.S.
|
Pentagon has a 'unique' policy for legal use of drones in U.S.
The use of military drones over U.S. soil appears to be perfectly legal, but some question why the program has been largely shrouded in mystery and say local governments should assume more control over the practice.
The Pentagon has used spy drones over the United States over the past decade, but did not publicize that fact until it responded to a Freedom of Information Act request, known as a FOIA. Benjamin Friedman, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, wondered why it took so long to provide information on a program that's been operating since 2006.
"If everything is so legal, then it shouldn't take a FOIA request to find out about it," Friedman said.
The Pentagon has publicly posted at least a partial list of the drone missions that have flown in non-military airspace over the United States and explains the use of the aircraft, many to aid in local disasters. But that list is not well known.
Friedman did not question the overall legality of the program. He said using military personnel and equipment on U.S. soil is a common practice, including training at military bases and providing assistance to local law enforcement agencies during emergencies. He gave the example of National Guard troops helping to locate victims after natural disasters.
Drones, he said, are simply an extension of that practice.
That mirrors the findings of a legal analysis conducted by the Pentagon's inspector general, which found the Pentagon's infrequent use of the military drones over U.S. soil — fewer than 20 times from 2006 to 2015 — to be lawful. According to a Pentagon report, then secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed an interim policy on Sept. 28, 2006, designed to govern the use of military drones over the U.S.
Pentagon report justifies deployment of military spy drones over the U.S.
That remained in force until superseded early last year by a policy with a more standardized approval process.
The inspector general analysis found that while the Pentagon can legally assist civil authorities when requested, the use of drones was new ground. There was no federal statute that addressed what to do if a governor or a state emergency official requested the use of a military drone for some form of surveillance, such as in floods, fires or other disasters.
So the Pentagon drafted an interim policy that mirrored how the military provides other forms of assistance to civil authorities when requested. But the policy was made highly restrictive, according to the inspector general analysis, requiring that each request receive explicit approval by the secretary of Defense or someone designated by the secretary.
"Great care is taken by DoD (Department of Defense) personnel to protect the American public's civil liberties and privacy rights while simultaneously preparing to employ UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) capabilities," the inspector general concluded.
Friedman said he would be more comfortable if local governments and law enforcement agencies stopped borrowing the military drones and instead purchased their own. By doing so, he said, there would be more oversight of the programs and more input from the very U.S. citizens who could find a drone flying over their backyard.
"It's an accountability concern," Friedman said. "You'd like to know if you're a voter in California or Ohio if your authorities feel they need to be flying Predator drones. You'd like to be able to have some kind of democratic debate about that."
|
962df45056248025946a13a77ed74eea
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/16/how-water-systems-identified/81281114/
|
How USA TODAY ID'd water with high lead levels
|
How USA TODAY ID'd water with high lead levels
To identify water systems across the country that found excessive amounts of lead in tests of users’ tap water, the USA TODAY NETWORK turned to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Safe Drinking Water Information System, a repository of data that purports to include details about contaminants and issues for every water system.
Journalists obtained data documenting any “action-level exceedance” for lead. We captured all tests above the action level for 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. We also looked at more complete water testing data obtained from several large states, which are the original source of most of the information that feeds into the EPA's database.
A water system exceeds the EPA's action level if more than 10% of samples taken during a testing period show lead contamination levels of more than 15 parts per billion. So, if a water system conducted 10 tap tests in a period, the second-highest test result is used to determine whether the system is over the action limit.
Beyond Flint: Excessive lead levels found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states
Here's an official EPA document on how that "90th percentile" test is selected, if you want to read more about it.
Samples of drinking water are taken from taps in homes, businesses, schools, day-care centers and other buildings the water system serves. They are tested and the results are submitted to a regulatory agency, usually at the state government level.
The EPA gathers tests for lead and for other contaminants above certain levels and posts the "exceedances" along with a host of other data about systems’ drinking water and their compliance with federal rules online in its Safe Drinking Water Information System database.
How much lead in water poses an imminent threat?
Journalists extracted the records of lead tests above the action level, streamlined the format and cross-checked a sample of the EPA’s records against individual test records gathered from several states under their open-records laws. Some duplicate test records were removed, but a range of other issues emerged with the EPA’s data.
While the EPA database provides the best available nationwide, public list of water systems that tested above the action-level threshold for lead contamination, it is imperfect, as are most large data sets operated by the government. USA TODAY identified problems with spellings of names, placement of decimal points, and inconsistent and incorrect data entry by local water systems or state agencies documenting test results.
The broader safe drinking water database has problems. as previously reported in USA TODAY and from the Government Accountability Office. USA TODAY’s sample review identified problems with about 5% of the more than 2,000 action-level exceedance records. Among the problems seen:
• Incorrect data entry, typically using incorrect units of measure. For example, Maine state records show the Bearhaven Crossing Water District experiencing an action-level exceedance of 20 parts per billion while the EPA data set shows 20,000 ppb, likely because the person entering the data was confused about the unit of measure. In reality, the test in question showed 20 ppb of lead.
In a few cases, the errors were decimal points in the wrong places or exceedances for copper entered into the database as lead.
• A small number of samples. With the very smallest water systems, only a handful of samples are taken during a test period, and states are allowed to average the top results. Sometimes that results in an artificially high lead reading, particularly if the math is done wrong. One action-level result in the tiny Sky Meadows subdivision in Harris County, Ga., was calculated based on incomplete data. Subsequent tests showed much lower lead levels.
When USA TODAY NETWORK journalists identified an entry in the federal database that was inconsistent with state records or that a state or water system official questioned, the record was either removed or corrected if definitive documentation was available to show the EPA’s published data was wrong.
4 tips to check the safety of your home's tap water
The measurements in the EPA data set capture lead levels at specific taps at a specific time, and subsequent tests might show lower lead levels.
Consider Harris County, Texas, where the state environmental agency confirmed action-level lead-in-water samples for 34 water systems in the EPA’s data set but noted 14 were no longer in action-level status, according to their records.
That means subsequent testing did not show lead levels greater than 15 ppb but does not necessarily mean that the lead issue is corrected across the system.
Lead in your water: Not easy to find out
While USA TODAY NETWORK journalists focused their reporting on water systems with repeated instances over several years exceeding the action level for lead, we included one-time instances for the sake of transparency — in the interest of alerting people and customers who use the drinking water at those sites, to empower them to question local and state officials about the reasons for the high lead levels and what action they took.
We also deemed it important to reveal to the broader public the full scope of drinking water contaminated with lead nationwide, showing how many water systems had tested above the government’s action level for lead, in light of the lack of transparency about lead in drinking water in places like Flint, Mich., and Sebring, Ohio.
Follow John Kelly and Mark Nichols on Twitter: @jkelly3rd and @nicholsmarkc
|
6ffd306b4a1575c43bd0de499c82069f
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/16/questions-answers-water-filters-lead/81219174/
|
What you need to know about water filters to remove lead
|
What you need to know about water filters to remove lead
Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misidentified the name of the Aquasana filter.
If you're not confident the drinking water in your home is lead free, consider buying a water filter or other treatment device.
Before you purchase a water-treatment device, experts recommend getting a water-quality report from your utility, then having a certified lab test your home’s water.
Question: How can I reduce the risk of lead in my drinking water?
Answer: Even if you don’t have lead pipes, it’s possible for lead to get in your water after leaching from faucets or solder on pipes.
Beyond Flint: Excessive lead levels found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states
One way to reduce the risk: If water has been sitting in your pipes for more than six hours, turn on your tap and run water through it until it comes out cold, at least 1 or 2 minutes. That helps flush any lead accumulated because of low water flow.
If you decide to buy a filter, be aware that each water filter guards against specific contaminants. Make sure you get a filter that reduces or eliminates the risk of lead.
Q: What type of water-treatment device do I want?
A: Several types of systems filter water used in homes. The filter may be attached to a faucet, sit on a counter or be affixed beneath the sink.
Filters also are found in refrigerators that serve water through the door, water pitchers and some water bottles.
Choose the type of filter based on your needs. For example, do you simply want to filter water in your kitchen, or do you want a filtration system for an entire home?
Reverse-osmosis devices screen out contaminants but can be more difficult to install than some filters. Distillers use electricity to boil water from a tap, reduce contaminants and collect clean water in a jug.
Q: Where can I find detailed information about each type of filter or system to help me make my decision?
A: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offers an explanation of filtration-system options, including varieties that reduce lead.
Consumer Reports has an overview of filter types. The publication also offers a more detailed report that rates and recommends filters.
It's available only to subscribers, who can view the publication’s overall score for filters after evaluating factors such as how well a filter removes lead, chloroform and bad taste.
Using these kinds of consumer-oriented sites will help you research to determine what kind of filter best fits your need. Once you’ve decided the type of filter you want, you can research brands online or go to building-supply stores and examine different brands and prices.
Q: How do I gauge quality in a water filter?
A: Government agencies, such as the EPA, don’t test water filters for effectiveness in removing lead from water.
You can check whether a particular brand of filter has been certified by NSF International, a private organization founded as the National Sanitation Foundation in 1944 that tests and certifies water filters, or the Water Quality Association, a trade group representing the water-treatment industry. The American National Standards Institute, a non-profit organization that oversees development of voluntary consensus standards, has accredited both organizations.
How much lead in water poses an imminent threat?
NSF International tests and verifies five areas when it certifies a water-treatment system.
A product must prove it reduces contaminants, does not add harmful substances to water, is structurally sound, and uses consistent production and manufacturing standards. A system is checked for misleading claims, labeling or advertising.
To be certified under NSF standards, a filter or water treatment system must demonstrate it is able to reduce lead from 15 parts per billion 10 ppb or less.
Keep in mind that some products will claim to be tested to NSF standards but do not have the organization’s certification. NSF International hasn't vetted such products.
Q: Where can consumers find out which brands and models of filters are professionally certified?
A: NSF International’s online database is searchable so you can find certified models of various filter types. The EPA suggests using NSF-certified products to ensure your filter meets standards. Search the NSF database by type of filter, brand and the substance you want to filter out at http://info.nsf.org/Certified/DWTU.
Another option: the Water Quality Association’s database at https://www.wqa.org.
The water-treatment industry trade organization tests and certifies filtration systems for use in homes or business properties. The EPA cites it as a credible resource.
Q: How much do water filters cost?
A: Retail websites quote a range of prices. Costco lists prices that range from $75 for a 450-gallon, under-counter filtration system, to $1,200 for a whole-home system.
You can compare prices by visiting multiple retailers, but prices are often similar.
Prices will vary depending on the type, size and features of a water-filtration system, but the unit's cost is not the only consideration. Replacement filters can range from less than $20 to $400 each year, according to Consumer Reports.
Q: How do I maintain a filtration system?
A: A big mistake people make is not replacing the filter when the manufacturer recommends it, an NSF spokeswoman said. Some systems have an indicator light or another alert that signals when a filter should be changed.
How USA TODAY ID'd water with high lead levels
The filters become less effective as contaminants clog a filter’s pores or adhere to a filter’s surface. You may not notice when a filter becomes less effective, so it’s important to follow the manufacturer’s recommendation.
Replacement typically is recommended based on a set period or a certain number of gallons that a filter processes.
“Any system that's used to treat water needs to be maintained," said Kevin Chadwick, a water manager with Maricopa County Environmental Services Department in Phoenix.
Q: Is getting a filter system less expensive than purchasing bottled water?
A: You probably can find a filtration system that is less expensive than bottled water. But filtration-system costs can add up depending on the quality, filters and maintenance.
Filter systems also are convenient. You can use filtered water to drink and cook and have the convenience of not having to drive to a store to buy water.
Sometimes, bottled water is a necessity. In Flint, Mich., communities used bottled water after tests revealed lead levels that exceeded what could be removed with in-home filters.
4 tips to check the safety of your home's tap water
“Bottled water is a solution at times,” said David Loveday, the Water Quality Association’s government affairs director. “Some areas, they were testing and getting readings of about 150 parts per billion. That’s where bottled water comes into play.”
Q: If I have a complaint about a filtration system, to whom do I take it?
A: Submit it to the manufacturer or to the Federal Trade Commission at FTC.gov. The FTC website has a portal to submit product complaints.
Follow Ken Alltucker of The Arizona Republic on Twitter: @kalltucker
|
9115e09fe54a1a0eb4600919f75f14a3
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/16/what-lead-levels-in-water-mean/81534336/
|
How much lead in water poses an imminent threat?
|
How much lead in water poses an imminent threat?
The water contamination crisis in Flint, Mich., has fueled concerns about how much lead is coming out of taps in homes across the USA.
But what amount of lead in drinking water poses an urgent health risk — the kind of threat that should cause consumers to immediately stop using their home's water for drinking and cooking?
The federal government has given water systems no recommendation on issuing a do-not-drink order, said Jim Taft, executive director of the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators.
If water samples show lead levels like those in Flint, "people need to stop drinking the water," Taft said. "But what is that number?"
Beyond Flint: Excessive lead levels found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states
That's difficult to answer because the amount of lead coming out of taps across a city can vary significantly depending on the amount of lead in each home's plumbing. Water is generally lead free leaving a system's treatment plant and becomes contaminated only as it approaches individual homes that have lead service lines or internal plumbing made with lead.
Newer homes without lead in their plumbing face no risk.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both say no amount of lead in water is safe.
But neither agency answered the USA TODAY NETWORK's questions about when lead contamination in water poses an imminent health risk or when do-not-drink orders should be issued.
"At this time, EPA has not provided a broader guidance regarding a lead concentration that would trigger a do-not-drink order," the agency said in an emailed statement.
The EPA's current action level for lead in drinking water is part of a water treatment technique rule designed to serve as a warning sign for water systems that they need to address the corrosivity of their water. The more corrosive the water, the more lead that will leach from old plumbing.
Only when more than 10% of a system's tap water samples show lead concentrations above 15 parts per billion does an alert go out to customers.
But these notifications don't tell consumers to stop drinking the water. They advise of a potential risk and give ways to reduce exposures, such as letting taps run to clear stagnant water that has been sitting in pipes and may contain the most lead.
How much lead in water poses an imminent threat?
In Flint, the amount of lead found in in residents' water since the crisis erupted has varied from house to house with many showing no detectable levels of lead. At a few homes, lead levels reached 4,000 ppb to nearly 12,000 ppb.
As of earlier this month, regulators had conducted more than 14,800 tests at homes across Flint. About 1,100 testsshowed lead levels at greater than the EPA's 15 ppb action level with more than a third of them above 40 ppb, state data show.
From at least 2002 into 2004, archived webpages show the EPA’s website said a lead concentration of 40 ppb or more in drinking water was cause for “immediate action.” At that level, the water posed an “imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of children and pregnant women.”
A USA TODAY NETWORK review of EPA drinking water enforcement data found at least 125 water systems — run by schools, villages and businesses — that reported lead concentrations of 40 ppb or greater in more than 10% of their tap water samples during the past four years.
The EPA removed its online references to this 40 ppb danger level in 2004, amid growing publicity about another lead-water crisis in the water system in the nation's capital caused because of a change in disinfection chemicals that increased lead leaching.
In response USA TODAY NETWORK questions, the EPA acknowledged its website for several years displayed 40 ppb as a health-threat standard, but said it never was adopted formally.
“Use of a 17-year-old draft analysis that has not undergone scientific peer review is not the right approach to help build public understanding of lead risks in drinking water,” the EPA said in a statement.
The EPA refused to release the analysis voluntarily and told the USA TODAY NETWORK it would need to file a federal Freedom of Information Act, a process that often takes months or years.
4 tips to check the safety of your home's tap water
Joel Beauvais, deputy assistant administrator of the EPA's Office of Water, emphasized: “EPA’s position is there is no safe level of lead exposure.”
The CDC, which declined to grant an interview, emailed a statement saying the agency recommends that pregnant women and children use bottled or filtered water if lead levels in their home's water exceed the EPA's 15 ppb action level. Children's developing brains and bodies are especially vulnerable to lead's toxic effects.
Yet some studies have found harm from consuming water when lead levels are above 5 ppb of lead, which is the maximum amount of lead contamination the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows in bottled water.
Exposures to lead are cumulative.
Drinking lead-contaminated water adds to the body’s burden from other sources. Those include soil contaminated with old leaded gasoline and factory waste and dust from deteriorating lead-based paint, which is often found in older homes.
“When we looked at the relative contributions from lead in water, soil and dust, we estimate that water lead contributes about 20%,” said lead-poisoning researcher Bruce Lanphear at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, who studied children exposed to lead in Rochester, N.Y.
Lanphear said his work has estimated that water with lead levels greater than 5 ppb were associated with a one-point rise in children's blood-lead levels.
Unlike other sources of lead exposure, contaminated water poses an increased threat because you are drinking it.
How USA TODAY ID'd water with high lead levels
“You should assume you’re absorbing most of it,” Lanphear said. “It’s not like the house dust over there.
"This is what you put into your mouth or you’re cooking with. It’s a direct exposure,” he said.
Infant formula made with lead-contaminated water poses a significant risk, Lanphear said. In another study, Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards estimated that half of infants fed formula reconstituted with tap water containing 18 ppb of lead would have their blood-lead levels rise above the current CDC level of concern.
Lead in your water: Not easy to find out
In December, experts on the EPA's National Drinking Water Advisory Council recommended that the agency develop a health-based "household action level" that would require water systems to notify local health officials when a home's lead test exceeded a certain level. But the council did not specify what that level should be.
The EPA has said it is studying this and many other recommendations from the council and expects to publish proposed revisions to drinking water regulations in 2017.
Contributing: Mark Nichols, USA TODAY. Follow Alison Young on Twitter: @alisonannyoung
|
cb303676ab5659e2633119281e2fa9b2
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/21/pharmacy-benefit-firms-can-raise-drug-costs-despite-cheaper-choices/81767978/
|
Secret deals may mean consumers pay more for drugs
|
Secret deals may mean consumers pay more for drugs
Secret deals often prompt drug benefit companies to cover brand-name prescriptions when equally effective generic or even over-the-counter medications are available, several drug pricing experts say.
These companies, known as pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), negotiate deals with drug makers that include rebates and other compensation to encourage certain drugs and come up with lists of drugs that their insurance plans will cover. Employers and insurance companies then determine which drugs to encourage on these formularies.
The process is so convoluted that even the United States' largest insurer, Anthem, discovered what it said were $3 billion in overcharges by Express Scripts and filed suit Monday against the PBM for damages.
"That the largest insurer has to file suit against the largest PBM is a testament to the complexity that exists in the market," says Michael Rea, founder and CEO of Rx Savings Solutions, which represents health insurance plans.
In a statement, Express Scripts spokesman Brian Henry said the suit is "without merit."
"Express Scripts values its relationship with Anthem and will continue to honor its commitments under the contract, as we would do with any client," said the statement. "Express Scripts has consistently acted in good faith and in accordance with the terms of its agreement with Anthem."
In their deals with drugmakers, PBMs agree to favor the high-cost drugs on the PBMs’ formularies and agree that they won't place quantity limits — or prior authorization programs — on the drugs, even though doing so would help health plans save money and make medical sense, says Linda Cahn, founder and president of Pharmacy Benefit Consultants, which audits PBM contracts.
Generic drugs get lower rebates or none at all, while the brand-name drugs can command rebates of as much as 40%, says Mel Brodsky, president of Keystone, a Philadelphia-area buying group for small pharmacies that is suing the pharmacy benefit manager Catamaran for "unfair business practices" and to require more transparency.
As drug prices fall under greater scrutiny following the disclosure of the massive price increases by drugmakers including Turing Pharmaceuticals and Valeant, the role of PBMs is also being more closely examined. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is considering whether to require more transparency in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., reintroduced legislation last month that would require more public disclosure in how PBMs determine their reimbursements, especially with government drug benefit programs including Medicare Part D.
At a House hearing on drug prices last month, Rep. Buddy Carter, a pharmacist who is also a Georgia Republican, said the solution is to "have transparency in the PBM world."
Mark Merritt, CEO of the PBMs' trade group, said more regulation wasn't the answer. Last week, PCMA launched a national campaign to emphasize that PBMs are part of the solution to high drug prices and not part of the problem. The group says its members cut drug prices by 30%.
CVS Caremark says it slowed drug cost growth, but critics question claims
But those who audit PBM contracts for a living disagree.
"What really gets me started is when PBMs sell their clients on programs that increase costs by encouraging brands so that the PBM can collect rebates," says Susan Hayes, a principal in Pharmacy Outcomes Specialists, which represents plan sponsors and audits their PBM contracts. "And many clients do not know the cost implications when they sign off on these programs."
Few companies or other plan sponsors, such as unions, contract with auditors like Hayes so don't drill down into the complicated details of their formularies. Hayes says she realized last week that a group of union funds had agreed to require a step therapy program that required patients to take pricey brand name drugs before generics to get guaranteed rebates.
PBMs pass along some of all of the rebates to their employer clients, but Hayes says they seldom make brand name drugs cheaper than generics for employers and unions, based on contracts she has audited.
Unless a PBM proves the use of a brand-name drug is bringing the cost down to lower than the generic through rebates passed along to the employer, Hayes says she tells clients "you can assume it’s not."
When they are pushed to be more transparent about their deals, PBMs and the drug companies "start arguing that they can’t give as good of deals" if they have to start disclosing the details, says Stephen Schondelmeyer, a pharmaceutical economics professor at the University of Minnesota. That argument, he says, "ignores the basic premise of economics," namely that consumers need to know all the alternatives and the pricing, he says.
When generic versions of drugs are introduced, it can lower the price of a drug by up to 85%, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Researchers, publishing online this month in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, say that if all patients with a chronic form of leukemia started on the generic form of the drug Gleevec when they were diagnosed, the cost of treatment per patient over five years would be nearly $100,000 less than it is now. Most of these patients need lifelong, daily medication.
Another egregious example of the problem, according to Cahn, is the class of ulcer drugs known as "proton-pump inhibitors" or PPIs. The best known of these drugs is Nexium, which costs several times the price of generics, which often cost far more than many over the counter options.
Most drug benefit plans, including Medicare and Medicaid, are "spending an absurd amount of money" on prescription PPIs, says Cahn.
Cahn says all of the players are contributing to the problem. Drugmakers do a disservice when they get FDA approval for high-cost "copycat PPIs” that add no additional value. Doctors should stop writing PPI prescriptions and tell their patients to use over the counter versions. And PBMs should remove brand PPIs from their standard formularies and educate their employer-clients to stop coverage for brand PPIs.
Cahn adds that pharmacists could also suggest to consumers that they stop using prescription versions and use over the counter PPIs instead.
CVS Caremark, the drugstore chain's PBM, doesn't exclude brand name ulcer drug Nexium from its 2016 formulary, but spokeswoman Christine Cramer says "in some cases, although less expensive over-the-counter versions of drugs may be available, some patients will still require access to a prescription drug to treat their condition."
"We offer a variety of formulary options that help deliver lower costs for clients...," she said in an emailed statement.
Sanjay Sandhir, a Dayton, Ohio, gastroenterologist, says he has a patient who was spending $140 a month for her share of the cost of Nexium, which was on her insurance plan's drug formulary, so he told her to just buy one of the non-prescription over the counter versions, which saved her $100 a month.
"The prices are too high for patients and there's a lack of transparency," says Sandhir.
And there's no discernible difference between the over-the-counter drugs and pricey brand name ones. Douglas Dykman, an Annapolis, Md., gastroenterologist, says it "doesn't matter to me" which version of the medications clients with ulcers use as they all work the same. He seldom knows what out of pocket costs patients are facing — only whether a drug is or isn't on their formulary.
Cahn says drugmakers should stop selling "copycat PPIs," doctors should stop writing prescriptions for PPIs and PBMs should educate their employer-clients on how to cut waste. Pharmacists should suggest patients stop using the prescription versions.
The cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor, for example, is on many formularies even though the generic can save patients hundreds of dollars a month. CVS Caremark excludes Lipitor for coverage, but Express Scripts does not, a review of the formularies shows, Cahn says.
"Express Scripts nudges patients to the most clinically appropriate and most affordable medication," says spokesman David Whitrap. "And in almost all cases when a generic is available, the generic is the most cost-effective option."
Hayes says that's not correct and cited diabetes drugs Tanzeum and Victoza, which are cheaper based on their average wholesale price than Bydureon, Byetta, Trulicity, that Express Scripts prefers among the diabetes drugs.
|
77a142d55f847cc5c0e29e108ebc3e97
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/27/cop-intern-sexual-assault/82318974/
|
She wanted to be a cop, until a cop did this
|
She wanted to be a cop, until a cop did this
(NEWSER) – The city of La Cruces, N.M., has agreed to pay $3 million to settle a federal civil lawsuit brought by a woman who was sexually assaulted by a police detective when she was a high-school intern with the department. During the trial, Diana Guerrero, who had aspired to become a police officer, told the court, "It had never occurred to me that a person who had earned a badge would do this," the Associated Press reports, noting Guerrero agreed to be named. According to a Justice Department press release, former Las Cruces police Detective Michael Garcia took Guerrero, then 17, on a ride-along to visit a crime scene in May 2011. Rather than take her directly back to the station, he "drove her to a secluded location where he sexually assaulted her." The press release notes he was "assigned to a unit that focused on child abuse and sex crimes investigations" at the time.
Garcia, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to nine years in prison in late 2014. Guerrero reported the assault, which left her feeling "like a piece of trash" in 2013, after bumping into a female detective that year who asked why she had ended the internship. "I just blurted it out," Guerrero told KVIA. "I am most happy and satisfied that this lawsuit brought to light a cesspool of sexual violence and harassment that exists in police departments across this country," Guerrero tells the AP. Indeed, an investigation by the news outlet found that, during a six-year period, about 1,000 officers were fired for a range of sex crimes; it calls that number "unquestionably an undercount." The City Council still has to approve the settlement, according to KRWG, which is expected to happen Monday. KVIA reports Guerrero now intends to pursue a career in nutrition.
More from Newser:
A Decade-Long Donut-Based Cold War in the Midwest Finally Went Hot This Week
Investigation Launched After Doc Refuses to Sign Garry Shandling's Death Certificate
|
cbc9a9062cd3fd95a9e9596bf074284c
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/04/09/postal-service-dropping-mail-prices/82837718/
|
Postal Service dropping mail prices for first time in 100 years
|
Postal Service dropping mail prices for first time in 100 years
Mailing letters, postcards and parcels gets cheaper Sunday as the U.S. Postal Service drops its prices for the first time in 100 years.
First-class letters will drop from 49 cents to 47 cents, and postcards from 35 cents to 34 cents.
Stamp prices typically go up slightly every few years to keep pace with inflation, but for the past two years customers paid an “exigent surcharge” implemented to help the Postal Service survive the Great Recession.
The Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) ordered the Postal Service to roll back that temporary price hike, meaning customers will pay less going forward.
Postal Service managers are unhappy, arguing the mandated price reduction will add $2 billion in annual losses. The Postal Service is subject to some Congressional mandates, and managers say they need more freedom for their semi-independent agency. Postal Service managers are already asking Congress to cancel the rollback, which generated $4.6 million for operations.
“Given our precarious financial condition and ongoing business needs, the price reduction required by the PRC exacerbates our losses,” Postmaster General and CEO Megan J. Brennan said in a statement. Brennan previously called the rollback “irrational.”
The Postal Service has been hit hard by consumers’ transition from written letters to emails, texts and social media messages, and its pricing structure as governed by the PRC is based largely on first-class letters. The problem is the Postal Service is delivering less mail but must still maintain the infrastructure necessary to deliver to 155 million addresses in the country.
The Postal Service receives no tax dollars, and instead must generate all of its own revenue. The change may require recalibration of office postage machines, although the move to Forever Stamps means they don't have to be reprinted. On the other hand, the price drop means people who bought Forever Stamps when they were 49 cents are losing 2 cents of value for each one they own.
Stamp prices were last lowered July 1, 1919, dropping from 3 cents to 2 cents per ounce.
|
495a04689223619702bd7432da4bdc53
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/04/24/pilot-lands-solar-powered-plane-after-risky-flight-across-pacific-ocean/83462522/
|
Pilot lands solar-powered plane after risky flight across Pacific Ocean
|
Pilot lands solar-powered plane after risky flight across Pacific Ocean
Two pilots landed a sun-powered airplane in California Saturday night, finishing the Pacific leg of their attempt to navigate around-the-world in an aircraft without using any fuel.
Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard and fellow pilot Andre Borschberg resumed their journey Thursday for the latest leg of their low-speed journey on Solar Impulse 2, nine months after they were grounded because of a fried battery and lack of sunlight during the winter.
They made it to California in less than three days, on schedule, despite having nearly run out of fuel, according to a tweet from the pair.
"It's a new era. It's not science fiction. It's today," Piccard told CNN after landing. "It exists and clean technologies can do the impossible."
Solar Impulse is scheduled to continue on to one or two locations in the Midwest and later land in New York City in early June, where they will prepare for two final flights over the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea before attempting to complete their mission of navigating around the world and landing Solar Impulse back in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
Sun-powered Solar Impulse resumes its round-the-world flight
The team began its journey last year in Abu Dhabi. Borschberg flew 13 hours and landed in Muscat, Oman. They continued their trip across Asia before Borschberg completed the longest nonstop solo flight in the world in four days, 21 hours and 52 minutes when they traveled from Japan to Hawaii.
But in breaking the flight record, they damaged the plane's battery. The pilots suspended their trip — and their original goal to complete the journey within a year — to repair the plane and avoid flying in the winter, which brought less sunlight.
This leg across the Pacific was their riskiest yet, because of the lack of emergency landing sites.The pilots had to avoid clouds during their flights because the plane needs clear skies to recharge its batteries. Avoiding turbulence and strong winds was also key for the keeping the crew safe in the lightweight aircraft.
Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, one of the project's sponsors, was among the crowd that came out for Piccard and Borschberg's late-night landing in Northern California.
"It was a beautiful landing," Brin told the pilots soon after they landed at Moffett Airfield in Mountain View.
The pilots were in the air 62 hours from the time they left Hawaii for the latest leg, but Piccard joked with flight controllers that he was up for continuing his journey.
"I could continue all the way to New York!" Piccard said.
Despite the obstacles the Solar Impulse 2 team has already faced, Piccard said he remained confident.
"You know there was a moment in the night, I was watching the reflection of the moon on the ocean and I was thinking, 'I'm completely alone in this tiny cockpit and I feel completely confident,'" Piccard told reporters after the landing.
Contributing: Aamer Madhani
|
9d54685ec6e0c55c011643d23d627c9a
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/04/27/paralyzed-bride-opens-up-pool-incident/83590900/
|
'Paralyzed bride' opens up about pool accident
|
'Paralyzed bride' opens up about pool accident
(NEWSER) – Rachelle Chapman, the now-30-year-old paralyzed in 2010 when one of her best friends pushed her in the pool at her bachelorette party, is talking to People and Today in advance of a TLC documentary about her story — a documentary that reveals, among other things, that Chapman is no longer friends with the woman who caused her accident. Though Chapman long defended her friend, refusing to name her publicly (she still hasn't), she says they ultimately drifted apart. Chapman tells People her friend was "distraught and depressed" after the accident, and the two supported each other. "The first year I made sure that she was OK, even more than me," Chapman tells Today. But as time went on, things shifted for both of them.
"She didn't make the effort ... and every time we spoke, I just felt like I was remembering the accident ... and I had negative feelings. I didn't feel that way in the beginning, but that's what's been happening over the last three years." Chapman says she ultimately "had to tell her that we couldn't be friends." Still, Chapman says she doesn't blame the woman — "we've all pushed somebody in a pool." The last time Chapman saw the friend was when Chapman's daughter, who celebrated her first birthday this week, was born via surrogate. As for caring for a 1-year-old, while her husband handles bottle-washing (Chapman lost the use of her fingers), "I have found a way to manipulate my hands to do a lot of things." Her mother lives with the family on weekdays to help; Chapman's husband works as a middle-school teacher. (This 5-year-old was paralyzed after doing a backbend.)
This article originally appeared on Newser
'Paralyzed Bride' Reveals State of Relationship With Friend Who Pushed Her in Pool
More from Newser
Pero the Dog Got Sent 240 Miles Away to Work on a Sheep Farm. He Hated His New Job
Bedbugs Would Rather Hide in Your Red Sheets, Please
School Bus Driver Allegedly Asked 11-Year-Old to Move Downed Power Line
Newser is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
|
f6561f930c8d0e112ab5b76d404674d9
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/04/28/transgender-bathroom-bills-discrimination/32594395/
|
The imaginary predator in America's transgender bathroom war
|
The imaginary predator in America's transgender bathroom war
You have to pee.
If you're like 99% of America, you look at pictograms, predictable gender binaries, to guide you toward the appropriate toilet. A person in pants on the left. A person in a dress on the right. If you're a woman, it's irrelevant that you have a vagina, are wearing jeans and can't recall the last time you donned a triangle dress to a dinner party. You know to hang a right, while men go left. The signage isn't literal, it reveals how culture wants your gender to look. It reveals what door it wants you to walk through.
The bathroom is a bastion of segregation. It's where we sort people. Civil rights battles have been fought there before — over blacks, over women, over people with disabilities. Now, with North Carolina and Mississippi passing laws that ban transgender Americans from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, another battle has begun.
Proponents of anti-trans bills, which are sweeping the country, purport a twofold argument about safety: 1. A man is a man no matter how he dresses, so letting him into the women's bathroom is absurd. 2. Male perverts and pedophiles disguised as women (faux transgender people) will troll women's bathrooms and sexually assault our wives and daughters.
But the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union say there is no statistical evidence of violence to justify the laws. They argue the bills are irrational, conflict with federal law and veritably endanger trans people. A slew of corporations, from Target to PayPal, agree.
So what is the crux of the issue?
"The anxiety isn't men in women's bathrooms, it's about masculinity in the wrong place," said Katherine Franke, director of Columbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. "It's portrayed as a threat to women, but on a much deeper level, it's about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman."
Transgender people have entered the public consciousness. Janet Mock. Laverne Cox. Caitlyn Jenner. But the National Center for Transgender Equality estimates that transgender people make up less than 1% of the population. We understand transgender people exist, but we don't understand who transgender people are.
The American Family Association, a conservative Christian activist group, has gained nearly 1 million signatures from people pledging to boycott Target over its inclusive transgender bathroom policy announced this month. A statement from the AFA, which is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, says the policy means "a man can simply say he 'feels like a woman today' and enter the women's restroom... even if young girls or women are already in there."
How other stores are handling transgender bathroom policies
What's unconscionable to trans activists is that while a label-preoccupied America grapples with the enormous perceived threat of sexual ambiguity and gender fluidity (despite a national love affair with the late Prince, who irreverently transcended gender norms) these anti-trans laws pose a ferocious threat to the safety and dignity of not only trans men and women, but to anyone who doesn't conform to traditional gender roles. In other words, a butch lesbian may face more discrimination in a public restroom than a fully transitioned trans woman, who can go about her business without anyone being the wiser.
North Carolina's House Bill 2, which eliminates local non-discrimination protections for LGBT people and forces trans people to use the bathroom that matches the sex on their birth certificate in schools and publicly-owned buildings, doesn't contain an enforcement plan. How do you stop someone who looks like a woman from walking into the ladies' room, and vice-versa? One imagines potty police checking birth certificates at restroom doors.
Payton McGarry, a 20-year-old transgender man, is a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, that challenges HB2. The UNC Greensboro student knows the perils of trying to use a bathroom that doesn't match your gender identity.
"In high school, as my body started masculinizing, I would walk into a female bathroom and I would be screamed at," McGarry said. "I would be pushed and shoved and even slapped. I do not look female. I do not belong in that bathroom."
McGarry was eventually approved to use a faculty bathroom.
The bathroom wars have, unsurprisingly, made their way into campaign rhetoric. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have condemned HB2. Donald Trump asked why we were changing something that isn't a problem, especially when states enacting the laws are suffering economic punishment. John Kasich said he probably would not have signed the law. Ted Cruz was the outlier. “It doesn’t make any sense at all to let grown adult men — strangers — to be alone in bathrooms with little girls," he said.
Conversations about safety are paramount. But trans advocates and civil liberty groups say these kinds of bills don't protect anyone, and, in fact, they put trans people in danger. A study published in the Journal of Homosexuality found that when people are denied access to a school bathroom for being trans, they are more likely to attempt suicide. A paper by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that in Washington, D.C., 70% of trans survey respondents reported being denied access, verbally harassed, or physically assaulted in public restrooms.
Mara Keisling, a trans woman and the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, says trans people use the bathroom that causes the least amount of ruckus. While protesting North Carolina's law this week, Keisling used the ladies' room at Gov. Pat McCrory’s office.
"There was no ruckus when I used the bathroom," she said. "And I guarantee you, had I used the men's room in front of all those police officers, there would have been."
Threats against transgender people are pervasive, and even made by elected officials. When North Carolina took up HB2, it convened a special session that cost $42,000 a day to pass it. Justifying the expense, North Carolina State Senator David Brock said, “You know, $42,000 is not going to cover the medical expenses when a pervert walks into a bathroom and my little girls are there.”
Liberty Counsel president Anita Staver last week threatened to bring her gun into Target bathrooms to protect herself from transgender people.
It appears trans Americans labeled as predators may have some predators of their own.
"I think people get so focused on genitals that they totally lose perspective that they're talking about a person," said Cathryn Oakley, senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign.
Schools across the U.S. are also embroiled in the debate as they contend with how to create safe spaces for transgender students.
Andrea Peyser wrote in a New York Postcolumn this month, "The thought of allowing anatomical males inside public school facilities used by young girls is enough to keep you up at night."
Chase Strangio, a staff attorney with the ACLU's LGBT & AIDS Project, says the solution to the modesty problem is not to expel people from public spaces, but to do a better job with privacy protections.
"We can take measures to protect privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms and other public spaces for the people who, for any number of reasons, including young people who have experienced trauma, need it," Strangio said.
Sex is biological. Gender is cultural. How we understand it, how we apply it, it isn't destined. Challenging the sanctity of sex segregation in the bathroom may rattle our ideas of masculinity and femininity, but what happens when it begins to erode our humanity?
Tyler Beebe, a 27-year-old trans woman who lives in Brooklyn, said she would prefer a world that didn't judge genitals so harshly.
"Trans women are killed for using the men's restroom, and they're jailed for using the women's restroom," she said. "In the end, what choice do we have?"
|
7d58f33b31b77825e5d7676afbc30fab
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/05/01/circus-elephants-perform-final-acts-before-retirement/83801062/
|
Ringling elephants perform last show, end 145-year run
|
Ringling elephants perform last show, end 145-year run
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — When the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus' performers spin, twirl, jump and sparkle in the colored spotlights, David Orr, 77, turns his attention elsewhere — to the mesmerized children who pack the stands, many waiting to see an elephant for the first time.
Orr was once one of those children. He experienced his first Ringling circus in 1946 in Columbus, Ohio, where he picked up a habit he couldn't kick. In 70 years, he's missed just two seasons. "It's the way I kept sane," he said. "I would run away to the circus for a few days."
Now he'll have to continue the circus streak without his beloved elephants. Ringling's final 11 performing elephants marched into arenas for the last time Sunday in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and Providence, R.I., ending a 145-year-old tradition of the giant pachyderms taking part in the big top.
Ringling bowed to pressure as state and local rules placed more restrictions on the circus' use of exotic animals and the bullhook trainers use to control the animals. The move followed decades of protests by animal rights activists.
Ringling Bros. circus elephants set for final act Sunday
Orr, of Sarasota, Fla., said he's seen how the animals are treated behind the scenes and strongly feels that they're well taken care of. "It's sad," he said, choking up when talking about the elephants' departure. "It hits me right here," he added, pointing to his heart.
Thunderous applause greeted Mable, April, Asia, Luna and Tonka as the elephants marched into the arena here in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for the final time wearing their well-known red leather, gold studded headdresses emblazoned with "Greatest Show on Earth." They stood on their heads, turned in circles, balanced on a small stand and even took a nap, albeit a brief one — the crowd shouted "Wake up, elephants" only moments later.
The tricks are the favorite part of the show for Carissa Lewis, 9 — especially when the animals stand on their heads, she said. "I really think that I just want the elephants staying in the circus," she chirped.
On the concourse helping pick out souvenirs for all five of her children, Carissa's mother Amanda Scanlon, 30, of Taylor, Pa., said she brought the whole family down just to see the final performance. "It's heartbreaking, because they're not coming back," she said. "Where are you going to see elephants?"
Behind the scenes, trainers and performers who have spent years working with the elephants were also sentimental. Many spent time bidding farewell to the historic mainstay of the show. Several posed for photos with the elephants ahead of the final performance. Some stood and solemnly watched as the elephants marched onto trucks and rolled away from an arena one last time.
Rescued circus tiger will get roaring welcome at Miami airport
Ryan Henning, animal trainer at the show for 12 years, called the change "bittersweet" and said the one moment he will miss most is when the curtain opens for the first time. "When the elephants peek through the curtain ... the crowd's reaction just goes crazy," he said.
Raw emotion also punctuated the scene outside the arena. Holding signs saying "Ban circus animals" and "Cruelty is not entertainment," more than a dozen activists came out to demonstrate at the elephants' last act.
The activists say the use of the bullhook — a long stick with a sharp metal hook — in the elephants' training and handling, along with chains and other methods of controlling the animals are cruel. Ringling maintains those practices are humane and not only for the safety of the humans who work with the animals but also for the elephants themselves.
While animal rights groups largely praise the circus' decision to retire the elephants, many say the move doesn't go far enough to eliminate other wild animal acts. "Do we celebrate this last day — yes," said Chris DeRose, founder of Last Chance for Animals, one of the protesters outside the stadium here. "But two, let's get the rest of them out of here, the rest of the animals suffer just as much."
"Why should they have to suffer for entertainment," he said.
The final performance leaves the 11 pachyderms with one last road trip, this time to Ringling's Center for Elephant Conservation, where they will join a herd of 29 elephants already in residence. The retirement ends a rigorous schedule that included 1,000 shows a year in 80 cities, split between two traveling elephant troupes.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals said elephants are highly intelligent and deeply emotional animals with memories similar to humans. They normally roam vast areas of wilderness and form long-lasting bonds with other elephants in their herds.
While the animals adjusted to performing and traveling with the circus and will adapt to the quieter activity of the conservation center, either way they're not living the life they would want to lead, he said.
"I suspect because of the way they’ve adapted, they make due with what they have," Masson said. "I wouldn’t say they never get any pleasure from (performing), but it’s a very diminished kind of pleasure."
DeeAnn Reeder, an animal behaviorist at Bucknell University who has worked with elephants, said moving to a new place and developing new social groups will initially be stressful for the creatures, but the long-term benefits far outweigh any negatives.
"They’ll be able to behave like elephants instead of circus animals," she said.
Masson said elephants rarely form true bonds with humans, instead remaining indifferent to their caretakers. However, Reeder said the elephants likely developed strong relationships to those who spent years training and performing with the animals.
"I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a little mourning that happens on each side of that relationship," she said.
Follow Katharine Lackey on Twitter: @katharinelackey
|
942414ac59fc06da99d5bfcf0d5ce5be
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/05/09/americans-listed-in-panama-papers/84160016/
|
Closer look at Americans named in Panama Papers
|
Closer look at Americans named in Panama Papers
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which produced the Panama Papers, said Monday that at least 36 Americans have been accused of fraudulently using off-shore accounts.
USA TODAY could not reach the Americans listed in the Panama Papers for comment. The consortium also tried to reach them but did not get any comments.
Here are details on some of the U.S. cases included in Monday's release, which includes a database for the public to search off-shore accounts of hundreds of thousands of people and companies:
Leonard Gotshalk: The former Atlanta Falcons offensive tackle turned Oregon businessman has faced criminal investigations for decades, yet he was still able to open an off-shore account through Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm whose 11.5 million documents on off-shore accounts were leaked.
In 1994, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Gotshalk for providing investors with "false and misleading information" about a company involved in oil and gas investments, according to the consortium. In 2004, an Oregon court convicted him of theft, sentenced him to 20 months in prison and ordered him to pay a fine. In 2010, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia unsealed an indictment against him, claiming he was part of a scheme to inflate the price of tech-company stocks.
Martin Frankel: The Connecticut financier pleaded guilty in 2002 for looting $200 million from insurance companies. According to the Hartford Courant, Frankel became notorious for his lavish lifestyle, which included purchasing jewels, furs, luxury cars and a compound where he recruited women "through advertisements in alternative publications." His story, which ended with a flight to Rome with two female friends, even became the subject of a novel.
Robert Miracle: Six people who ran a Ponzi scheme in Seattle were led by Miracle, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for his part. The group was accused of defrauding more than 4,200 Indonesian investors out of $175 million. During his sentencing hearing in 2011, a federal judge ordered Miracle to give up a $38,000 diamond ring, a $27,000 painting he bought in Italy, and told Miracle he had "ruined people's lives," according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.
Harvey Milam: The Mississippi businessman is the son of J.W. Milam, who killed Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American in 1955. Harvey Milam was accused of cheating investors in the Caribbean island of Nevis, according to the Clarion-Ledger.
Mary Patten: The Florida-based businesswoman was charged by U.S. securities regulators of running a $6 million investment fraud.
Rebel Holiday: The Virginia woman was fined $110,000 by the State Corporation Commission of Virginia and banned from selling securities in the state.
Panama Papers reveal at least 36 Americans accused of financial crimes
|
7fd6dcf4daaa0fcad3c6e50e9d837728
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/05/11/planned-parenthood-shooting-suspect-found-not-competent-stand-trial/84243964/
|
Planned Parenthood shooting suspect found incompetent to stand trial
|
Planned Parenthood shooting suspect found incompetent to stand trial
COLORADO SPRINGS — The man who admitted to killing three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic here was found incompetent to stand trial Wednesday and indefinitely confined to a state mental hospital.
Two state-appointed doctors said Robert Lewis Dear Jr. suffers from the delusion that the federal government has persecuted him for more than 20 years for his anti-government and anti-abortion beliefs. Judge Gilbert Martinez on Wednesday accepted those findings and ordered Dear to undergo unspecified "restoration treatment" at the state hospital.
In a court order issued Wednesday, Martinez wrote that experts determined Dear suffers from "delusional disorder, persecutory type." During psychiatric evaluations, Martinez wrote, Dear "engaged in a somewhat rambling monologue that was confusing to follow" and often lapsed into "significantly paranoid ideas about him being targeted for persecution by federal authorities."
Dear also professed several other delusional beliefs since his arrest, according to the judge's order. They include that "Obama is the antichrist" and funds ISIL, the holy spirit has spoken to him, Alex Jones is a double agent, Princess Diana's death was a professional hit, and that the White House plans to declare martial law.
During the hearing, Dear mocked Martinez when the judge verbally stumbled while reading his eight-page order. Dear also told reporters to examine a Bible verse to find the justification for his actions.
"Justice delayed is justice denied," Dear interrupted.
As Dear was escorted from the courtroom following the hearing, he yelled "filthy animal" at the judge.
Dear has confessed repeatedly to the Nov. 27, 2015, attack, saying he intended to save the lives of unborn babies.
Killed in the attack were police officer Garrett Swasey, a father of two, Army veteran Ke'Arre Stewart, a father of two, and Jennifer Markovsky, a mother of two. None of the victims worked for Planned Parenthood. The attack injured nine others. Police ended the assault when they crashed armored SWAT vehicles into the lobby of clinic where Dear had holed up.
Planned Parenthood shooter ‘happy’ with his attack
Prosecutors charged Dear with 179 counts, including first-degree murder.
Those charges remain pending until a judge deems Dear competent to stand trial. The court must find that Dear understands the proceedings against him and can assist in his defense. The court will review Dear's mental status every 90 days. If eventually found competent and convicted, he could face the death penalty.
Dear told police he attacked the clinic because he was "upset with them performing abortions and the selling of baby parts," according to documents released last month. He also admitted to fatally shooting an arriving police officer through a tinted window because he knew the officer couldn’t see him, the documents said.
Dear had confessed previously in open court to the shootings, and claimed he was a “warrior for the babies.”
The attack came after months of publicity over what Planned Parenthood says were deceptively edited video recordings purporting to show clinic staff elsewhere offering to sell fetal tissue for research purposes.
|
e87e503d9f0c02299dbf80380f6af21b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/05/23/police-chiefs-ferguson-san-francisco/84785128/
|
Amid heightened scrutiny, it's 'a precarious time' for U.S. police chiefs
|
Amid heightened scrutiny, it's 'a precarious time' for U.S. police chiefs
The list of local police chiefs recently ousted in the wake of personnel disputes or racially charged episodes involving officers’ conduct is long — and getting longer.
San Francisco Chief Greg Suhr, who resigned last week after the fatal police shooting of an African-American woman, is the latest top official to leave the stage as communities large and small continue to struggle with crises of confidence in their local law enforcement agencies.
Since Ferguson, Mo., exploded in civil unrest following the fatal police shooting of a black teenager nearly two years ago, chiefs have exited with increasing regularity, from Baltimore and Chicago to Cincinnati and Salt Lake City.
S.F. police chief resigns in wake of black woman's shooting
"Never has the job been more difficult than now,'' said Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a coalition of the nation's top law enforcement officers. "It is a precarious time.''
Stephens and other law enforcement analysts attribute the accelerated turnover to sustained scrutiny of all facets of police operations initially prompted by the racial strife that left Ferguson in near ruin and that later reignited in New York, Cleveland, North Charleston, S.C., and other communities following controversial — often deadly — police actions.
Ahead of political conventions, police rethink protest response
David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, said the public attention now trained on police actions has intensified public pressure on political leaders to act quickly, with many often choosing to cut ties with established police leaders if only to salvage their own viability or calm a volatile environment.
"Patience is in short supply these days,'' Harris said. "What once may be have been seen as a purely local matter involving a police department, a chief or an officer, is now seen as part of national pattern or problem. What came out of Ferguson painted for people a set of issues that is now seen as recurring and national in scope.''
Policing the USA
Earlier this year, the ouster of Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy played out as a national drama. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who had consistently expressed public support for McCarthy, reversed course following the release of a video showing the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by an officer who was later charged with murder.
Hours after the mayor announced McCarthy's firing, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan announced that she had requested the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to investigate the department's operations.
"Trust in the Chicago Police Department is broken," Madigan wrote in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch. "Chicago cannot move ahead and rebuild trust between the police and the community without an outside, independent investigation into its police department to improve policing practices."
That review is ongoing, as the reverberations from Ferguson, Baltimore and other communities continue to be felt. In Baltimore, police officer Edward Nero was acquitted Monday of all charges in the death of Freddie Gray, who died more than a year ago after suffering a spinal injury while in the custody of police. His controversial death touched off violent protests in the city, a series of events that preceded the firing of then-police Commissioner Anthony Batts.
Baltimore cop acquitted in Freddie Gray death
Meanwhile in Ferguson, Delrish Moss, a former Miami police official, is in the midst of his first month on the job as the city's new chief, replacing Thomas Jackson, who resigned in March 2015 after a Justice report offered a withering indictment of the department’s policies and practices.
Federal officials, too, are continuing efforts to bolster public trust in local policing.
At a White House event Monday to mark last year's release of President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing report — yet another effort rooted in Ferguson's aftermath — Lynch said the current environment represented "a moment of unprecedented challenge for police and citizens alike.''
"Our work to help law enforcement adjust to the specific challenges of the 21st century has arisen from an intensely difficult set of circumstances,'' Lynch said in prepared remarks. "In cities across the United States ... we've seen long-simmering and deeply rooted tensions boil over into protest, discord and even — tragically — into violence.''
FBI Director James Comey, too, is expected to participate in a conference on race and law enforcement Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala., and once again broach the highly charged topic.
UC police chief resigns
In some places, including Cincinnati and Salt Lake City, changes were prompted not by a shooting or other questionable use of force, but by internal clashes involving personnel.
For many police chiefs, the spotlight has been especially harsh for the past two years and there is no let-up in sight.
White House: 'No evidence' to support cop pullback causing crime surges
Ronal Serpas has some experience in that glare.
Hired in 2010 to lead the fractured New Orleans Police Department, following a series of scandals exposed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Serpas said the job always had an unforgiving quality attached to it.
"As a chief, you are always on the tip of the spear,'' said Serpas, now a criminal justice professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. "The difference now is that everybody is watching and the political process is playing out for all to see.''
|
a58b427b58b0a457caf8b97bd5e9c2a6
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/05/23/sen-bob-corker-says-meeting-donald-trump-policy/84795618/
|
Sen. Bob Corker says meeting with Donald Trump was on policy
|
Sen. Bob Corker says meeting with Donald Trump was on policy
WASHINGTON – Sen. Bob Corker met privately with Donald Trump on Monday, stoking speculation the Tennessee Republican is being vetted as a possible running mate for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
Corker arrived for the meeting at Trump Tower in New York City shortly before noon and emerged roughly an hour later. The senator told reporters at the scene the meeting focused mostly on policy and was a chance for the two to get to know each other better.
“I think it’s certainly worthwhile to sit down and get to know the nominee in a little bit different way,” Corker said. “We did that today.”
Regarding the possibility that he could be Trump’s running mate, Corker said, “I have no reason whatsoever to believe I’m being considered,” he said. “I’ll say that until I’m blue in the face.”
Sen. Bob Corker says he's willing to advise Donald Trump on foreign policy
Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been the subject of speculation he's a contender to become Trump’s running mate.
Trump has said he'll likely pick someone with a background in politics instead of an outsider like himself. Some Republican insiders think Corker’s foreign policy background would be an asset to the ticket and would make him a logical pick.
Earlier this month, Corker told USA TODAY he's offered to help Trump develop a foreign policy platform and stands ready to assist him in the general election.
Corker’s national stature has grown considerably in the year and a half since he took over the Foreign Relations Committee.
Last year, Time magazine named him to its annual list of the world's 100 most influential people, ranking Corker alongside world leaders such as President Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
|
edc43b258e4bc800540267f6cdc2cde8
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/05/26/private-investigator-claims-casey-anthony-lawyer/84954666/
|
P.I. says Casey Anthony lawyer acted unethically
|
P.I. says Casey Anthony lawyer acted unethically
New court papers suggest discord between a private investigator and the attorney representing Casey Anthony, the Florida woman acquitted in 2011 of her daughter's murder, according to media reports.
The investigator, Dominic Casey, said in court deposition documents related to Casey Anthony's Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in Florida that Jose Baez, the attorney who represented Anthony, told him that Anthony admitted to killing her daughter, according to reports in the Orlando Sentinel, Fox News, and PeopleMagazine. The documents are filed with U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Middle District of Florida, Tampa Division, and are dated April 25, 2016.
Casey also claimed in the deposition that Baez had a sexual relationship with Anthony, a claim that Baez vehemently denies.
"I unequivocally and categorically deny exchanging sex for legal services with Ms. Anthony," Baez wrote to People. "I further unequivocally and categorically deny having any sexual relationship with Ms. Anthony whatsoever."
Casey worked with Baez in 2008 after Casey Anthony was arrested for child neglect following the disappearance of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee Anthony, on July 5, 2011. Dominic Casey's affidavit is dated Dec. 15, 2015.
On July 26, 2008, the investigator claimed, Baez told him that Anthony murdered her daughter and "dumped the body somewhere and he needed all the help he could get to find the body before anyone else did."
Dominic Casey also wrote of an incident in which he arrived unexpectedly at Baez's office and found Casey Anthony there, naked. Anthony ran out of Baez's private office through a conference room and into a hallway, Dominic Casey wrote. It was not an isolated incident, he wrote.
Casey "told (Anthony) that she cannot allow (Baez) to continue engaging in this behavior," the investigator wrote in the affidavit. "Casey told me she had to do what Jose said because she had no money for her defense."
|
3d60e67aedbc31bc74d3e80af0f4412b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/04/muhammad-ali-hollywood-star/85426914/
|
Why Ali's Hollywood star is on a wall (not the ground)
|
Why Ali's Hollywood star is on a wall (not the ground)
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — You'd literally need to float like a butterfly to walk on Muhammad Ali's Hollywood star.
The engraved star, which was presented in 2002, is alone on a wall, while the nearby stars of Steven Spielberg, Halle Berry and Nicole Kidman cover the Walk of Fame sidewalk. On Saturday, Ali's star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd. became a sort of memorial site for the athlete who died Friday.
But why is the star on the wall?
Ana Martinez, the producer of the Walk of Fame ceremonies, says Ali "did not want the name of Muhammad to be stepped on," and so in 2002, Ali's star was ceremoniously presented on an easel (as opposed to being unveiled on the ground, like the others) and then put on the wall at the entrance to what is now called Dolby Theatre.
As for why Ali received an honor that is generally reserved for filmmakers, actors and musicians, Martinez explains: "He was a showman. He had two Grammy-nominated spoken word albums. He was an entertainer, as well."
At noon Saturday, Martinez placed a wreath of flowers at the site of Ali's star, and presented a card to his family that read, "Float like a butterfly. Rest in peace, Mr. Ali." All day Saturday, a security team helped facilitate a line of fans who arrived to take pictures, place flowers and often pose with clenched fists in front of the star.
Sheryl Pruitt, 58, from Twinsburg, Ohio, stopped by the star with her family "just to pay respects," she said. "We're trying to pass this on to our children, the great impact Muhammad Ali had on the world, on sports," she said after posing in front of the star with her two sons and daughter.
Meanwhile, John Watson, 40, from Philadelphia visited Ali's star solo. He said it was a no-brainer to show up after hearing the news of Ali's death because "he was the champ, the best boxer, hall of fame. Muhammad Ali was a king."
Ali's impact was felt by those visiting from outside of the United States, too. "He's a legend. He's so inspiring for all of us, even when he was dealing with his illness" Hessa Alqahtla, 23 of Saudi Arabia.
Back in 2002, before Ali's star ceremony, then-chairman of the Walk of Fame committee Johnny Grant said that Ali was worthy of a star for several reasons, including this: "Since the day he won worldwide recognition with an Olympic gold medal, his life has been walking theater."
Grant was the man who approved Ali's request to have his star on the wall. According to Martinez, who's been with the Walk of Fame for two decades, no other honoree has ever been granted a similar request, and probably never will.
|
6a0cef4bab760179bb0d25158ec26ce4
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/09/stanford-rapist-scheduled-release-september/85641596/
|
Prosecutor says Stanford rapist lied to judge
|
Prosecutor says Stanford rapist lied to judge
The Stanford University freshman convicted of raping an unconscious woman outside a fraternity lied when he told his sentencing judge he had little experience with partying prior to his arrival on campus, a prosecutor claims.
Brock Turner, now 20, was sentenced last week to six months in county jail for the January 2015 assault, a ruling that drew strong criticism in the Stanford community and across the nation. Santa Clara County jail records list his release date as Sept. 2, three months after his sentencing. Early release for good behavior is common in California and many other states.
Turner, in his court statement seeking a probation sentence, said he was "shattered by the party culture" at his school.
"Coming from a small town in Ohio, I had never really experienced celebrating or partying that involved alcohol." He added that he "looked to the guys on my swim team as family" and followed their lead into weekend partying.
Stanford rapist: 'I've been shattered by the party culture'
Dad to dad: Open letter blasts father of Stanford rapist
The San Jose Mercury News, however, reports prosecutor Alaleh Kiancerci said in her sentencing memo that texts and photos found on Turner's cell phone indicate he used alcohol and drugs in high school.
"The text messages also referenced doing acid or trying to find a 'hook up' to purchase acid both in high school and while at Stanford," Kiancerci wrote.
The documents refer to a text message exchange between Turner and his sister from June 3, 2014, when she asked "Did you rage last night?" His response: "Yeah kind of. It was hard to find a place to drink. But when we finally did could only drink for like an hour and a half."
ABC News reports that a woman who saw Turner at a party on the night of the assault said he grabbed her and kissed her until she pushed him a way. And police also talked to a woman who said that, a week before the assault, she met Turner at a party and danced. She said Turner "creeped" her out by putting his hands on her waist, stomach and upper thighs.
Turner, who claimed the victim had consented to sex, could have faced more than a decade in prison on the charges — assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated/unconscious person, penetration of an intoxicated person and penetration of an unconscious person.
|
f8db3811626582a345abde07b6d96947
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/12/military-suicide-rates/85287518/
|
Experts worry high military suicide rates are 'new normal'
|
Experts worry high military suicide rates are 'new normal'
Corrections & Clarifications: A previous version of this story misidentified the university where Carl Castro is an assistant professor.
Seven years after the rate of suicides by soldiers more than doubled, the Army has failed to reduce the tragic pace of self-destruction, and experts worry the problem is a "new normal."
"It's very clear that nothing that the Army has done has resulted in the suicide rates coming down," said Carl Castro, a psychologist who retired from the Army in 2013, when he was a colonel overseeing behavioral health research programs.
The sharp rise in the Army's suicide rate from 2004 through 2009 coincided with unusually heavy demands on the nation's all-volunteer military, as hundreds of thousands of troops, most of them in the Army, deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The vast majority have since come home, but suicide rates remain stubbornly high.
The Army's suicide rate for active-duty soldiers averaged nearly 11-per-100-000 from Sept. 11, 2001, until shortly after the Iraq invasion in 2004. It more than doubled over the next five years, and, with the exception of a spike in 2012, has remained largely constant at 24-to-25-per-100,000, roughly 20% to 25% higher than a civilian population of the same age and gender makeup as the military.
Since the Army is the largest service branch in the military, the Pentagon suicide statistics reflected a similar increase.
"Seven years of relative stability at these profoundly higher rates may well be the new normal," said David Rudd, president of the University of Memphis, who served on a panel of scientists that reviewed military mental health programs and issued a critical report in 2014.
Rudd worries that a sense of heightened concern that gripped Congress and the Army when military suicides spiked has dissipated. "You don't see any significant outrage about it now," he said.
The Army used to post suicide statistics promptly each month, but data is now published by the Pentagon each quarter and often is delayed for months.
"I do think there is a sort of creeping mind-set of, 'Well, this is just how it is now,' " said Craig Bryan, executive director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah. "The sense of urgency about this problem has started to fade away."
Deaths, however, persist at only too regular intervals.
In late January, Army Maj. Troy Donn Wayman, 44, shot himself to death in his home near Fort Hood, Texas, according to Army Times. Wayman had deployed five times in his career, including twice to Iraq. Fort Hood, one of the Army's largest bases, still suffers more than one suicide per month on average, a level unabated for several years.
Scientists still don't know exactly why suicides increased so dramatically in the military. Major studies have shown no direct link between the deaths and being deployed overseas, and suicide increased even among soldiers who did not deploy.
Many experts remain certain that combat is a crucial factor of suicide, and that after 9/11, the Army came under enormous pressure. Scientists argue that deployment does not always equate to combat. Many troops are sent to non-combat zones or serve on large bases with little exposure to violence.
Lt. Col. Chris Ivany, Army director of behavioral health care, said mental illness is linked to suicide and noted that the illness rates have also risen. Combat experiences are known to cause behavioral health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.
"(Suicide) rose during a period of war, and it's just implausible to me to discount the role that being at war might play on the changing environment of Army service," said Michael Schoenbaum, a scientist with the National Institute of Mental Health who is involved with a $97 million ongoing study into suicide in the Army.
Schoenbaum and others say lower suicide rates in the military before wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made sense. Soldiers, in a period of peace, have advantages that should make them less susceptible to self-destructive urges. Unlike many civilian peers, soldiers have jobs, health insurance, stability, a sense of purpose and are screened for mental and physical issues before entering the military.
"You would expect a particular version of the healthy worker effect," Schoenbaum said. Fifteen years of sustained conflict may have altered that effect, he said.
"When you look at the duration of these elevated (suicide) rates," Rudd said, "you have to conclude that military culture has changed and that this is, in fact, the new reality."
Castro, the former military behavioral health research chief, said the Army never has conducted the kind of peer-reviewed studies necessary to see if its suicide prevention programs actually work.
"They would roll out new programs that would use new technology. But never did they assess whether or not it was improving knowledge, improving awareness, deterring people from thinking about suicide," said Castro, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. "Nobody in the field wanted to wait for evidence-based prevention efforts. They just wanted to do something."
Pentagon officials say that is changing. Adam Walsh, director of research and program evaluation for the Defense Suicide Prevention Office, said a series of new programs enhancing peer support, suicide prevention training and interventions are being evaluated.
Ivany said the Army has had success in reducing hospitalization rates for mental illness.
"We know care is being delivered on the outpatient side. We think it's higher quality," Ivany said. "I absolutely hope that the rate will come down and we will work to do everything we can to make that happen. Whether or not it will come down is a separate question that I just don't think anyone is in a position to answer."
.
.
|
b4f8fa5543ffedfc952e2455dc066ee0
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/12/orlando-nightclub-shooting-what-we-know/85786006/
|
Orlando nightclub shooting: What we know
|
Orlando nightclub shooting: What we know
Police and Orlando city officials said 50 people are dead and 53 are hospitalized after a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub early Sunday.
Here is what we know so far:
• A gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub: It began around 2 a.m. Sunday as a gunbattle between a man and an off-duty police officer who was working at the Pulse nightclub near downtown Orlando, Police Chief John Mina said at a news conference. It became a hostage situation and there was a three-hour standoff until a police SWAT team burst through a wall to rescue those inside.
About 320 people were in the club, police said. Some people escaped through the back of the club, while others were trapped inside.
FBI Special Agent Ronald Hopper said the suspect — Omar Seddique Mateen, 29 of Fort Pierce, Fla. — had come to the attention of the FBI in 2013 and 2014 because of concerns about "inflammatory comments" made to coworkers and potential ties to an American suicide bomber who carried out an attack in Syria.
• Three-hour standoff unfolded: Officers from multiple departments arrived at the scene after the shooting. A bomb squad was called in, and before 5 a.m. officers conducted a controlled detonation. Police used an armored vehicle to break through a wall at the nightclub, then SWAT team members exchanged gunfire with the suspect. He was shot and killed. Mina said the suspect was armed with a handgun and an assault rifle.
Officers rescued at least 30 hostages from the club.
Everyone was 'dropping and screaming': Witnesses describe chaos in Orlando shooting
• Fifty victims dead: Police and Orlando city officials said 50 people were dead and another 53 people were hospitalized. Police had initially said that at least 20 people were killed but found far more dead inside the club.
At least 14 law enforcement officers were involved in exchanging gunfire with the suspect, police said Sunday afternoon, and one was injured. Police said it appears a Kevlar helmet saved the life of the officer, who suffered facial injuries.
• Terrorism suspected: Police described the mass shooting as a "domestic terror incident." Authorities are investigating whether the incident was the work of Islamic terrorism, and the FBI is investigating.
Mateen acknowledged an allegiance to the Islamic State during a 911 call to law enforcement from the nightclub, a federal law enforcement officials said. He also praised Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
When asked whether the shooter had ties to a Jihadist terror group, FBI Special Agent Ronald Hopper said during a news conference that "we do have suggestions that that individual may have leanings toward that, that particular ideology. But right now we can't say definitively so we're still running everything around."
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., told reporters that there appears to be connections to ISIL, though the FBI has not yet confirmed the suspect's motives.
Pulse is not alone: A brief history of attacks on gay clubs
• Suspect had "suspicious device": Witnesses reported seeing a bomb in the gunman's possession, but police did not confirm that detail. Police did say the gunman was armed with an assault rifle, a handgun and an unidentified "suspicious device." A bomb squad responded to the scene and conducted a "controlled explosion," police said. The guns were purchased legally, an official from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said at a news conference.
• Shooting suspect's father: Mir Seddique told NBC News that the shooting "had nothing to do with religion" and that his son got angry when he recently saw two men kissing in Miami. The father, sometimes cited as Seddique Mir Mateen, told NBC News on Sunday that his son had recently expressed anti-gay sentiments and had become angry when he saw two men kissing a few months ago in Miami. He said the attack "had nothing to do with religion." Multiple news outlets said the shooter was a Muslim.
"We were in Downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music," the father told NBC News, "and he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry." Seddique also told NBC News that Mateen was father to a 3-year-old son.
"They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, 'Look at that. In front of my son they are doing that.' And then we were in the men's bathroom and men were kissing each other."
• Other threats: Authorities said they had no indication of any other threat in Florida or elsewhere in the nation.
• Hotlines for family members, tips: Police said they are focusing on identifying the victims. Family members who are trying to locate relatives can call 407-246-4357. The names of those killed are being posted online after their next of kin have been notified: www.cityoforlando.net/blog/victims/. A family assistance center has been set up at the Hampton Inn at 43 Columbia Street in Orlando. The FBI has asked anyone who was at the club before the shooting and anyone with tips to call 1-800-CALL-FBI ( 1-800-225-5324).
Pulse more than 'just another gay club'
|
de759d809f72ba1c19d25b306f046882
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/12/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-suspect/85787480/
|
FBI: Orlando suspect U.S. citizen, vowed allegiance to Islamic State
|
FBI: Orlando suspect U.S. citizen, vowed allegiance to Islamic State
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Investigators were reviewing a range of possible terror and hate-crime links to a gunman who professed his allegiance to the Islamic State from the scene of a horrific mass shooting at a crowded Orlando nightclub early Sunday that left at least 50 dead and 53 others wounded, the FBI said.
Omar Mateen, 29, of Fort Pierce, Fla., acknowledged his support for the terror group during a 911 call to local law enforcement from the nightclub, Orlando FBI chief Ron Hopper said.
During the call, placed in the pre-dawn hours after the first round of shots were fired, Mateen also made reference to the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, said a separate federal law enforcement official who was not authorized to comment publicly.
The disclosure closely tracked an account provided earlier Sunday by California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Schiff said that a Department of Homeland Security briefing indicated that Mateen had made the radical proclamation before he died in a shootout with authorities.
“Whether this attack also was ISIS-directed remains to be determined,’’ Schiff said in a statement.
Hopper also confirmed Sunday that Mateen had been interviewed by federal authorities three times in connection with two investigations during the past three years. In the most recent case, the FBI reviewed Mateen's alleged contacts in 2014 with Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, an American suicide bomber from Florida who died in Syria the same year.
Hopper said the case was closed when investigators determined that Mateen's contacts were "minimal.'' A federal law enforcement official later said a review of the Abu-Salha case found no direct contact between Mateen and the bomber. The two attended the same mosque, the official said.
In a 2013 investigation, investigators interviewed Mateen twice about "inflammatory comments'' the gunman made to a co-worker about possible ties to international terrorism. That case also was closed when authorities were unable to "verify'' the comments.
In both cases, the federal law enforcement source said, Mateen agreed to be interviewed and cooperated with investigators.
Mateen was not under investigation at the time of the shooting, a status that allowed for his purchase of a handgun and an AR-15 rifle which were used in the assault. A Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives trace found that the firearms were purchased "legally'' in Florida within the "last few days.''
Investigators, meanwhile, were interviewing members of Mateen’s family Sunday in an attempt to learn what may have prompted the assault, two federal law enforcement officials said.
NBC News reported that the attacker’s father indicated that Mateen recently expressed anti-gay sentiments, but one of the officials said investigators were still reviewing a wide range of possible motivations.
The official also said investigators were reviewing Mateen’s recent travels and contacts to learn more about possible preparations for the attack, now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history.
According to Florida court records, Mateen was married in 2009 and divorced two years later.
Who is Omar Mateen?
Mateen married Sitora Yusufiy on April 16, 2009. The marriage license was issued in St. Lucie County, Fla., records show. A dissolution of marriage was filed in July 2011.
Yusufiy could not be immediately reached. But in an interview with The Washington Post, the ex-wife claimed she was beaten repeatedly.
A former Fort Pierce police officer who once worked with Mateen as a security guard at PGA Village in Port St. Lucie, Fla., said Mateen was "unhinged and unstable."
Daniel Gilroy said he worked the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift with G4S Security at the south gate of the community for several months in 2014 and 2015. Mateen took over from him for a later shift.
Gilroy said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times and quit after he said Mateen began stalking him with up to 20 or 30 texts per day. He also left Gilroy 13 to 15 phone messages a day, the former officer said.
"I quit because everything he said was toxic," Gilroy said Sunday, "and the company wouldn't do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people."
John Kenning, a regional G4S chief executive, confirmed that Mateen had been employed there since September 2007.
"We are shocked and saddened by the tragic event that occurred at the Orlando nightclub,'' Kenning said in a written statement. "We are cooperating fully with all law enforcement authorities, including the FBI, as they conduct their investigation. Our thoughts and prayers are with all of the friends, families and people affected by this unspeakable tragedy.''
Two of Mateen's prior acquaintances described the gunman's actions as completely out of character for the person they knew.
"He would never shoot anybody or kill anybody,'' Lamont Owens said, adding that he had not seen Mateen for a "few'' years.
Another associate, Ryan Jones, described Mateen as "normal,'' though he also acknowledged not having contact with Mateen for several years.
"He was a cool, calm and collected person,'' Jones said.
Born in New York, Mateen lived in a Fort Pierce apartment complex that was teeming with law enforcement officials Sunday. He also used a mailing address at his parents' nearby Port St. Lucie, Fla., address.
Mateen received an associates of science degree in criminal justice technology in 2006 from Indian River State College, according to college spokeswoman Michelle Abaldo.
Local law enforcement records show no apparent criminal history in Florida.
Contributing: Anthony Westbury and Nicole Rodriguez in Port St. Lucie; Johnson reported from Washington.
More coverage of the Orlando shooting:
Orlando police: 'Approximately 20 dead' after club rampage
Everyone was 'dropping and screaming': Witnesses describe chaos in Orlando shooting
Brutal rampages in U.S. history
Mass shooting creates chaos at Orlando nightclub
|
8ce7a7d662710fa78f950392da524bba
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/15/sex-scandal-claiming-california-cops-jobs/85894724/
|
Oakland sex scandal fallout: Interim police chief fired
|
Oakland sex scandal fallout: Interim police chief fired
Oakland’s mayor fired the city’s interim police chief less than a week after appointing him to run the department amid a probe into whether dozens of officers had sex with a prostitute, including when she was underage.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Mayor Libby Schaaf declined to specify why she fired the the interim chief, repeatedly noting that state law prohibits discussion of police personnel matters. Schaaf appointed the interim chief last week following the abrupt departure of the former chief during an ongoing investigation into claims by a young woman who said she had sex with officers, in part, to avoid being arrested.
The Real Reason Why Oakland's Police Chief Was Fired | East Bay Express
Schaaf repeatedly said she needs to trust the department’s leadership during the investigation that is also examining allegations that high-ranking officers in the department knew about the woman’s claims for months but took little or no action. Five Oakland police officers have been suspended, and two of them have resigned. Schaaf said she learned on Monday information that raised concern about the interim chief’s ability to serve and fired him after they met Tuesday.
“We are dealing with disgusting allegations that upset me greatly,” Schaaf said in a Wednesday afternoon press conference. "As mayor, I need to have absolute confidence that the leader of this department can be 100% effective at leading cultural change based on current allegations that we take extremely seriously.”
The probe began following the September 2015 suicide of an Oakland officer who left a note admitting to a relationship with the woman that began when he was married. The woman is the daughter of a police dispatcher, and the investigation into her contact with officers has now broadened to encompass multiple police agencies across the area. At least four law enforcement agencies have opened internal investigations into the woman's claims, which she has backed up with text messages.
The woman, who USA TODAY is not identifying because she may be the victim of multiple sex crimes, has made multiple references to the investigation on her Facebook page and posted pictures of herself giving interviews to television reporters.
She did not respond to a request for comment but told KPIX-TV that she had sex with at least three officers while she was 16, which would be statutory rape. She said she had sex with the officers, in part, for protection against arrest. She has shown reporters text messages purporting to be from some of the officers in which she was tipped off to where vice squad arrest sweeps were to be made.
“I thought ‘wow,’ (the officers) cared about me. Thinking back at it, I do see myself as a victim because I do feel like I was taken advantage of … but, personally, I don’t have any bad feelings toward them," she told KPIX-TV.
Schaaf said she wants to ensure that all members of the Oakland Police Department are “morally fit” to serve the public.
|
cd6154832cc06a4728889cd6efd2b2a0
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/19/orlando-marks-week-after-pulse-massacre-tears-and-questions/86114078/
|
Orlando marks week after Pulse massacre: tears and questions
|
Orlando marks week after Pulse massacre: tears and questions
Seven hard days after it became the site of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, Orlando remembered the fallen Sunday with pealing church bells and — from normally raucous nightclubs to Disney World — moments of silence.
An estimated 20,000 people prepared for an early evening vigil at Lake Eola Park for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, preceded by a memorial service at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke. Mourners planned to march from the church to the lakeside park, carrying flowers, candles and messages of peace.
Several churches held memorial services during the day. Florida Gov. Rick Scott, speaking at First Baptist Church, one of the area’s largest churches, said the attacks targeted “two very vulnerable populations” — meaning gays and Latinos.
People prayed on the street and left balloons, flowers, pictures and posters to honor all 49 victims. Some visited a row of 49 white wood crosses made by a retired carpenter from Illinois; others waited in line at Realm Tattoos for a “One Pulse” tattoo.
The tattoos were free, but people were encouraged to leave a donation for the victims.
Antaeus Schembri was there Saturday. He said he got a tattoo on his forearm to "show support to the city that I love."
Meanwhile, the investigation continued into why Omar Mateen, 29, invaded the gay nightclub and opened fire around 2 a.m. on June 12, killing 49 and wounding 53 before being killed by police who stormed the building. He also pledged allegiance to the Islamic State militant group in a 911 call during the attack.
Eighteen of the wounded victims remained hospitalized Sunday. Four were in critical condition, two were listed as guarded and 12 as stable.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday that the FBI would release a partial transcript of three conversations between Mateen and Orlando police negotiators that took place while the gunman was inside the club.
Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Lynch said authorities hope to create a profile of Mateen to help prevent a similar disaster: “We are going back and learning everything we can about this killer, about his contacts, people who may have known him or seen him.’’ On Tuesday she’ll go to Orlando to meet investigators.
Lynch said a key goal of the investigation was to determine why Mateen apparently targeted the LGBTQ community. She declined to say if a federal grand jury was likely to charge Mateen's second wife, Noor Salman, who officials say knew her husband planned the attack.
Investigators are trying to learn more not just about Mateen, but also about others who knew him, including members of the mosque he attended.
Omar Saleh, a lawyer for the Council of American-Islamic Relations, said he sat in on a half-hour interview Friday with a man who has worshiped at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, which Mateen also attended.
Sunday's observances of a week's passage since the attack began when the day was young. The music stopped around 2 a.m. at many of the area's nightclubs to mark the moment when the killing began.
Around midnight, after Disney World's usual “Kiss Goodnight’’ announcement, park workers and visitors gathered to pay tribute to the victims. They held glow sticks, smartphones and artificial candles in the air during a moment of silence.
Participants in the observance, which was not organized by the theme park, arranged the glow sticks into a rainbow heart that rested at the base of Disney’s Cinderella Castle.
They also gathered for photos in front of an 11-by-7-foot rainbow flag with a black heart that showed a pulse beat in its center, and they made heart symbols with their hands.
One of the Pulse victims, Jerald Wright, worked in a store at the park.
Orlando’s professional soccer team honored the victims Saturday night by blocking off 49 stadium seats with rainbow-colored balloons.
Players at the MLS game between Orlando City and the San Jose Earthquakes wore rainbow-colored socks and sweatbands; fans waved rainbow flags (in addition to the usual ones of players’ home countries). Play was stopped at the 49th minute for a moment of silence, and fans wearing colored shirts created a rainbow in the stands.
The game ended in a tie.
Contributing: Chris Bonanno, Florida Today
|
f0f55e29d028109e576837403c9af570
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/23/supreme-court-drunk-driving-warrant-police-minnesota-north-dakota/85939208/
|
Supreme Court divides over breath, blood tests for drunk drivers
|
Supreme Court divides over breath, blood tests for drunk drivers
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that suspected drunk drivers can be arrested for refusing breath tests when police lack a warrant — but they can refuse more invasive blood tests.
While sympathizing with the intention of such laws in 13 states — to gain evidence of drunk driving before blood alcohol levels recede — a majority of justices said warrants for blood tests must be obtained to protect drivers' constitutional rights.
However, five justices also agreed that simple breath tests do not implicate significant privacy concerns, so police can arrest drivers who refuse them.
"Because breath tests are significantly less intrusive than blood tests and in most cases amply serve law enforcement interests, we conclude that a breath test, but not a blood test, may be administered as a search incident to a lawful arrest for drunk driving," Justice Samuel Alito wrote.
The decision divided the court three ways. Siding with Alito were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. Two liberal justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor — said warrants should be required for both tests.
" I fear that if the court continues down this road, the 4th Amendment's warrant requirement will become nothing more than a suggestion," Sotomayor wrote.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas decried the "hairsplitting" between breath and blood tests and said warrants should not be needed for either one.
Supreme Court skeptical of drunken-driving breath tests without warrants
The laws in Minnesota and North Dakota are similar to those in 11 other states: Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia.
The justices have ruled in the past that police cannot search a driver or vehicle after an arrest without getting a warrant, unless it's for their own personal safety or to preserve evidence. In 2013, they ruled that police cannot conduct blood tests for drunk driving without a warrant. The new cases raised a different issue: whether states could arrest those who refuse testing.
While blood tests are invasive, the question of simple breath tests divided the justices the most during oral argument in April. On one hand, they said, blowing into a little box is only a minor invasion. On the other hand, why can't police get a warrant within minutes, even in rural areas with small police departments and a dearth of judges or magistrates?
Chief deputy solicitor general Ian Gershengorn, representing the federal government, responded that judges and magistrates are not available around the clock to issue warrants in more remote parts of the country.
Throughout the oral argument, Alito had appeared most firmly on the side of the states. "The reason why people don't want to submit to a blood-alcohol test is that they don't want their blood alcohol measured," he said. "It's not that they object so much to blowing into a straw."
Deadlocked Supreme Court blocks Obama on immigration
Supreme Court upholds affirmative action in university admissions
|
a22fe86ba993b281d1567bfc26aa50e8
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/30/va-suicide-hotline-workers-veterans/86239764/
|
VA suicide hotline workers ripped for failing vets
|
VA suicide hotline workers ripped for failing vets
More than a third of troubled veterans are not getting through to the best trained suicide-hotline staffers because of poor work habits at the Department of Veteran's Affairs' call center, according to VA emails obtained by USA TODAY.
Some workers handle only one to five calls each day and leave before their shifts end even though phone lines have gotten busier, the emails say. As a result, 35% to 50% of the calls roll over to back-up centers where workers have less training to deal with the emotional problems of former servicemembers.
"There are staff who spend very little time on the phone or engaged in assigned productive activity," then-crisis line director Greg Hughes complained in a May 13 email to the hotline staff. Hughes left the position June 17. "If we continue to roll over calls because we have staff that are not making an honest effort, then we are failing at our mission." His email suggested that as many as half the workforce was underperforming.
The VA, which confirmed the authenticity of the emails, has been swamped with calls since opening in 2007. The volume increased from fewer than 10,000 in 2007 to more than 500,000 last year, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.
4 vets tie up VA suicide hotline with abusive calls
A 2010 calculation by the VA estimates that 22 veterans kill themselves each day. The VA, which has not updated that estimate, says the hotline "rescues" 30 veterans from suicide each day.
Thirteen days after Hughes' May 13 email message, he drafted a second email saying that the rollover rate had improved slightly to 35% to 40% of calls rolled over to the backup center, down from 45% to 50% when he sent his first message. Still, "We staff to a certain level and then we do not have that coverage because we have staff who routinely request to leave early," Hughes wrote in the May 25 email.
Sloan Gibson, deputy director of the VA, who has set a goal of zero calls going to back-up centers by Sept. 30, told USA TODAY he is unhappy about the staff problems.
"The first reaction is that it pisses me off," Gibson said. "The second reaction is that we got good leadership in place and we're moving to effect dramatic change."
The VA's efforts to provide suicide hotline counseling have taken a battering this year. Last year, the work of the hotline staff was movingly portrayed in an HBO film, Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, which received an Oscar for best documentary, short subject. But in February, an inspector general investigation revealed that some of the in-coming calls early last year had rolled over to back-up centers and gone to voicemail.
VA suicide hotline in Oscar-winning documentary lets calls go to voicemail
The VA said it has fixed that problem. But the inspector general also complained about a lack of training and proper accreditation for the back-up centers. A report by the Office of Special Counsel in April said the training and accreditation problems with back-up centers had not been corrected.
"Part of the reason that we want to go toward where we eliminate the backup centers is because we feel we can do a better job," Hughes said in an interview.
The back-up calls centers are part of a network of 164 private, non-profit phone-banks that also provide services to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or national suicide hotline.
Hughes' efforts to improve the phone-bank were praised by the GAO. "It seemed like the director was on track to make needed improvements," GAO senior investigator Randall Williamson said.
In an interview, Hughes said he left the job for family reasons. Matthew Eitutis, director of VA Member Services, which oversees the hotline, said an acting director is in place and efforts are underway to hire a permanent replacement.
Asked how many staffers under-performed, he initially said he didn't know the specific number, but later said about 5%.
Hughes said that under a labor agreement, problem employees handling phone calls can be disciplined under a process that begins with raising concerns, as he did in his emails. Gibson, the VA deputy director, said the hotline jobs, where operators sometimes spend feverish minutes trying to dissuade a veteran from taking his or her life, are among the most stressful occupations in the department.
Eitutis said the hotline office is expanding and taking steps to improve services, such as recording phone calls to improve quality of care. Eitutis said the call center will have a record 236 responders answering phones within the next few weeks.
Gibson said changes for the VA hotline are long overdue. "I step back from this and I look at it and I see a function, an activity, that has been chronically under-managed for years," he said.
The toll-free hotline number is 800-273-8255.
Read the emails here
|
2706e49d5fb00949ffd1716e9afc6e84
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/06/30/veterans-tie-up-va-suicide-hotline-abusive-calls/86507544/
|
4 vets tie up VA suicide hotline with abusive calls
|
4 vets tie up VA suicide hotline with abusive calls
A suicide hotline struggling to assist increasing numbers of former servicemembers in crisis is being hampered by four veterans who call thousands of times per month, tying up phone lines with abusive and even vulgar comments, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The four called 5,619 times in May, more than 4% of all 128,346 calls that came into what's known as the Veterans Crisis Line. One caller alone was responsible for 2,158 calls in May, according to VA press secretary Victoria Dillon.
"Most of the calls are often abusive, vulgar and profane," said Sloan Gibson, VA deputy secretary.
The hotline was established in 2007 to provide counseling and assistance to veterans struggling emotionally. Since then, the volume has increased dramatically and last year the hotline received more than 500,000 calls. The counselors who answer perform an average of about 30 "rescues" — preventing suicides — each day, the VA says.
The service has come under fire in recent months amid reports that some in-coming calls last year were transferred to backup centers, where they were fed into a voicemail answering system. The VA said that problem has been corrected, but it still struggles to answer all the calls coming in and at times 35% to 50% go to backup centers outside the VA where people answering the phone lack the training and resources that the VA call center has.
The VA's goal is to handle all calls without any going to a backup center by Sept. 30.
The agency is expanding hotline staff. But Gibson said efforts can be frustrated by the repetitive, abusive phone calls from the four veterans who are not in crisis.
"It's unacceptable that they would block that kind of access for other veterans and other active-duty service members that really need crisis help and so we're working through this clinically now to address that, cause it's just wrong," Gibson said. "My bottom line was deal with it and deal with it quickly because we're not going to continue to have that happen."
Dillon said the VA will be "restricting their calls only after a consultation with clinicians at their local VA Medical Centers to ensure that these four veterans can be cared for appropriately, while at the same time freeing up staff at the Veterans Crisis Line for those veterans, servicemembers and family members who need to speak with crisis line counselors timely and thoroughly."
|
dc37a03ca520670d3a36fc43e8e58489
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/03/explosion-central-park-new-york-city/86654300/
|
Police: Homemade explosive blast injures man in Central Park
|
Police: Homemade explosive blast injures man in Central Park
An 18-year-old Virginia man was seriously injured in a blast in New York's Central Park Sunday that police say could have been caused by homemade fireworks.
Police identified the injured man as Connor Golden of Fairfax, Va.
WABC-TV reported that he was critically injured by the explosion, which it said occurred at about 11 a.m. ET as he climbed off a rock near Fifth Avenue and East 62nd Street.
An unnamed eyewitness said Golden was climbing on a rock structure when he stepped on something that exploded, WCBS Newsradio 880 reported. He was undergoing surgery on his left foot at Bellevue Hospital, where he was reported in stable condition.
At a briefing Sunday afternoon, NYPD Deputy Chief John O'Connell said the blast "could have been an experiment with fireworks or homemade explosives." A few hours later, police spokesman J. Peter Donald tweeted, "what caused the explosion was likely homemade fireworks or something similar."
Lt. Mark Torre, head of the city's bomb squad, told the New York Post, “This is a time of a year where typically we will see a lot of experimentation — explosive experimenters, if you will. Their goal is to make a loud noise, maybe make a flash. They like to make noise and sort of play with fireworks, and it’s even better if they can make their own.”
Police dogs were canvassing the park for more possible explosives, the AP reported, and police were also examining a car parked at Newark Airport that the victim used to drive to New York, sources told the New York Daily News.
The explosive appeared to have been in the area for more than a day, Torre told the Daily News. Two of Golden's friends told police they had no fireworks or other explosives.
One witness said the blast sounded “like a cannon.”
One of Golden's friends, Thomas Hinds, 20, told the Daily News that he had just stepped off a large rock when the blast went off behind him.
“I got down the hill and boom, my ears were ringing. I felt a wave, a gust hit me in the back,” Hinds said. “I turned around and saw him on the ground with his foot bleeding."
Hinds added, "It just demolished his foot."
An unnamed official told the New York Post that the explosive was in a brown bag and didn't appear to be designed to be pressure-sensitive.
Torre told the Post that forensic evidence suggested it was "not meant go off by someone stepping on it."
The explosion was heard by attendees of Elie Wiesel’s funeral on E. 61st St., the Daily News reported, though there was no sign the blast was related to the memorial for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust survivor.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday tweeted, "Dangerous incident in Central Park today. Fireworks are fun — but let's leave them to the professionals. Stay safe."
|
9e2fb9ea2f385d8b49382b51facaf4a9
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/06/black-leaders-demand-state-probe-fatal-shooting-baton-rouge-police/86745562/
|
New video in Alton Sterling shooting stirs anger
|
New video in Alton Sterling shooting stirs anger
With questions and anger bubbling up nationwide, the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights division took over the investigation Wednesday of a fatal shooting — captured on at least two graphic videos — of a black man by two Baton Rouge, La., police officers.
The move came only hours after leaders of the city's black community joined family members of the victim, Alton Sterling, 37, at a news conference to call for more protests and for the inquiry to be turned over to state and federal authorities.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, who announced the federal involvement at a news conference, said he had "serious concerns" about the shooting based information from police and the video of the shooting that took place outside of a convenience store. "The video is disturbing, to say the least," Edwards said.
Edwards told reporters that the inquiry, originally in the hands of local police, would be handled "impartially, professionally and thoroughly." He said the agency's civil rights division would be in charge of the probe, assisted by the FBI and Louisiana State Police.
A second video surfaced late Wednesday that appears to show the incident in the parking lot of a convenience store, The Daily Beast reported. The media outlet said the store owner, Abdul Muflahi, provided the new video and reported it does not appear to support the claim that Sterling's supposed gun represented an active threat to the officers. Seconds after the shooting, one of the officers is seen removing an object from Sterling's right pants pocket.
Officers identified
Edwards called on the Baton Rouge community and faith-based leaders "to work with all of us that we remain calm and peaceful as the details unfold." He also said he had spoken with Sterling's aunt, Sandra Sterling, to express his condolences.
Sandra Sterling had joined community leaders in front of city hall earlier Wednesday to call her nephew's shooting a "horrible thing." "He didn’t deserve that," she said.
The developments prompted one national civil rights organization to reiterate its call for better safeguards against alleged police wrongdoing. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund on Wednesday underscored a previous call for, among other thingws, annual collection and public reporting of arrests, use of force and traffic stop data, training on implicit bias, adolescent development and appropriate interactions with people suffering from mental illness and other disabilities.
"Mr. Sterling's death is horrific to witness and follows an increasingly long line of unjustified police shootings of civilians," said Sherillyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the LDF. "We send our sincere condolences to his family, and join the call for a transparent investigation of the shooting, including the release of any surveillance, dash-cam, or police body-worn camera video."
At a news conference Wednesday, Baton Rouge police chief Carl Dabadie called the fatal shooting a "horrible tragedy." He identified the officers involved as Blane Salamoni, a four-year member of the department and Howie Lake II, who has been on the force for three years.
He did not identify their race, but said they have have been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.
Lake was placed on administrative leave once before, in 2014, along with five other officers, as a result of a police-involved shooting, WAFB-TV reported. The incident involved a suspect who crashed his car while trying to elude officers. The suspect then began shooting at officers, who returned fire, hitting him multiple times but not killing him.
Dabadie also called on any groups planning to gather to express their concerns over the incident to "do it peacefully, that no one gets hurt or injured."
The Justice Department’s investigation will look into whether the officers willfully violated Sterling’s civil rights through the use of unreasonable or excessive force, the Associated Press reported. Similar investigations, which often take many months to resolve, were opened following the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.
Federal investigators must meet a high legal burden to bring a civil rights prosecution, establishing that an officer knowingly used unreasonable force under the circumstances and did not simply make a mistake or use poor judgment, AP reported. Many federal probes conclude without criminal charges.
Protests erupt after first video published
The shooting occurred after the officers arrived at the Triple S Food Mart about 12:35 a.m. Tuesday. they were responding to an anonymous caller who indicated that a man, later identified as Sterling, was selling music CDs and wearing a red shirt threatened him with a gun, Cpl. L’Jean McKneely said.
Mufleh Alatiyat, a 25-year-old employee of the store described Sterling as generous and said he often gave away CDs or petty cash or bought food or drink for some people. “He was a very nice guy,” he said. “He helped a lot of people.”
Protests erupted late Tuesday and continued into the early morning hours following the appearance on Facebook of a graphic video purportedly showing the shooting.
Shooting in Baton Rouge: What we know
That 48-second cellphone video captured by a bystander shows an officer firing at least one round into Sterling's chest followed by the sound of at least four shots as the camera abruptly turns away.
"Get on the ground, get on the ground!" one officer shouts at the outset of the video clip.
One officer pulls down and pins the man's left arm. His right arm is not visible in the video.
"He's got a gun! Gun," one officer says, prompting the officer visible in the video to draw his weapon and point it at the man's chest. That action is followed by a flash from the gun.
Warning: This graphic video uploaded to YouTube purportedly shows the shooting
An autopsy shows Sterling died of multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and back, according to East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner William "Beau" Clark.
Muflahi told WAFB-TV that the first officer used a stun gun on Sterling and the second officer tackled the man. Muflahi said as Sterling fought to get the officer off him, the first officer shot him “four to six times.”
He says Sterling did not have a gun in his hand at the time but he saw officers remove a gun from Sterling’s pocket after the shooting. Police confiscated a video of the incident taken by the store's surveillance cameras.
East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar C. Moore III on Wednesday said he and his staff watched interviews of the two officers with internal investigators. He said the two officers "feel they were completely justified” in shooting Sterling, the Advocate reported.
Emotional loved ones of Alton Sterling demand justice
Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., called for the Department of Justice to investigate the killing. He said officials claimed that both officers had body cameras "but they fell off during the struggle and do not show the shooting."
By dawn Wednesday, protesters and friends had created a makeshift memorial to Sterling on the white folding tables and fold-out chair he used to sell homemade music compilations on CD’s.
The protests increased after the video surfaced, with demonstrators chanting, "hands up, don't shoot" and "black lives matter."
Demonstrators blocked the intersection near the convenience store before 10 p.m. CT Tuesday night. They eventually cleared the streets and moved to the sidewalks.
NAACP calls for firing of police chief
Michael McClanahan, president of the Baton Rouge NAACP, called on the mayor to fire the chief of police and then resign himself. He also called for the probe into the killing to be handed over the the Louisiana State Police.
"The best way to insure that this is no cover up is to turn it over to a neutral third party," McClanahan said.
He said the community's goal was to "root out the 1% of the bad police who believe they are the judge, jury and executioner of innocent people, period, but most of all black lives."
McClanahan called on the Baton Rouge police to arrest the two officers. "If the system works for anyone, it should work for them, too," he said.
Gary Chambers, publisher of The Rouge Collection, which serves the predominantly black community of north Baton Rouge, called for a community meeting Wednesday evening of blacks, whites, other ethnics groups and faith-based leaders to "come together as a city and say that this is not going to stand in this community."
"This is not a place of division," Chambers said. "This is not a community place where we are trying to pit all of our community against all police. We understand that not all police are bad, but this must be answered for."
Quinyetta McMillon, mother of the oldest of Sterling's five children, broke down repeatedly as she addressed the news conference, At one point her son, who stood next to hear, broke into sobs and buried his face against her arm, and was gently taken by bystanders.
"The individuals involved in this murder took away a man with children who depended on their daddy on a daily basis," she said.
She said the community had come together "to ensure that this event will not go unnoticed, especially for the future."
"I for one will not rest and will not allow him to be swept into the dirt," she said.
|
9c742c838ce7382feb9259ee2b7a47a0
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/11/black-lives-matter-what-what-stands/86963292/
|
Black Lives Matter: A primer on what it is and what it stands for
|
Black Lives Matter: A primer on what it is and what it stands for
After a week of conflict in the United States that included the police-involved shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the subsequent sniper attack that left five Dallas police officers dead, the Black Lives Matter movement once again has been at the center of controversy.
But lost in the discussion is a sense of what Black Lives Matter is and what it stands for.
What is Black Lives Matter?
Black Lives Matter was founded by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi as both a hashtag and a political project after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. Distraught at the verdict, Oakland, Calif., community activist Garza wrote an impassioned Facebook plea ending with the words "black lives matter." Cullors, a community organizer from Los Angeles, shared the Facebook post and put a hashtag in front of those three words. The ideals expressed — the economic, political and social empowerment of African-Americans — resonated nationwide.
Meet the woman who coined #BlackLivesMatter
Since 2013, Black Lives Matter has moved from social media platforms to the streets, morphing into an organization and a movement that gained national recognition during demonstrations after the 2014 police-involved killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
How does Black Lives Matter work?
What sets Black Lives Matter apart from other social justice groups, however, is its decentralized approach and reliance almost solely on local, rather than national, leadership. Cullors said organizing is often spontaneous and not directed by one person or group of people.
“We don’t get (people) onto the streets, they get themselves onto the street,” she said.
Black Lives Matter in Cleveland refuses RNC protest regulations
Black Lives Matter is made up of a network of local chapters who operate mostly independently. Chelsea Fuller of the Advancement Project, a nonprofit that works with grassroots justice and race movements, said that local organizing is a powerful way to address poverty, access to housing and jobs, community policing and other issues that intersect with systemic racism.
“We can’t affect national narrative, we can’t affect national legislation that comes down and affects local people if local people don’t push back and take a stand about what's happening in local communities,” Fuller said.
What does Black Lives Matter stand for?
The most important directive of Black Lives Matter, Cullors said, is to deal with anti-black racism, to “push for black people’s right to live with dignity and respect” and be included in the American democracy that they helped create.
“This is about the quality of life for black people, for poor people in this country,” said Umi Selah, co-director of Dream Defenders in Miami. Though not officially affiliated, Dream Defenders and similar social justice groups often align themselves with Black Lives Matter.
DeRay Mckesson: Criticism of Black Lives Matter dishonest
“The conception that all we’re mad about is police and policing is a strong misconception,” Selah said. In fact, Black Lives Matter released a statement last week condemning the shooting in Dallas as counter to what the movement is trying to accomplish.
Ralikh Hayes of Baltimore BLOC echoed Selah, saying that Black Lives Matter is not inherently anti-police or anti-white, nor does the phrase Black Lives Matter means other lives aren't important.
“We are against a system that views people as tools,” Hayes said.
Cullors also hears claims that Black Lives Matter lacks direction or strategy. But Cullors said the strategy is clear -- working to ensure that black people live with the full dignity of their human rights.
“We are not leaderless, we’re leader-full,” she said. "We're trying to change the world... developing a new vision for what this generation of black leaders can look like."
|
5dbb991ccc998fe3e65b41647316b94b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/15/thousands-christians-gather-national-mall-together-2016/87146256/
|
Thousands of Christians to gather on National Mall for 'Together 2016'
|
Thousands of Christians to gather on National Mall for 'Together 2016'
When Nick Hall first began planning “Together 2016” several years ago, he didn’t expect it would ultimately be held during a contentious political season and in the midst of several recent acts of violence across the world.
But in some ways, the event — a large gathering of Christians planned for Saturday in Washington, D.C., that will feature music and speakers — is coming at the perfect time, Hall said.
“I think our world really needs healing,” said Hall, the lead organizer of the gathering. “Moments of historic change are often marked by historic gatherings, so we really believe this a moment where our world can change.”
Thousands of Christians will flock to the National Mall for the event, which Hall said is being targeted toward Millennials. Everyone is invited, though, and Hall said he’s met people this week from states including Florida and California as well as from Africa, Europe and Asia.
The purpose, Hall said, is to give people an opportunity to “reset,” or get a second chance.
“And we really we just kind of had the feeling that Jesus is often a reset to individuals, to our nation, to each of us,” Hall added.
The day’s lineup includes a number of musical acts, from hip-hop artists to rock bands, as well as several speakers. Those performers, Hall said, were selected because organizers felt they were the leaders of the millennial faith generation.
The event will also feature praying, which Hall said will include prayers for those affected by violence across the world, such as the victims of the deadly truck attack in Nice, France on Thursday.
In recent weeks, other violent incidents have included the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub, the terrorist attack in Istanbul, the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the deadly shooting of five police officers in Dallas.
“As we build up to this, I think everybody’s looking for a leader right now,” Hall said. “The only agenda is Jesus, and beyond reset, Jesus changes everything.”
Hall said he and other organizers see Saturday as a once-in-a-generation gathering and a chance to leave a lasting impact.
“Everyone talks about how we need change, but there aren’t always a lot of solutions,” Hall said. “This is an opportunity.”
|
a5f517f4cffe817b9e8935849d0fae4b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/26/bus-driver-admits-raping-student-walks-free/87561230/
|
Bus driver admits to raping student, walks free
|
Bus driver admits to raping student, walks free
(NEWSER) – A 35-year-old former school bus driver won't serve time in jail after pleading guilty to raping a 15-year-old student in Hamilton County, Tenn.
On Thursday, Judge Barry Steelman accepted Alexander Rodriquez's plea deal for aggravated statutory rape, which included a four-year suspended sentence, though he questioned why prosecutors didn't want to put the man behind bars. "We did point out that [Rodriquez] had already served 100 days," his defense lawyer tells the Chattanooga Times Free Press, adding there were "credibility issues" with the victim.
Rodriquez will now be placed on supervised sex offender probation for 10 years and must wear a GPS monitor. But the victim's father — who's suing Rodriquez and the Hamilton County Board of Education for $10 million, per the Free Press — says it's not enough.
"We were immediately turned off by the fact that there was no jail time," he says. "I'm disappointed that somebody that commits a crime sexually, especially against a child, gets treated like a DUI [offender]," he adds.
"For me and my family, this has been an absolutely heartbreaking experience," The victim told authorities that Rodriquez drove her from Sale Creek High School to a bus loading station last March, then took her to a Super 8, where he forced her to perform oral sex and raped her, saying, "I'm trying to make it hurt," per the Chattanoogan.
After authorities called Rodriquez looking for the girl, she said he dropped her off an hour's walk from her house and told her to tell her parents she had been with a friend.
(In Missouri, police say a man kept a teenage girl captive in his home for weeks.)
This story originally appeared on Newser:
Bus Driver Admits to Raping Student, Then Walks Free
More from Newser:
Mom Learns Dead Son's Heart Is Still in the Family
In Gucci's Not-Too-Distant Past: A Sensational Murder
Find Out Which US Cities Boast a Lot of Brainiacs
Newser is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
|
7b7498541540d3bfa677628c9d5379a9
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/29/appeals-court-north-carolina-voter-id-law-discriminatory/87728254/
|
North Carolina voting restrictions struck down
|
North Carolina voting restrictions struck down
A federal appeals court Friday struck down North Carolina's array of voting restrictions enacted in 2013, saying they all "disproportionately affected African Americans."
The decision came a week after a similar ruling against Texas' voter ID law, giving civil rights groups two major victories leading up to the November elections.
Appeals court strikes down Texas voter ID law
Both cases can be appealed to the Supreme Court, but the justices would not have time to consider them before Nov. 8. Based on the appeals court verdicts, the high court is likely to insist that the restrictions be set aside in the meantime.
Citing "the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina," a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said state lawmakers intentionally imposed the restrictions to make it more difficult for blacks to vote.
"The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision," the judges said. "They constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist."
The North Carolina and Texas laws were enacted following the Supreme Court's ruling in 2013 striking down part of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discrimination to get federal permission before changing voting procedures.
While Texas imposed the toughest photo ID rules, North Carolina's law was the most expansive of any in the nation. In addition to identification requirements, it eliminated same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting and reduced early voting.
The law had been challenged by the North Carolina NAACP and other civil rights groups, along with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Without court action, the law threatened to impact the presidential race in the politically balanced state, which President Obama won narrowly in 2008 but Mitt Romney won back for Republicans in 2012.
The law had come under attack last month when the panel heard oral arguments. Judge Henry Floyd said the legislature's rush to impose limits after getting a green light from the Supreme Court in 2013 "looks pretty bad to me."
Federal appeals court skeptical of North Carolina voting restrictions
Seventeen states have new voting procedures in place for the November election, more than half of which are being challenged in court. Many require voters to show photo identification, such as the Texas law. Others target rules for registering, early voting and provisional voting, such as North Carolina's law.
Last month, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, a generally conservative court, ruled 9-6 that Texas' law was not intended to discriminate but had that effect on minority voters. The law could have left up to 600,000 voters without the proper identification in this fall's elections, opponents claimed.
|
0323e47a0922bff7a6fbef64ead074ff
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/08/21/violence-flooding-mark-historic-baton-rouge-summer/89076252/
|
Violence, flooding mark historic Baton Rouge summer
|
Violence, flooding mark historic Baton Rouge summer
A grueling summer for Baton Rouge that started with a racially charged officer-involved shooting and the murder of three police officers is winding down amid flooded streets and a visit from President Obama.
Some residents believe the Louisiana city on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River will emerge stronger from the somber parade of tragedy.
"This city has been through a lot, and it has been painful for everyone," Lorri Burgess, a community activist and former city councilwoman, told USA TODAY. Burgess, 53 and a lifelong resident, said cleanup efforts have strengthened community bonds.
"Black, white, if you didn't get flooded, you pulled up carpets for friends. It makes the toughest people pretty humble," said Burgess, who is black. "People think more clearly about what is fair and what is right."
Historic flooding in southern Louisiana has put Baton Rouge in the national headlines for more than a week. Photos and video reveal devastating flooding, heroic water rescues, and homes and property trashed by walls of water.
At water's edge, southern Louisiana weighs its future
Obama arrives Tuesday to witness firsthand the destruction and bring hope to exhausted residents. More than 100,000 people in the state have registered for federal emergency aid, and more than $55 million has been approved to help with temporary rental assistance, home repairs and other immediate needs.
Just weeks earlier, Baton Rouge made headlines for violence. On July 5, two officers responding to a 911 call about a man with a gun outside a convenience store confronted Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man. A struggle ensued, and Sterling was fatally shot in the chest and back. The officers were placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.
The shooting led to protests across the nation, and the Justice Department announced it would investigate Sterling's death. Then, on July 17, a man ambushed officers responding to a 911 call, killing two Baton Rouge officers and a sheriff's deputy.
Sheriff's Department Capt. Darryl Armentor, who is white, knows the parents of one of the officers involved in Sterling's shooting as well as one of the deputies killed in the ambush. His own home had flood damage, and his team of sheriff's deputies rescued scores of people from the floods.
Armentor told the Associated Press he hasn't had time to process all the events this summer.
"There's no time for stress now. We just work," he said. "It hasn't stopped."
In turbulent year, tests for Edwards
Valerie Bourgeois, owner of Bourgee' women's apparel shop in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood, says the shootings are still on people's minds.
"We need to continue to fight injustice," Bourgeois, 56, told USA TODAY. She questions why two white police officers were sent into a black community to deal with the 911 call. Bourgeois, who is black, is hesitant to judge, adding that "fear has no color, but we have a problem with police brutality, especially when it comes to African Americans."
The flooding effects her personally as well as professionally. Some friends and clients have lost almost everything. And while her store was not damaged by the high water, she says all business people in the city will feel the impact.
She says the floods are bringing people together, and that could help the city going forward.
"We are building relationships, and when you have a relationship you can sit down and discuss things," she said. "I think the floods will help with that."
Burgess agrees. She said that issues placed on hold by the flooding will resurface.
"They are important, but are they as important as so many people losing everything? The floods are a powerful punch," she said. "It might make us all realize that all lives matter."
|
0387691909153115b154cdbae0588dd0
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/09/12/grand-jury-look-into-alleged-cover-up-chicago-cops-mcdonald-case/90261368/
|
Grand jury to probe alleged cover-up by Chicago cops in Laquan McDonald case
|
Grand jury to probe alleged cover-up by Chicago cops in Laquan McDonald case
CHICAGO — A grand jury will hear evidence of a possible cover-up by several Chicago cops at the scene of the controversial police shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, an Illinois judge said Monday.
Judge LeRoy Martin Jr., the presiding judge of the Cook County Court’s criminal division, agreed to impanel the grand jury at the request of a special prosecutor investigating the actions of officers at the scene of the shooting death of the black teenager in October 2014. Officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 shots at McDonald, who was holding a small knife.
The move to convene a grand jury, requested by special prosecutor Patricia Brown Holmes, comes about two weeks after Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson moved to fire five police officers on the scene of the shooting for allegedly offering false statements about what happened.
Chicago chief moves to fire 5 cops in Laquan McDonald case
Police dashcam video, made public in November by court order, touched off weeks of protests in Chicago. It shows that Van Dyke fired at McDonald within seconds of getting out of his squad car. But Van Dyke, who was charged with first-degree murder late last year, and several officers at the scene told investigators that McDonald ignored repeated calls from Van Dyke to drop the knife and had put the officers in danger.
In filing their recommendations to the Chicago Police Board — the agency in charge of the final determinations on the employment of the cops involved — Johnson and police department lawyers alleged that Van Dyke and fellow officers Stephen Franko, Janet Mondragon, Daphne Sebastian and Ricardo Viramontes knowingly made false or inaccurate statements backing up Van Dyke’s contention that he shot out of fear for his and his fellow officers lives.
Police pursued McDonald in response to reports that he had been breaking into trucks. The police dashcam video of the incident appears to show McDonald veering away from the officers when Van Dyke opened fire.
Three other officers who are among those whose statements have been questioned by the city’s inspector general have already retired from the police department. Van Dyke’s partner, officer Joseph Walsh, also recently resigned from the police department.
Walsh told investigators after the incident that he "backed up" as McDonald got to within 12 to 15 feet of the officers and "swung the knife toward the officers in an aggressive manner." Walsh said he and Van Dyke repeatedly called on McDonald to drop the knife.
Brown Holmes was named a special prosecutor in July to investigate whether the actions of the officers merited criminal charges.
Follow USA TODAY Chicago correspondent Aamer Madhani on Twitter: @AamerISmad
|
26668fe3c7ae6251ec53243390dd077b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/09/27/lawyer-nathan-desai-identified-gunman-who-shot-9-houston/91161506/
|
Porsche-driving lawyer was Houston shooter
|
Porsche-driving lawyer was Houston shooter
Police found two semiautomatic weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition but no firm reason why a Porsche-driving lawyer went on a shooting rampage in southwest Houston that concluded with his own death.
Investigators on Tuesday identified the shooter as Nathan DeSai and were trying to determine what prompted the spree that paralyzed several city blocks for hours Monday. Six people were shot and three others suffered injuries from flying glass when DeSai, 46, opened fire on passing cars before being killed by officers, police said.
Three people remained hospitalized, one in critical condition, early Tuesday.
DeSai's family says they last spoke with him at dinner with his parents Sunday night. On Monday morning, they saw his Porsche Boxster on the news and a police robot searching it for explosives.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, speaking by phone from a trade mission to Cuba, said there were no apparent ties to terrorism. He said DeSai was apparently either recently fired or asked to leave the law firm of McDaniel and DeSai in February.
Houston gunman's rampage ends with suspect dead
Not quite so, says Kenneth McDaniel, DeSai's former law partner. McDaniel said the 12-year partnership was undone by Houston's struggling economy during an energy downturn.
“He went his way with his practice and I went with mine,” McDaniel told the Associated Press. “All I can say it’s a horrible situation. I’m sad for everyone involved.”
DeSai was dressed in military-style garb and took cover behind a tree, Houston Police Capt. Dwayne Ready said. He was armed with a .45 caliber semiautomatic Thompson rifle, a semiautomatic handgun and a knife, along with more than 2,500 rounds of ammunition, Ready said. Both guns were legally purchased, he added.
Witnesses said he was shooting at random vehicles. Nine police officers ultimately engaged DeSai in a gunbattle that ended with the lawyer's death, Ready said.
"We did find some old Nazi emblems among his personal effects," Ready said. But he added that other "vintage" military memorabilia, some dating to the Civil War, also was found.
The State Bar of Texas confirmed that DeSai had no public disciplinary history but could not say whether there are any open complaints against him.
Contributing: KHOU-TV
|
fb332114523949a78f5ff6b57218740b
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/10/14/rare-tornado-strikes-oregon-beach-town-thousands-without-power/92059086/
|
Storm brings twisters, heavy rain to Pacific Northwest
|
Storm brings twisters, heavy rain to Pacific Northwest
PORTLAND, Ore. — Two tornadoes touched down Friday in Oregon, including one that damaged several city blocks in the coastal town of Manzanita, as heavy rain walloped the Pacific Northwest.
The Manzanita tornado hit at around 8:20 a.m. PT and had maximum winds between 125-130 mph, according to the National Weather Service in Portland.
There were no reports of injuries.
Tillamook County Sheriff Andy Long said the Manzanita tornado path was about "10 streets long" and traveled "right through the center of town."
Manzanita Mayor Garry Bullard declared a state of emergency.
Debbie Harmon, owner of the Amanita Galley, said most of the damage is near the beach and downtown.
US and National Weather Forecasts - USATODAY.com
“It was a normal beach storm, which we get a lot of, and then out of nowhere the wind went ‘whoooo,’” she said. “Suddenly the whole sky was filled with debris. It was just crazy. And then it just stopped.”
City manager Jerry Taylor said Manzanita has a permanent population of about 620 people. Many people own second homes there, he said.
"Many of our houses, especially this time of year, are not occupied," said Taylor.
The Red Cross opened a shelter at the Calvary Bible Church in Manzanita.
"I haven’t seen anything like this in my 20 years here. Maybe a small waterspout 20 years ago," Taylor said.
Julee Ward, who lives between Manzanita and Nehalem, said she awoke to violent thunderstorms and an eerie, dark sky. Her husband went outside to check on things after 8 a.m. and called for her to come out.
“Behold there was this big tornado flying about a mile away from our house,” she said. “There was debris flying everywhere … you could see the debris up in the funnel.”
Video shot by her husband showed a massive funnel spilling down from dark clouds.
“You could hear it howling too, which was the crazy part,” she added.
The NWS confirmed a second tornado came near Oceanside at around 9 a.m. There were no immediate reports of damage.
The last time there were two tornadoes in Northwest Oregon was Nov. 12, 1991, when three tornadoes touched down, according to the NWS.
Elsewhere, thousands of people were without power as utility crews in the region prepared for what’s expected to be an even rougher storm on Saturday.
In Seattle, a 4-year-old boy and his father were injured by a falling tree branch. The Seattle Fire Department said the child suffered serious injuries and the father minor injuries.
The heavy rain created dangerous conditions throughout the region, as drivers tried to see out rain-pounded windshields and navigate through standing water on roads.
In Oregon, Portland General Electric reported that more than 4,000 customers were without power early Friday. Pacific Power reported that 2,800 customers in coastal communities had no lights, down from a peak of more than 15,000.
At one point, 15,000 customers were without power in Seattle.
Portland had the rainiest Oct. 13 in its history. In addition, the National Weather Service says a 103-mph wind gust was recorded at Cape Meares.
Meteorologists expect a lull before the remnants of Typhoon Songda, which wreaked havoc in the western Pacific days ago, hit the Pacific Northwest on Saturday. Forecasters say wind gusts as high as 70 mph could sweep through Seattle. Mayor Ed Murray urged residents to avoid the city’s many parks during the wet weekend weather.
Contributing: The Associated Press
|
55cd2d2e3003ccd8adb1e86c518dae14
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/10/31/7-hurt-pipeline-explosion-lights-up-sky-alabama/93095064/
|
7 hurt as pipeline explosion lights up the sky in Alabama
|
7 hurt as pipeline explosion lights up the sky in Alabama
HELENA, Ala. (AP) — At least seven workers were injured Monday when an explosion occurred along the Colonial Pipeline in rural Alabama, not far from where it burst last month, authorities said.
The explosion sent flames soaring over the forest about a mile west of where the pipeline burst in September, Gov. Robert Bentley said in a statement. That rupture led to gasoline shortages across the South.
People within 3 miles of the blast site were being evacuated, the governor said.
“We’ll just hope and pray for the best,” Bentley added.
Video from area media shows a huge plume of flame and smoke rising in a wooded area in Shelby County southwest of Birmingham.
The seven injured workers were taken to Birmingham hospitals by helicopter and ambulance, Bentley told WBRC-TV in a live interview Monday evening.
“It appears to have been an accident, and they’re allowing fuel to burn,” Bentley said. “It’s about one mile west of where the repair took place on the Colonial Pipeline just recently.”
Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline said in a brief statement Monday evening that it has shut down its main pipeline.
“Colonial’s top priorities are the health and safety of the work crew on site and protection of the public,” the company said.
The company’s statement did not address how Monday’s explosion might affect the availability of gasoline and said more information would be released as it becomes available.
Several fire departments were sending crews to assist. Helena police say they’re assisting Shelby County authorities with the blaze.
The explosion happened in a remote area outside the town of Helena, away from residential areas, Helena Mayor Mark told WBRC-TV.
In September, the Colonial Pipeline leaked thousands of gallons of gas southwest of Birmingham near Helena and led to dry fuel pumps in several Southern states — for days, in some cases. There was no immediate indication Thursday whether or not Monday’s explosion will lead to similar shortages.
Colonial Pipeline, based in Alpharetta, Ga., transports more than 100 million gallons of products daily to markets between Houston and New York City, serving more than 50 million people, it says on its website. They include petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel. Authorities have not said which type of fuel was involved in the explosion Monday.
|
031f35e18b352345697946f0d42d2786
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/11/23/epa-big-cities-stop-killing-rats-dry-ice/94337366/
|
EPA to big cities: Stop killing rats with dry ice
|
EPA to big cities: Stop killing rats with dry ice
An efficient, chilling new weapon in the urban war on rats may be swiftly meeting its demise after the government notified major cities that the use of dry ice as a rodenticide violates federal law.
The method of stuffing dry ice — frozen carbon dioxide — into burrows to suffocate rats as it sublimates from a solid to a gas proved more efficient at killing rodents and cheaper than using conventional rat poisons in cities such as Boston, Chicago and New York, which all recently launched programs to test the method.
But the Environmental Protection Agency reached out to state agencies in Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and elsewhere in recent months to make clear that federal guidelines prohibit the use of dry ice for rat abatement because the deadly treatment is not registered with the federal agency as required. The law is in place to ensure products are safe, and directions for use minimize risks to users, the public and the environment.
Death by dry ice: How cities are using a chilling killer to zap rats
The revelation prompted Boston and New York to halt the use of dry ice in their rat abatement programs, while Chicago is investigating the issue. All three cities launched tests this year as urban centers around the country experienced a spike in the number of citizen complaints about rodents after a relatively warm winter.
The notifications, months after the cities first began using dry ice, highlight the complicated process of pesticide use in the USA. States enforce the federal guidelines and receive notification from the EPA if a city is in violation.
Rats! Several big U.S. cities seeing surge in rodent complaints
William “Buddy” Christopher, who heads Boston’s Inspectional Services Department, said he halted the city's dry ice experiment on Oct. 20 after receiving a notification from the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources about the illegal use of the product. But the state agency received the notice from the EPA on Aug. 8, about two months earlier. The agency did not provide a reason for the delay.
“We didn’t see this thing as a pesticide by the classic definition, because dry ice is used everywhere,” Christopher said. “You go to a nightclub and they’ll serve cocktails in a bucket of dry ice. This is not necessarily one of those logical things, it’s a regulatory issue, and we’ll respect everything they want us to do.”
The Boston's legal team is in the process of applying for an EPA permit to restart the program, Christopher said. The city recorded as much as a 95% reduction in rodent activity in areas where it deployed dry ice after it launched the pilot in April.
Louisiana is shrinking, thanks to giant swamp rats
Chicago launched its pilot in August and immediately recorded a 60% reduction in burrows in areas it tested. The city noted that at 50 cents per pound, dry ice is far cheaper than the rat poison pellets selling for $57 per 20-pound bucket.
Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Public Health, said the agency received notification last week from the EPA that the Chicago program violated federal law.
The city is now investigating the matter. “The city of Chicago is reviewing the matter to ensure that we are in compliance with any regulations,” said Sara McGann, a Chicago Street’s and Sanitation Department spokeswoman.
Wrigley Field renovation has rats 'running rampant' in Chicago
In New York, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation notified New York City officials that its use of dry ice violated federal law after the EPA reached out. In a statement, the state agency said it “does not support the use of illegal products or substances, such as dry ice, for rodent control.”
Carolina Rodriguez, a spokeswoman in New York City’s Department of Health, said“the dry ice trial was promising,” but “it has concluded.” She declined further comment.
Widespread media attention about the cities' use of dry ice prompted several municipalities and school systems to contact the EPA about the legality of the product, the agency said.
Ruth Kerzee, executive director of the Midwest Pesticide Action Center, said her organization raised concerns with regional EPA officials and the city of Chicago about the new rat-killing method.
Kerzee, whose organization promotes minimizing the use of pesticides, said while dry ice is less toxic than some conventional pesticides it remains unclear what, if any, guidelines cities created to ensure the product is being safely handled by personnel.
“We think it could be a sea changer, a great thing to be able to use, but it does need to be vetted and go through the process, so that we don’t end up in a situation where we throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Kerzee said.
The National Pest Management Association, a trade group representing private pest control companies, also inquired with EPA and the Illinois Department of Public Health about the use of dry ice after Chicago launched its pilot and was told it could not be legally used as rodenticide, said Jim Fredericks, chief entomologist for the association. The group published a message to members in its newsletter last month that “any use of CO2/dry ice to control rodents would be a violation of federal law.”
Fredericks said the industry association is not calling for the EPA to permit dry ice as a rodenticide. “It’s not one of our priorities right now,” he said.
Loretta Mayer, CEO of the Arizona-based SenesTech, a company marketing a non-lethal product that sterilizes rats, said some products on the market are more dangerous than dry ice.
Still, even if dry ice is eventually approved by the EPA, Mayer said it won’t be a panacea for cities in their epic battle with rats, which reach sexual maturity five weeks after birth.
“In the end, it’s just another form of killing, and killing is not a sustainable rodent-pest control strategy,” Mayer said. “From that standpoint, dry ice is not particularly a big winner. We’ve been killing rats for centuries, and we still have the problem.”
Follow USA TODAY Chicago correspondent Aamer Madhani on Twitter: @AamerISmad
|
fa04b1aeec59c174ada565939e6381ff
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/04/deadliest-nightclub-fires-us-history/94955170/
|
Deadliest nightclub fires in U.S. history
|
Deadliest nightclub fires in U.S. history
At least 24 people were killed in Oakland after a massive fire erupted during a dance party Friday night in a warehouse and artist collective. As authorities search the rubble of the converted party space, expecting the death toll to climb, here's a look at the deadliest U.S. nightclub fires:
Death toll rises to 33 in Oakland warehouse fire
Feb, 20, 2003 — The Station nightclub, Warwick, R.I.: 100 dead; more than 200 injured. Fireworks ignited flammable sound insulation during a show by the the rock band Great White and engulfed the club with smoke and flames.
March 25, 1990 — Happy Land nightclub, New York: 87 dead. A disgruntled ex-boyfriend doused the club with gasoline while his girlfriend was inside. The Bronx club's only exit was set ablaze and the doors jammed shut, trapping people inside.
May 28, 1977 — Beverly Hills Supper Club, Southgate, Ky.: 165 dead, more than 200 injured. A Memorial Day fire broke out in an overcrowded club with poor safety standards.
Death toll rises to 33 in Oakland warehouse fire
June 30, 1974 — Gulliver's nightclub, Port Chester, N.Y.: 24 dead. An arsonist set the club on fire in an attempt to cover up a burglary at a next-door bowling alley.
June 24, 1973 — UpStairs Lounge, New Orleans: 32 dead. This unsolved arson attack on a gay bar had been the worst attack on a U.S. gay bar until the Orlando shooting massacre in June left 49 people dead.
Nov. 28, 1942 — Cocoanut Grove, Boston: 492 dead. This was the deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history. The tragedy at one of the top clubs in the post-Prohibition era prompted increased safety standards at bars, such as sprinklers and accessible exits.
April 23, 1940 — Rhythm Club, Natchez, Miss.: 209 dead. Spanish moss that lined the dance hall was engulfed in flames. The windows had been boarded up to prevent people from sneaking into the club.
Sept. 20, 1929 — Study Club, Detroit: 22 dead. Fire broke out at a speakeasy.
Contributing: The Associated Press
|
75fe646a6b82971cdcf4b89ee540cf9c
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/04/oakland-warehouse-fire-ghost-ship/94950350/
|
Death toll rises to 33 in Oakland warehouse fire
|
Death toll rises to 33 in Oakland warehouse fire
OAKLAND — The death toll rose to 33 Sunday and could still climb after a massive weekend fire roared through this city's "Ghost Ship," a warehouse-turned-artist collective and popular party space.
Mayor Libby Schaaf said Alameda County District Attorney Nancy E. O’Malley had activated a criminal investigation team and that investigators were on the scene of the fire.
Schaaf said officials had delivered “the unacceptable and horrific news of losing a loved one” to seven families, and that the city would be releasing the names of the deceased “promptly.”
“It is with so much grief and so much compassion that we as your city family share with you this horrific news," she said.
Oakland's 'Ghost Ship' warehouse had known safety concerns
County Sheriff's Office spokesman Ray Kelly said about 35% to 40% of the building had been searched since Friday night's blaze, so a final death toll could be days away.
"The number will go up," Kelly said Sunday. "Firefighters are tired, exhausted. This is very emotional."
He said the victims include "minors," possibly as young as 17 years old. He added that some of the victims hailed from Europe and Asia.
Kelly also said one of the victims, whom he didn't identify, was the son of a county sheriff's deputy.
Asked about criminal charges in the blaze, Schaaf said engaging O'Malley's criminal investigation team "allows a criminal investigation to be conducted — I believe it is a bit premature and I am not authorized to make that announcement. Only the district attorney is allowed to make the announcement of criminal charges.”
She added, "It is far too early for us to have any suspicions about what caused this fire, and that is something that we will be sharing with you in the coming days.”
The city later Sunday said eight victims had been identified. One was a 17-year-old whose name was not released, but city officials identified the others as:
The fire broke out during an electronic music party at the warehouse, part of which had been converted to makeshift art studios and living areas. The party apparently took place in a large open space on the second floor accessible by a single wooden staircase.
Melinda Drayton, Oakland Fire Department battalion chief, said firefighters breached a wall overnight and were attempting to systematically and safely remove debris "bucket by bucket" from the battered building. She said firefighters had not yet reached the location where the fire began, and investigators were far from determining the cause of the blaze.
As Oakland fire spread, partygoer thought: 'This is probably contained’
"This will be a long and arduous process," she said. "We want to make sure we are respecting the victims and their families and ensuring our firefighters' safety."
The building sits in Fruitvale, a neighborhood with a large Latino population a few miles southeast of downtown. Yellow police tape a block from the building kept the public away. The charred remains of the top of the building were visible, and work crews could be seen dragging out debris.
Chris Nechodom, 30, a photographer and filmmaker from Richmond, Calif., was visiting a friend on the first floor of the warehouse when the fire started. He told USA TODAY he thought at first it might be coming from a fog machine at the party above. But soon he was shouting so people fleeing the fire could follow his voice toward the exit.
Finally, he had inhaled so much smoke he had to go outside.
"I'm just praying and thanking the higher power that I made it out," he said.
Several therapy dogs and their handlers were in the area Sunday to comfort families and first responders. Constance Barich, 61, visited with Rosie, a 2-year-old English Labrador. Barich, an artist in the neighborhood for 30 years, said she has lived in some of the warehouses.
"There are hundreds and hundreds of artists in this neighborhood," she told USA TODAY. "If it looks like someone is living there, they are."
Phillip Rhodes and his wife Pam, members of the rapid response team for Phil Graham Ministries, drove from Tracy, Calif.
"We are here to provide emotional and spiritual care to any and all," Phillip Rhodes said.
The electronic-music party featured Golden Donna, the stage name for Wisconsin musician Joel Shanahan. Shanahan told the Madison, Wis., alternative weekly Isthmus that he was alive but "far from OK" after the tragedy.
Shanahan said he watched helplessly from across the street as the building burned. He said he decided to cut short his West Coast tour.
“I’ll be home soon,” he told the weekly. “My heart is just broken.”
The Oakland Fire Department brought in tractors, bulldozers, trucks and a crane to breach the labyrinth of charred wood and twisted wires. The building has partially collapsed, making it perilous for emergency responders.
Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed said it took about five hours to douse the blaze. The building, which did not appear to have sprinklers, also did not have clear exit path, she said.
City officials have confirmed that building authorities had opened an investigation just last month into complaints about the safety of the structure. That inquiry was ongoing when the fire struck.
Planning and Building Director Darin Ranelletti said the building's owners had no permits to hold parties or create living spaces in the building. He said a department inspector had attempted to enter the building last month while responding to a complaint but was unable to gain access.
Fernando Valenzuela, who graduated from a nearby high school and now has an insurance business in the neighborhood, said the building always scared him. He said he's frustrated the city ignores such places that are not up to code.
"This is a bunch of kids in a flat. Kids don't know — they think they are immortal," he said.
Speaking to reporters Sunday afternoon, city and county officials said the enormity of the loss in the fire was overwhelming.
Kelly, the sheriff's office spokesman said: “When we started this investigation, if you would have told us that we would have 33 victims, we wouldn’t have believed you. I don’t know how many more people are left in there. We have no idea — we have no idea how many people were in that building that night. We don’t even know how many people got out of that building.”
Mayor Schaaf said, "You have to understand that the scope of this tragedy is tremendous."
Bacon reported from McLean, Va. Contributing: Elizabeth Weise, Greg Toppo, USA TODAY, and the Associated Press.
|
161efcacfa7b7c10e5650a49b4577398
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/07/watch-live-75th-anniversary-attack-pearl-harbor/95085236/
|
Watch: 75th anniversary of attack on Pearl Harbor
|
Watch: 75th anniversary of attack on Pearl Harbor
The U.S. Navy commemorates the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor Wednesday. A moment of silence marked the local time — 7:55 a.m. Dec. 7, 1941 — when the first Japanese planes filled the skies over the harbor where most of the Navy’s Pacific battleships were moored. You can watch the ceremony at the top of this page.
The USA TODAY Network is remembering the 75th anniversary of the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor with exclusive essays, personal recollections from survivors, historical photos and virtual reality video. See our complete coverage here:
Pearl Harbor: Complete coverage of 75th anniversary of attack
Dive to wreckage of WWII Japanese mini submarines near Pearl Harbor:
|
e90b2927c22518f411ade1c70adf608e
|
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/12/concerned-muslim-women-rethinking-hijab/95351734/
|
When wearing a hijab becomes too dangerous
|
When wearing a hijab becomes too dangerous
Melissa Grajek was subjected to all kinds of taunts for wearing the hijab, but an incident at Discovery Lake in San Marcos, Calif., sealed the deal.
Her 1-year-old son was playing with another boy when an irate father saw her and whisked his son away, telling Grajek: “I can’t wait until Trump is president because he’ll send you back to where you came from.”
The man then scooped up a handful of wood chips and threw them at Grajek’s son.
At that moment, Grajek thought, enough was enough. She decided to take off her head covering.
“I had been on the fence regarding hijab, but that incident made it clear my religious choices could be putting my son at risk,” she said.
Grajek’s decision to doff the hijab follows reports of assaults against Muslim women.
Last week, Ilhan Omar, a newly elected Minneapolis state representative, was leaving the White House, where she discussed policy initiatives, when a cab driver threatened to yank her hijab while shouting expletives and calling her “ISIS.”
A day earlier, a man pushed a New York City transit worker down a staircase at Grand Central Terminal, yelling, “You’re a terrorist, go back to your own country!”
And two weeks ago in Brooklyn, another man threatened an off-duty police officer with his pit bull, telling her and her son to “go back to your country.”
All three women were wearing hijabs.
Assaults or intimidation of Muslims had been steadily rising well before the election, but they became more common during the divisive campaign of President-elect Donald Trump, who called for a ban on Muslim immigrants and proposed a registry for U.S. Muslims.
A Pew Research Center analysis of hate crimes statistics from the FBI shows that the number of physical assaults against Muslims reached 9/11-era levels last year. The number of anti-Muslim intimidation crimes — defined as threatening bodily harm — also rose.
Now some imams across the country are saying it’s OK to take the hijab off, at least temporarily.
Imam Abdullah Antepli recently asked a group of women at the Islamic Association of Raleigh (N.C.) how many of them felt unsafe in public.
Dozens of hands shot up.
He then told them the extraordinary circumstances under which Muslim Americans now live may require extraordinary measures — including taking off the hijab, at least for a while.
George Takei: Trump's Muslim registry is 'prelude to internment'
“I’m not trying to be alarmist,” said Antepli, the chief representative of Muslim affairs at Duke University. “But the nation is being sucked into a combustible mix. We have to think unconventionally.”
Antepli’s call to remove the hijab, which he repeated at a mosque in Cary and in home gatherings of Muslims in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, is rare but not unheard of.
In Texas, Imam Omar Suleiman, president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research and resident scholar at the Valley Ranch Islamic Center in Irving, said women’s fears should be taken seriously.
“It’s important to give our women support and validate the fear they’re feeling,” Suleiman said. “Fear isn’t quantifiable; it’s to the person’s own experience.”
While Suleiman doesn’t foresee a blanket call to abandon the head scarf, he advises women to consider practical measures, such as wearing a hoodie instead of a hijab if they feel like they may be in danger.
For many Muslim women, the head covering is a quintessential mark of their identity — much as the kippa or yarmulke is a customary requirement for Orthodox and some Conservative Jewish men.
While often understood as a symbol of modesty and privacy, the hijab is much more for those Muslim women who choose to wear it. They view it alternately as a sign of religious devotion, discipline, freedom from Western expectations or simply a way to be in a continuous state of prayer.
Many Muslim women would never think of giving it up, even if it means being targeted.
“This is a difficult time,” acknowledged Khalilah Sabra, a Raleigh Muslim activist who works for the Muslim American Society’s Immigrant Justice Center. Just last month, a man spit in her face as she descended the stairs of the Garfield, N.J., Municipal Court, where she was testifying in a domestic violence dispute. “I had to pause and decide do I fight or let it go?”
Sabra decided to buck up and carry on. “We have to stand up for our religious rights and encourage women to stand their ground,” she said.
Others, however, are taking security measures.
FBI: Hate crimes targeting Muslims up 67% in 2015
On Nov. 9, when New York’s Muslim Community Network posted a notice on Facebook about a self-defense workshop, leaders expected 50 or 60 women would respond. Within hours, 2,700 women had signed up.
Some Muslim women are buying pepper spray, taking firearms training or applying for concealed carry permits.
And quietly, some Muslim women are uncovering their hair.
“One of the reasons women are encouraged to dress modestly is for their protection,” said Engy Abdelkader, senior fellow and adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. “Once that purpose is no longer served, there’s an argument that it becomes a matter of necessity to remove it.”
Trump on post-election harassment, hate crimes: 'Stop it'
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.