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Gibson stopped all 37 shots he faced as Minnesota peppered the Ducks net in all three periods, but was shut out at home for just the second time this season. Joseph Cramarossa had the lone goal for the Ducks (30-18-10), while Gibson recorded his fourth shutout of the season.
The Wild (37-13-6) had won their previous two meetings of the season vs. Anaheim, but fell behind early and were frustrated by Gibson throughout. Minnesota failed to score on five power plays in the game, coming within an inch of scoring when a long-range slap shot by defenseman Christian Folin hit the inside of the right post, sailed through the crease and to the side boards.
Minnesota goalie Devan Dubnyk had 22 saves in the loss.
The Ducks took a lead less than five minutes into the game when Cramarossa went hard to the net and was rewarded. Streaking down the right side, Corey Perry took a sharp angle shot that Dubnyk stopped, but produced a rebound he couldn't control. Cramarossa, who'd gotten to the top of the crease, slapped the loose puck home before the goalie could react. It was Cramarossa's first goal in more than a month.
Minnesota had the first two power plays of the game and out-shot Anaheim 13-8 in the opening period, but could not solve Gibson.
The Wild got two more power plays in the second period, and were thoroughly dominant throughout, out-shooting the Ducks 16-4. But Gibson repeatedly thwarted the Minnesota scoring chances.
It was the first shutout in more than a month for Gibson, who blanked Dallas on Jan. 10, and the win allowed Anaheim to close its six-game road trip with a 2-3-1 mark.
Anaheim lost top-line left winger Antoine Vermette with 12:27 to play in the third period after he was ejected for slashing linesman Shandor Alphonso.
NOTES: The Wild assigned F Tyler Graovac to Iowa of the American Hockey League after he cleared waivers. In 45 games with the NHL club this season, he has six goals. With his 6-foot-5 frame, there was some thought that he might be claimed by another team this close to the trade deadline but instead headed back to the minors. ... Ducks RW Jared Boll was a healthy scratch for the fourth time in Anaheim's last seven games. He has two assists in 38 games this season. ... Minnesota, which is in the midst of a franchise-record eight-game homestand, will next host the Dallas Stars on Thursday. Anaheim, which wrapped up a five-game trip on Tuesday, hosts the Florida Panthers on Friday. ... There was some speculation that Ducks D Sami Vatanen could return to the lineup after missing the previous four games with a lower-body injury, but he was scratched again. |
The event marked the 60th anniversary of the landing of the Granma yacht which brought the Castro brothers and their bearded rebels from Mexico to Cuba to start their revolution against a U.S.-backed dictatorship.
Troops wielding automatic rifles marched in lock step behind a replica of the Granma on Monday, followed by a sea of banner- and flag-waving Cubans, many bussed in and organized through their workplaces and neighborhoods.
"This is an important message of unity and strength," said Rene Lazo, 66, who, like most, got up well before the crack of dawn to participate in the parade.
"This is going to be a difficult year but we will keep working hard to bring our people forwards".
Communist-ruled Cuba fell into an economic recession in the second half of last year, its first since the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter century ago, as its strategic ally Venezuela floundered.
Meanwhile its historic detente with the United States came under threat with the election of Donald Trump as President. Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has said he would unravel attempts to normalize relations unless he gets a “better deal".
All this is taking place as Cuba is also coming to terms with the loss of its revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro. While "El Comandante" had handed the presidency over to his younger brother Raul in 2008, he remained a key figurehead.
Some of those marching held up images of Castro or banners reading "We are Fidel". While the parade normally takes place every five years on Dec. 2, it was postponed a month due to his death in late November.
"He may not be present physically but he is in all our hearts," said Natalia Gonzales, who had painted "I am Fidel" on the foreheads of her three grandchildren.
Raul Castro and his family watched and waved at those marching from the foot of the towering monument to independence hero Jose Marti in the center of the square.
The mood on Monday was of defiance although many Cubans said they hoped there would not be a return of Cold War-era politics.
"We are braced for conflict with the USA, we always have been," said 70-year-old Marcial Garcia. "But I hope Trump will instead follow the path ... towards normalization."
Trump's threat to gradual and still fragile detente could not come at a worse time for Cuba.
A tourism boom in part sparked by looser travel restrictions on Americans failed last year to offset dwindling oil shipments from Venezuela and less cash for Cuban doctors and other professionals working overseas.
"Everything is just very uncertain at the moment, so there's more propaganda," said Antonio Sosa, 50, an engineer who chose not to attend the parade. "You don't see news on the news broadcast anymore, just speeches Fidel gave 30 years ago." |
Jeremy Kessler, 33, surrendered just before noon at his home in Crosby, where officers had been stationed since 3 a.m. after a 911 caller reported multiple gunshots coming from the house.
No one was injured, and Kessler was taken into custody without incident, Chief Deputy Rob Melby of the Divide County Sheriff’s Office said.
Official charges have yet to be filed by the Divide County State’s Attorney’s Office.
As of Tuesday afternoon, it was still unclear why Keller, who was alone in his house in northwest Crosby, allegedly began firing.
A neighbor said gunshots continued throughout the early morning hours after six shots were heard initially, along with someone yelling.
“He emptied a full mag,” Huntter Lacey, who lives next door to Kessler, said.
Police issued an emergency notification to surrounding residents, but did not order evacuations, Melby said.
“We told them to shelter in place,” he said.
Both the elementary and high school in Crosby were put on lockdown as well, according to Divide County School Superintendent Sherlock Hirning. The alert was lifted around 11:15 a.m. when police notified administrators that Kessler was in custody.
The incident prompted a response from the U.S. Border Patrol, the North Dakota Highway Patrol, the Burke County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, several deputies from the Williams County Sheriff’s Office and members of the Minot SWAT team, who surrounded the home before Kessler came out.
Investigators from the Divide County Sheriff’s Office and the Bureau of Criminal Investigation spent hours Tuesday afternoon combing through the small house and inspecting the surrounding property, including the exterior of other houses nearby.
Agents removed a number of rifles from the residence, along with what appeared to be ammunition boxes. |
The proposed training, which would have been provided by volunteers at no cost to the state, would occur during orientation for legislators at the beginning of each session.
The bill was not prompted by the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, but several who testified in support of the training said better cultural understanding could have prevented some of the conflicts that arose during the protests.
The Senate Government and Veterans Affairs Committee amended the bill to a legislative management study to consider the need for cultural competency training for legislators, other elected and appointed officials and state employees.
Sen. Shawn Vedaa, R-Velva, a member of the committee, said Tuesday, Feb. 14, the bill was amended to a study because several committee members felt requiring the training "was overstepping legislation."
Sen. Dick Dever, R-Bismarck, spoke in favor of the bill as a way to repair relationships that have been strained during the pipeline protests.
"I think there have been damages done to the relationships between our general population and the population south of here through recent events," Dever said.
The Senate voted to amend the bill to a study, but ultimately the bill failed in a 20-26 vote on Tuesday.
Sen. Richard Marcellais, D-Belcourt, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and one of the bill's sponsors, said he is disappointed with the vote.
"It's not going to improve the communications or relations between the state and tribes," he said.
Marcellais sponsored similar legislation in 2009 that also failed in the Senate with a similar vote. |
The Knights received goals from 10 different players in cruising to a 16-1 win over Grafton-Park River in the East Region tournament quarterfinals at Purpur Arena.
No. 1 Central improved to 22-0 and will play No. 4 Devils Lake in the semifinals Friday at 6 p.m. at Purpur.
"We moved the puck well and shared the load," Central coach Grant Paranica said. "Throughout the lineup, everybody played quite well."
Central senior Grant Johnson, the state's leading scorer, led the way with a six-point night. He had three goals and three assists, despite playing limited minutes late in the game with the score out of hand.
Boe Bjorge, Cam Olstad, Lucas Kanta and Zachary Murphy all had two goals for the Knights, while Judd Caulfield, Hunter Moreland, Cole Hanson, Parker Stroh (first varsity goal) and Mitch Idalski all scored once.
Central defenders Brock Reller and Tate Steffan each had three assists.
"We played really well, passing the puck and not being selfish," Reller said. "We can't get complacent now. We have to play our game, pass the puck and move our feet."
Central outscored the Spoilers 35-2 in three meetings this season.
Fourteen different Knights figured into the scoring. Central scored more goals in a game than it has in at least 10 years.
"From our third and fourth line, we logged quite a bit of minutes," Paranica said. "They seemed to manage and actually create opportunities no matter who we played them against."
Central led 7-1 after one period, with Grafton-Park River's lone goal coming from Wyatt Wardner, who made it 2-1 at 4 minutes, 39 seconds of the first period.
The Knights led 12-1 after two periods and saw running time throughout the third period.
The Spoilers, who dropped to 4-18 this season, will play No. 5 Fargo South/Shanley at noon on Friday in a tournament loser-out game at Purpur. |
Let freedom ring, in the nooks and crannies of the administrative state: One day a year—Lemonade Day—children in Austin, Texas, can sell the stuff without spending $460 on various fees, licenses and permits.
Twelve-year olds in a Tampa middle school, learning about "how much privilege" they have, were asked if they were "Cisgendered," "Transgendered" or "Genderqueer." Two years after Emma was the most common name given to baby American girls, the trend was toward supposedly gender-neutral baby names (e.g., Lincoln, Max, Arlo) lest the child feel enslaved to stereotypes. A New Jersey mother says a police officer interrogated her 9-year-old son after he was suspected of a racial slur when he talked about brownies, the baked good.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pondered whether a worker committed racial harassment by wearing a cap emblazoned with the Gadsden flag (depicting a coiled rattlesnake, with the words "Don't Tread on Me"). A University of Iowa professor complained that the Hawkeyes' mascot Herky, a fierce bird, is "conveying an invitation to aggressivity and even violence" that is discordant with the "all accepting, nondiscriminatory messages we are trying to convey."
As President's Day approached, San Diego advised city workers to use "bias-free language" by avoiding the phrase "Founding Fathers." A National Park Service employee giving guided tours to Independence Hall in Philadelphia told tourists that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were produced by "class elites who were just out to protect their privileged status." The employee praised herself for her "bravery."
The NBA, which plays preseason games in China, home of forced abortions and organ harvests, moved its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte because of North Carolina's law stipulating that transgender individuals should use bathrooms appropriate to their physiology.
The New York Times reported the downside of humanity's mastery of fire: "Figuring out how to make fire was no doubt an evolutionary boon to our ancestors. But it may have led to our smoking habit." Facing a budget shortfall in 2010, New York's Legislature raised the cigarette tax $1.60 to $4.35 per pack, expecting, illogically, that it would discourage smoking and raise $290 million annually. By 2016, cigarette revenues had fallen 25 percent, and smuggled cigarettes held 58 percent of the New York market.
By 2016, six years after the president's wife agitated for federal guidelines limiting sodium, sugar, fats and calories in school lunches, 1.4 million students had exited the National School Lunch Program, and students had a robust black market in salt and sugar. A tweet with the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama said, "The first lady can have a personal chef, but I can't have two packets of ketchup?"
After Connecticut imposed its fifth tax increase since 2011, General Electric moved its headquarters from there to Boston. CKE Restaurants includes the Carl's Jr. chain, which was founded in California and ignited the fast-food industry. CKE announced that it was moving its headquarters from California (highest income tax rate: 13 percent) to Tennessee (highest income tax rate: zero).
Congress considered bills to prevent the IRS from hiring or retaining people delinquent in their tax payments. Unions in New York and California lobbied for exemption from the $15 minimum wage they lobbied for. It was splendidly appropriate that when Cuba buried the architect of its ramshackle socialism, the vehicle carrying Castro's ashes broke down and had to be pushed by soldiers.
"Thou swell, thou witty, thou sweet, thou grand" were not lyrics that many Americans sang about either presidential candidate, but one of them had to win, so as you steel yourself for 2017, remember H.L. Mencken's timeless wisdom: A martini is "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet."
Will writes for the Washington Post. Readers can reach him at georgewill@washpost.com. |
Tribal lawyers filed for a summary judgement on the permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers following an executive order by President Donald Trump that expedited the 1,172-mile crude oil pipeline's approval.
The Tribe said it is seeking the judgement in hopes of getting a decision before the pipeline can go into operation.
The corps issued the final easement allowing the pipeline to be constructed under the Missouri River, half a mile upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, on Feb. 8, reversing an earlier decision to withhold the easement while the agency completed an environmental impact statement.
"In this arbitrary and capricious reversal of course, the Trump Administration is circumventing the law: wholly disregarding the treaty rights of the Standing Rock Sioux and ignoring the legally required environmental review. It isn't the 1800s anymore — the U.S. government must keep its promises to the Standing Rock Sioux and reject rather than embrace dangerous projects that undercut treaties," Jan Hasselman, the Earthjustice attorney who is representing the Tribe in its challenges against the pipeline, said in a statement.
The action comes on the heels of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who denied a request for a temporary restraining order to halt pipeline construction while the legal battle plays out. |
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a branch of the Interior Department, in September proposed bringing the bee under federal safeguards.
The rule formalizing the listing of the vanishing pollinator, once widely found in the upper Midwest and Northeastern United States, was published in the Federal Register on Jan. 11 and was to take effect last Friday.
The Natural Resources Defense Council said the listing has been delayed until March 21 as part of a broader freeze ordered by Trump's White House on rules issued by the prior administration aimed at protecting public health and the environment.
The group argued in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that U.S. wildlife managers had violated the law by abruptly suspending the bumble bee listing without public notice or comment. They said the rule technically became final when it was published in the Federal Register.
The lawsuit seeks to have a judge declare that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acted unlawfully and to order the agency to rescind the rule delaying the bumble bee's listing.
"The science is clear—this species is headed toward extinction, and soon. There is no legitimate reason to delay federal protections," Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney Rebecca Riley said in a statement.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could not immediately be reached for comment.
Bumble bees pollinate wildflowers and about a third of U.S. crops, from blueberries to tomatoes, according to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
The bee's population and range have declined by more than 90 percent since the late 1990s due to disease, pesticides, climate change and habitat loss, according to wildlife officials.
The insect is one of 47 varieties of native bumble bees in the United States and Canada, more than a quarter of which face the risk of extinction, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
In September, seven varieties of yellow-faced bees in Hawaii became the first such insects to be added to the U.S. list of endangered species because of losses due to habitat destruction, wildfires and the invasion of nonnative plants and insects. |
She had overdosed. Someone had brought her to the clinic in the middle of the night on Feb. 2, authorities said, but when the clinic was closed, whoever brought her abandoned the car and left. They didn't call 911.
This month, the Grand Forks Police Department put out a reminder that those using and possessing drugs who are present at the time of an overdose will not be prosecuted if they call and cooperate with first responders.
In North Dakota and Minnesota, Good Samaritan laws are on the books that give immunity to those who call in drug overdoses if the caller remains on scene until first responders arrive and cooperate with medical services and law enforcement. The person must be in need of emergency medical services. Up to three people can be granted immunity.
The law also applies to people overdosing from alcohol consumption.
"We want people to be focused on saving a life," said Lt. Jeremy Moe with the special resource bureau.
In 2016, Grand Forks Police responded to 28 calls for overdoses. Three of them were fatal.
State Sen. Howard Anderson Jr., R-Turtle Lake, was a sponsor of the Good Samaritan laws that passed in North Dakota in 2015. The former director of the North Dakota Board of Pharmacy, Anderson said he wanted to sponsor the law to give people a better chance to survive. Information provided by companions can be key to successful care.
"It's hard to find out what they took or what the situation is, so by the time doctors get a chance to figure out what it is, it's too late," Anderson said.
In the process of passing the law, legislators heard testimony from a man whose companions had abandoned him in a dumpster, thinking he'd overdosed, Anderson said.
But too few people know about the law, Anderson said. He also believes law enforcement have been overzealous in pressing charges against people, despite the law.
"They're using the Good Samaritan laws as an excuse to charge people because, obviously, if I gave you drugs, then I'm guilty of providing them for you. It's like a sale even if I gave it to you free," he said. "So we need a little better education with police. If you're trying to save somebody's life for crying out loud, back off a little bit. Catch the crook the next time."
Anderson said users speak to one another, and if law enforcement is too aggressive, it might deter people from calling for help.
Grand Forks Police said they were not aware of any specific incidents in town where immunity had been granted based on the Good Samaritan laws.
Forum News Service contributed to this article. |
It described the Reina nightclub, where many foreigners as well as Turks were killed, as a gathering point for Christians celebrating their "apostate holiday". The attack, it said, was revenge for Turkish military involvement in Syria.
"The apostate Turkish government should know that the blood of Muslims shed with airplanes and artillery fire will, with God's permission, ignite a fire in their own land," the Islamic State declaration said.
There was no immediate comment from Turkish officials.
The jihadist group has been blamed for at least half a dozen attacks on civilian targets in Turkey over the past 18 months; but, other than assassinations, this is the first time it has directly claimed any of them. It made the statement on one of its Telegram channels, a method used after attacks elsewhere.
NATO member Turkey is part of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State and launched an incursion into neighboring Syria in August to drive the radical Sunni militants from its borders, sending in tanks and special forces backed by fighter jets.
Nationals of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Morocco, Libya, Israel, India, Canada, a Turkish-Belgian dual citizen and a Franco-Tunisian woman were among those killed at the nightclub on the shores of the Bosphorus waterway. Twenty-five of the dead were foreigners, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.
All of those killed died from gunshot wounds, some of them shot at a very close distance or even point-blank range, according to a forensics report quoted by Milliyet newspaper.
Police distributed a hazy black-and-white photo of the alleged gunman taken from security footage. State broadcaster TRT Haber said eight people had been detained in Istanbul.
The authorities believe the attacker may be from a Central Asian nation and suspect he had links to Islamic State, the Hurriyet newspaper said. It said he may be from the same cell responsible for a gun-and-bomb attack on Istanbul's main airport in June, in which 45 people were killed and hundreds wounded.
The attack at Reina, popular with Turkish celebrities and wealthy visitors, shook Turkey as it tries to recover from a failed July coup and a series of deadly bombings, some blamed on Islamic State, others claimed by Kurdish militants.
Around 600 people were thought to be inside when the gunman shot dead a policeman and civilian at the door, forcing his way in then opening fire with an automatic assault rifle. Witnesses said he shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest).
Some at the exclusive club jumped into the Bosphorus after the attacker opened fire at random just over an hour into the new year. Witnesses described how he shot the wounded as they lay on the ground.
Kalashnikov in suitcast
The attacker was believed to have taken a taxi from the southern Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul and, because of the busy traffic, got out and walked the last four minutes to the entrance of the nightclub, newspaper Haberturk said.
He pulled his Kalashnikov rifle from a suitcase at the side of the road, opened fire on those at the door, then threw two hand grenades after entering, Haberturk said, without citing its sources. It said six empty magazines were found at the scene and that he was estimated to have fired at least 180 bullets.
Security services had been on alert across Europe for new year celebrations following an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin that killed 12 people. Only days ago, an online message from a pro-Islamic State group called for attacks by "lone wolves" on "celebrations, gatherings and clubs".
In a statement hours after the shooting, President Tayyip Erdogan said such attacks aimed to create chaos and destabilize the country.
Four months into its operation in Syria, the Turkish army and the rebels it backs are besieging the Islamic State-held town of al-Bab. Erdogan has said he wants them to continue to Raqqa, the jihadists' Syrian stronghold.
Turkey has also been cracking down on Islamic State networks at home. In counter-terrorism operations between Dec 26-Jan 2, Turkish police detained 147 people over links to the group and formally arrested 25 of them, the interior ministry said.
The New Year's Day attack came five months after a failed military coup, in which more than 240 people were killed, many of them in Istanbul, as rogue soldiers commandeered tanks and fighter jets in a bid to seize power.
More than 100,000 people, including soldiers and police officers, have been sacked or suspended in a subsequent crackdown ordered by Erdogan, raising concern both about civic rights and the effectiveness of Turkey's security apparatus. |
The SMHS left the space over the course of last summer to move into a brand-new facility just a few blocks away. Since then, the administrative and advising offices of the UND College of Arts and Sciences have been moving their operations into the building.
The plan to renovate the old SMHS would help clear the way for the consolidation of additional departments in the basement, first and second floors of the old SMHS. Some of the functions that would move over now are housed in buildings slated to be taken offline by the university.
As proposed to the SBHE, the renovations would be funded by $1.3 million in extraordinary repair funding and $2 million in appropriated funds.
An SBHE summary of the university's proposal states UND indicated there is a "high probability" that digital classrooms will be built while the renovations are taking place. The summary states the board would not consider approval of additional classroom space until prior approval of the university's strategic plan, along with the portion of a master plan which identifies facility needs for programming.
The request from UND was heard Tuesday by the board's budget and finance committee.
North Dakota University System communications director Billie Jo Lorius said the committee has asked UND for additional information. Lorius said the committee took no specific action on the proposal beyond passing it along to be heard by the board at its next full meeting.
Other news
• UND's Pride of the North marching band has met its fundraising goal of $88,000, set in November. The funds were donated by 232 alumni, friends and loved ones and will be used to purchase new uniforms for the fall of 2017.
• The University of Minnesota-Crookston will host the founder and CEO of Extreme Sandbox, Randy Stenger, at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Peterson Classroom of Heritage Hall. A question and answer session and refreshments will follow the presentation.
• The UND Music Department will host a senior trombone recital for Sean Sprague at 1 p.m. Sunday in the Hughes Fine Arts Center. The recital is free, and all are welcome.
• The UND Music Department will host a recital for the UND Guitar Studio at 8 p.m. Wednesday in the Hughes Fine Arts Center. The event is free and open to the public. |
The Roughriders were leading only 32-29 with 13:04 remaining after Aaron Knutson scored from close range for Central. But Red River broke the game open when the Riders followed with a decisive 21-2 run.
"It was getting a little frustrating,'' Red River junior Jordan Polynice said of the Riders' early scoring problems. "We had open shots. They just weren't falling.
"But we went to the press and started running. That's when we're at our best, in a fast-paced game.''
Polynice had 10 of his game-high 22 points in the run, in which the Riders poured in the 21 points in a 4:35 span to build a 53-31 advantage.
Pierson Painter had a 3-point basket in the big spurt; otherwise, it was Red River scoring by attacking the basket. And they picked up eight points off turnovers.
"We haven't had many first halves like that,'' said Red River coach Kirby Krefting, whose team led 24-22 at halftime. "Can you come out any flatter than we did? We were settling for jump shots and giving Central too many good looks.
"Our defense got us going. We got some easy baskets and started attacking the basket.''
In the second half, Cody Robertson and Tyler Enerson each had three steals and Polynice blocked a pair of shots to highlight the defense.
Robertson added 11 points for the 12-7 Roughriders, while Painter was a spark off the bench with eight points.
Central got a short-lived spark when Jacob Ohnstad hit a long trey at the buzzer to end the first half, pulling the Knights within 24-22. But the Knights couldn't match the pace Red River set in the second half.
"Red River is a good offensive team,'' Central coach Dan Carlson said. "We expected them to make a run at some point. And we couldn't score in that run to slow them down. That's what hurt. We've had a hard time scoring this year.''
Knutson had 12 points and Ohnstad 10 to lead the 0-19 Knights. Ohnstad finished with nine rebounds, one shy of a double double. |
Common sense suggests that when you've got a big goal, like committing to a new workout routine, eating better, losing weight, or perhaps writing a book or starting a business, you should tell as many people as possible.
After all, if lots of friends know about your goal, you'll be motivated to work harder because you don't want to disappoint yourself or your community.
Plus, your friends will check in with you, and push you, and hold you accountable so that you don't quit on yourself. Right?
Well... maybe not.
In his 3-minute TED Talk, Derek Sivers shares a surprising idea: Telling people about your goal makes it less likely to happen.
Why is this?
As Derek explains, some researchers think it has something to do with the power of "social acknowledgment."
For example, let's say you announce to your best friend: "I'm going to train for 5K race! This year, I'm really doing it!"
Your friend responds by saying: "Congratulations! What a great goal. You can do it. I'm so proud of you."
As you listen to your friend's encouragement, praise and acknowledgment, you feel really great! You feel accepted, appreciated and full of warm, fuzzy feelings.
But there's a catch: once your body is flooded with those types of warm feelings, you're actually less motivated to "do the hard work" that's necessary to reach your goal.
In a sense, your brain has been "tricked" into thinking you're already "done." That's why telling people about your goals can be counter-productive. It gives you a "premature sense of completeness." Or so the theory goes.
My personal opinion: It really depends on your personality and on the type of goal you're trying to achieve.
If your goal is to get a new job, for example, then it's important to tell lots of people, because the people in your professional network can point you towards possible job opportunities, write letters of recommendation and open all kinds of doors for you. You'll get farther and faster if you involve your community.
But in other instances, zipping your lips might be a good idea.
If you've been telling your friends, "I'm going to write a book!" for 10 years in a row, but you're making zero progress, then maybe you could try changing your approach. Zip your lips and start writing in secret. Maybe you'll find more success if you take the no-talking, action-only approach.
My personal goal was to crank out several more articles and get them polished and queued up for publication so that I don't have to worry about writing over the winter holiday break.
But instead, I got sidelined by a winter virus.
So, maybe I shouldn't have said that. |
Gardenhire, 59, will travel back to Minnesota shortly before mid-April surgery, but the cancer was caught early and the prognosis is good for a full recovery.
Gardenhire told the Arizona Republic that he expects to return roughly six weeks after surgery but added on a conference call with reporters that he still must undergo additional tests to make sure the cancer hasn’t spread.
“I don’t think anybody can say 100 percent of anything when you’re dealing with cancer,” Gardenhire said. “In talking with the doctors, they’re been pretty optimistic. I feel pretty confident, and they do too, that we’re going to go in there and take this thing out.”
The second-winningest manager in Twins history, Gardenhire spent last season as a special assistant under former Twins general manager Terry Ryan, himself treated for cancer in 2014. Gardenhire managed the Twins to six division titles in his 13-year run from 2002-14.
Even after getting fired after the 2014 season, Gardenhire continued to undergo annual physicals with Twins internist Dr. Vijay Eyunni. It was during a recent exam that Eyunni noticed Gardenhire’s elevated PSA levels and ordered more tests, which came back positive for prostate cancer.
“Not only is Dr. Vijay my doctor, he’s a very good friend,” Gardenhire said. “He wouldn’t let me go without getting a physical. If I didn’t show up when the rest of the guys do in January every year, he calls us and says, ‘Get in here.’ I tip my hat to him because he’s done that for a lot of people, not just me.”
Toby Gardenhire, the manager’s son, was recently hired to a full-time coaching role with the Gulf Coast League Twins after serving in a part-time capacity last season. The younger Gardenhire spent the past five seasons as head baseball coach at Wisconsin-Stout.
“That’s bad news,” Twins closer Glen Perkins said of Ron Gardenhire’s cancer diagnosis. “I’ve known him for a long time. I guess you just pray for him and hope that they catch it early and they’ll be able to get him fixed up. He’s got a good sense of humor. He’s got a great attitude about everything. Hopefully, he’ll continue that.”
Perkins lost a grandfather to bone cancer that started out as prostate cancer. He was close with former Gophers pitching coach Todd Oakes, who died last spring after a long battle with leukemia, and was part of a contingent of Twins employees that recently visited former Twins bullpen coach Rick Stelmaszek, who is 68 and battling pancreatitis.
“It’s not fun watching people go through cancer,” Perkins said. “I’ve had too much experience with that lately. Cancer sucks.”
Gardenhire said many friends have reached out to him since his diagnosis was revealed, including Diamondbacks team owner Ken Kendrick and team president Derrick Hall, both of whom overcame prostate cancer.
“There’s a lot of people reaching out to me that have been through it, including some good close friends of mine there in the Twin Cities,” Gardenhire said. “Like a lot of people in this country and all over, I’m joining a fight personally against this thing — cancer. We’re going to attack it. (Wife) Carol and I and my kids, we understand it and we’re going to go through it and we’re going to keep our heads high and push on.”
The St. Paul Pioneer Press is a media partner with Forum News Service |
A key bottom line: The position is important, even vital. Why is Kennedy himself among North Dakota's highest paid public servants? Simple: Because Kennedy's salary is leverage. It's an investment by North Dakota in Kennedy's talent and connections, traits that Kennedy is expected to use to raise tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars for the university.
Fundraising is a huge part of a modern university president's job. So is running the complicated institution in a way that grows its reputation and strength.
If Kennedy succeeds at those goals, then North Dakota's investment will have more than paid off. And if the event coordinator helps Kennedy succeed, then the state will have spent its money wisely there, too.
Furthermore, critics hurt their case when they dismiss the coordinator as a "bartender." A glance at the job description sets the record straight. The description lists more than 50 duties, of which "serve as bartender during events" is only one.
Other duties include "initiate, plan and coordinate all official entertaining events hosted by the president and first lady," "coordinate all catering arrangements," "extend invitations and coordinate RSVP follow-up," "on-site management of the event," "track expenses," "oversee payment" and dozens of others.
As a thoughtful letter in Monday's Herald concluded, "to reduce the impressive multi-tasking that the event coordinator must do to just one of the more trivial duties in the job description is a disservice to her (the retiring incumbent's) valuable work and presence at UND."
That said, Kennedy must realize that with every UND staffer and student anxious about where the ax will fall, his own hiring decisions will be second guessed. People are watching, and a key to getting "buy in" from them will be showing that the administration is sharing—not just feeling—their pain.
That's where Kennedy should direct his attention, because that's why this hire touched a nerve.
It's the timing—meaning the timing of this particular hire, and what it seems to be saying about Kennedy's approach to UND's fiscal squeeze.
UND philosophy professor Jack Russell Weinstein was blunt about that perception. "They're cutting the law school, they're cutting the radio station and they're cutting courses, and the president is hiring a party planner," Weinstein told Herald Staff Writer Andrew Hazzard.
A few years ago, Altru Health System faced its own cutbacks. Here's how the headline in the next day's Herald read: "Altru tightens its belt; senior leadership taking pay cut until end of 2013."
Altru's approach generated comments, too; but those comments were a lot more forgiving of Altru's leaders. That's because the stakeholders knew the leaders were sharing in the sacrifice, not just doing it out. There's a lesson in that perception for Kennedy at UND.
-- Tom Dennis for the Herald |
Amber Gajeski, the center's activities assistant, said the goal of the evening was to help seniors meet new people. She said she often hears members express that they do not have companions with whom to share activities.
"That's kind of one of the main reasons why I (thought), we have to try this event," she said. "Even if they don't find love, which we're not really expecting."
Five men and five women attended. They sat in pairs and talked for eight minutes at a time, then mingled as a group afterward. The attendees said they came into the evening expecting a lighthearted evening without pressure.
"I'm at an age now where it's about fun, meeting new people," said Bobbie, a member of the center who declined to give her last name. "It's not like I think I'm going to find a husband or anything. It's just about having fun now."
Attendees noted on a sheet of paper if they were interested in getting to know anyone they met further. Gajeski had placed conversation prompts on each table in case any of the pairs needed help breaking the ice, but the cards seemed to go untouched as everyone chatted easily up until the time came to switch pairs.
Jim Laturnus said he found he had a lot in common with all of the women he visited.
"I had nothing to lose, really," he said of his choice to come to the event. "I was just looking for companionship. I do know some of these other people here before. They're all fun. Every single one of them had something in common."
"We really had a good time, learned a little bit about each other," Roxie Lord said. "I'm really glad I came." She added she approaches everything with the same positive attitude. "A sense of humor is the best thing to have to keep going through life," she said.
Gajeski said in the future, the Senior Center may organize a similar event for women only so they can meet new friends. "There's a lot of people that just moved here. It would be nice for them to get introduced to other people." |
• >0 (µg/dL): Even at birth, all people have some lead in their blood. However, the CDC says no level of exposure has been deemed safe for children.
• 1.0 - 1.3 (µg/dL): Average blood lead level among U.S. children ages 1-5.
• 3.5 (µg/dL): The CDC is considering using this level as a new "reference value" to identify children under age six with elevated blood lead levels. The threshold is lowered periodically to reflect new data from a national health and nutritional survey.
• 5 (µg/dL): The CDC's current reference level for an elevated childhood blood level that warrants public health action, close monitoring or case management. Some 500,000 U.S. children are at or above this level, which some states define as lead poisoning.
• 10 (µg/dL): Children who reach this threshold require closer attention and action to limit further lead exposure. Many states conduct inspections of the poisoned child's living environment to identify exposure sources. Research shows that a blood lead level of 10 (µg/dL) can lower IQ by 4 to 6 points on average.
• 45 (µg/dL): Poisoning that may require hospitalization and chelation drug treatment, which helps the body to excrete lead. The drugs aren't considered effective for children with lower blood lead levels.
• >70 (µg/dL): Left unchecked, acute lead poisoning can cause seizures, coma and death.
Sources: CDC, state health agencies, poisoning prevention programs, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency |
Connor Bartz, 18, said the brothers began working on this year’s sculpture Nov. 18. A dry early winter meant they had to gather snow from neighbors’ yards and a church parking lot. Rain on Christmas Day washed away some of the fish’s scales, but doesn’t seem to have caused any structural damage. The sculpture took about 350 hours to complete and is completely snow.
The sculpture is at 2777 16th St. NW in New Brighton and is illuminated until 11 p.m.
As in years past, the brothers are accepting free-will donations for clean water initiatives. This year’s collection goes toward funding clean water operations in the African country of Malawi via One Day’s Wages. More information can be found on the Bartz snow sculptures on their Facebook page.
The Pioneer Press is a Forum News Service media partner. |
We should expect the angry mobs behind their keyboards and their desks at the state capitol to come out strongly against University of North Dakota president Mark Kennedy any moment now, ripping him to pieces for arrogance, aloofness and elitism.
Any moment now …
Pretty soon …
Stand by …
No? Not today?
OK.
This is surprising. Because when Kennedy decided he was going to hire an event coordinator in the midst of shrinking budgets and cutbacks at UND, it was the perfect storm of a high-falutin’ academic (even though Kennedy isn’t an academic as much as a former politician) acting all fancy and rich when the rest of the state is in belt-tightening mode.
This usually means pitchforks and torches time in humble North Dakota.
The Grand Forks Herald, to its everlasting credit, reported a story last week that the UND president’s office was seeking to replace a retiring event coordinator and assistant to Kennedy’s wife. The position would entail “picking up all the necessary supplies for events hosted by UND President Mark Kennedy and first lady Debbie Kennedy, managing invitations and RSVPs and ‘(serving)’ as bartender for UND football and hockey suite events,” the Herald wrote.
A personal assistant of sorts, in other words.
To read the rest of this story, click here. |
The Cavaliers withstood a big night by Timberwolves forward Andrew Wiggins, who scored 41 points to lead the way for Minnesota. It matched Wiggins' second-highest point total of the season.
Wiggins had help from Karl-Anthony Towns, who scored 26 points and grabbed seven rebounds. Gorgui Dieng added 12 points, but no other Timberwolves player reached double figures in scoring.
A step-back 3-pointer by James and a fast break layup by former Timberwolves player Derrick Williams pushed Cleveland's lead to 114-106 with 1:39 to play. That essentially sealed the win for the Cavaliers, who went on to close out their 38th victory of the season.
It's Cleveland's second win over Minnesota in a two-week span. The Cavaliers beat the Timberwolves 125-97 on Feb. 1.
Cleveland took its biggest lead of 14 points midway through the third quarter when Irving hit a deep 3-pointer. Wiggins single-handedly brought the Timberwolves back.
Wiggins scored 19 points in the third quarter, including a late 3-pointer and a buzzer-beating jumper to tie it at 93 heading into the fourth. Wiggins had 37 points through three quarters on 14-of-22 shooting but cooled off in the final quarter.
Cleveland's offense had to make up for the loss of forward Kevin Love, who earlier Tuesday had surgery on his left knee that will sideline him for six weeks. Love was averaging 20.0 points and 11.1 rebounds per game.
In Love's absence, three Cleveland starters topped the 20-point mark. Irving and James had their typical outputs on offense, while Channing Frye chipped in 21 points—including four 3-pointers. Tristan Thompson added 14 points and 11 rebounds.
Minnesota struggles to guard the 3-pointer this year, while Cleveland entered Tuesday's game as one of the top 3-point shooting teams in the league. While the Cavaliers shot only 33.3 percent from long range, they converted 13 3-pointers.
NOTES: Timberwolves G Zach LaVine had successful surgery Tuesday to repair his torn ACL in his left knee. LaVine suffered the injury Feb. 3 in Minnesota's game against Detroit. LaVine was averaging a career-high 18.9 points. ... Minnesota plays Wednesday at Denver before a nine-day break for the NBA All-Star Game. The Timberwolves return to action Feb. 24 against Dallas. ... Cleveland hosts Indianapolis on Wednesday before the Cavaliers enter the All-Star Break. The Cavs' first game after the break is Feb. 23 against the Knicks. |
After a brief cold snap moved into the region last week, temperatures have been about 20 degrees above normal, according to the National Weather Service. Highs statewide have lingered in the high 30s this week and are expected to climb into the low and mid-40s by the weekend, according to the National Weather Service.
"We have gotten into the 44 to 51 range for this week of February," NWS meteorologist Peter Speicher said of past weather readings. "We've been as warm as 51 back in 2000. It's not totally uncommon, but it's still well above seasonal norms."
An extended outlook from NWS favors above-normal temperatures next week for most of the country except for the West Coast and Alaska.
Records possible
Some cities have a shot of setting record highs next week, and for Grand Forks, Sunday's record high could be the easiest to break. The city's high temperature record for Feb. 19, set last year, was 44 at the Grand Forks International Airport, and Speicher said Sunday's forecast calls for a high of 45 degrees.
"That would be the easiest to break," Speicher said.
No high records have been set in February so far this year.
Above-freezing temperatures could be good news for southern and western parts of North Dakota. The warm weather should speed up snowmelt, helping to remove excess moisture from river basins along watersheds.
Fields in the southern part of the Red River Valley have little snow compared with the Red River of the North starting near Hillsboro.
Paths could open up as the snow melts, taking the excess water to rivers, streams and lakes. Areas should be on the lookout for rising water levels, but the melt taking off that excess water from snowpack slowly could help alleviate flooding in the spring, according to the NWS. Less snow could mean less moisture that could flow over the plains.
"Anything helps," Speicher said. "It definitely helps that we are going back below freezing at night because that slows the flow rate down."
Devils Lake Basin
In the Devils Lake Basin, they could see above-freezing temperatures Wednesday and into the weekend, with some days going above 40 degrees.
A slow melt can't hurt the Devils Lake Basin, said Jeff Frith, manager of the Devils lake Basin Joint Water Resource Board. The region surrounding the 150,000-acre lake likely will see major flooding due to heavy snow and saturated soil from a wet summer and fall. NWS meteorologists predict a 2-foot to 4-foot rise with record runoff and possibly elevations.
There still is a lot of winter left and potential for more snow, though Devils Lake has been lucky since snowfall has been relatively low for moisture accumulation in January and into mid-February, he said.
"A long, slow melt would be just what the doctor ordered, but I think we have way too much winter left to start getting really excited about spring," Frith said.
NWS meteorologists were assessing snowpack and other factors that will play a role in predicting flood outlooks. The agency's second spring flood outlook is due Thursday, though Frith doesn't expect much to change since the last one was released almost three weeks ago.
The Midwest likely will see more precipitation than normal in February, and that trend should continue into April, according to NWS. There is no precipitation forecast for this week, though there is a 50 percent chance of next week being wetter than normal.
Overall, February for almost all of the U.S. should be warmer than normal. Colder-than-normal temperatures could return by the end of February and into early March, NWS meteorologists predict. |
Brandon Kent Sundeen, of Devils Lake, faces terrorizing, driving under the influence and assault charges after reports he was waving a gun early Tuesday morning at Thirsty's Bar in downtown Devils Lake.
Peter Owlboy Jr. told the Forum News Service that Sundeen was outside the bar and appeared drunk and ready to fight. Sundeen also pointed a gun at Owlboy's chest, the victim said, adding he feared for his life.
Sundeen eventually left after calming down, Owlboy said.
Devils Lake Police said they later pulled Sundeen over and booked him at the Lake Region Law Enforcement Center.
Charges had not been filed against Sundeen as of Tuesday evening. |
The same jury found Roof guilty last month of 33 counts of federal hate crimes resulting in death, obstruction of religion and firearms violations.
The jury will be seated again to determine whether to put Roof to death but first the judge must decide whether Roof can serve as his own attorney or whether he will be represented by court-appointed lawyers.
U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel, whose decision was expected on Monday, said he was keeping the proceedings closed in order to avoid sequestering the jury.
Gergel said he was concerned jurors would inadvertently hear potentially prejudicial information from the hearing if reporters were allowed to cover it, ruling that protecting Roof's right to a fair trial outweighed the media's right to view the hearing.
The judge rejected arguments from press attorney Jay Bender and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Richardson, who wanted an open hearing. Gergel also banned relatives of the victims from attending.
The judge previously found Roof competent to stand trial after a hearing held in November ahead of the guilt phase but on Monday was due to hear new testimony from forensic psychiatrist James Ballenger, who examined Roof for five hours over the weekend, Gergel said.
Roof's standby lawyers filed a motion arguing that Roof was not competent to stand trial or represent himself after he revealed at a hearing last week that he would present no evidence or witnesses during the sentencing phase.
His announcement raised "in especially stark fashion the question of whether the defendant is actually unable to defend himself," the lawyers said in a court filing.
A team led by prominent capital defense lawyer David Bruck represented Roof during the guilt phase of the trial.
Roof has opted to represent himself for the sentencing phase, due to begin on Tuesday, and has sought to keep jurors from hearing evidence about his competency and mental health. |
The balanced Roughriders used a big second-half start to pull away from host Grand Forks Central for a 67-56 girls basketball win.
Red River led only 23-20 at halftime. But they opened the second half with a stretch in which, on their first 13 possessions, they scored on 11 of them while turning the ball over twice.
"I don't know if a stretch like that happens very often for anybody,'' Red River coach Kent Ripplinger said. "Sometimes we rush things and don't take care of the ball. We took care of the ball and found open players in that run.''
Lexi Robson and Kendra Bohm each had six points to set the pace as the 16-3 Riders stretched their three-point halftime lead to 45-27 with 10:52 remaining. Central was behind by double figures for most of the remainder of the game until putting together a 7-0 run to pull within 64-56 with 46 seconds left.
Robson had 38 points when Red River beat Central 71-59 in the teams' first game. She had a game-high 18 points this time, but Red River had more balance. Bohm added 12 points and Danica Kemnitz and reserve Maggie Steffen each added 10.
"That (balance) is something we wanted to get done,'' Ripplinger said. "We needed more offense from our post players and Kendra and Danica came through. We got four players in double figures. Typically, it's more like two or three.''
Red River had a 13-0 run in the first half, but Central still was within three points at intermission.
"If you don't give up runs like that, you don't get yourself in trouble,'' Central coach D.J. Burris said. "And (allowing big runs) has been a bit of a problem for us.''
Lauren Dub's 16 points led the 9-10 Knights. Amber Anderson added a season-high 11 points to go with eight rebounds. |
House Bill 1366, which relates to the way oil tax revenue is distributed to cities, counties and schools in the Bakken, failed with a 37-54 vote.
House Majority Leader Al Carlson, R-Fargo, urged lawmakers to vote no to the bill, emphasizing that it would be better to address funding for oil-impacted areas after the March revenue forecast is released.
"A no vote doesn't mean you're against the west," Carlson said.
Rep. Gary Sukut, R-Williston, the primary sponsor of the bill, said communities in the Bakken rely on oil tax revenue to pay for expanded law enforcement facilities, new water plants and other infrastructure they added to meet unprecedented growth spurred by oil development.
Officials from so-called Bakken hub cities of Dickinson, Williston and Minot, as well as smaller communities in the Oil Patch, testified during a hearing on the bill that the funding is essential so they can continue making debt payments.
Initially the bill had a $33.5 million fiscal impact to keep the communities receiving the same amount of funding they received last biennium. The bill was amended to have a $7.65 million fiscal impact.
In addition, the bill includes funding for airports in Williston and Dickinson and other oil impact grant funding that was approved during the last session but has not yet been delivered due to budget shortfalls.
Several legislators from western North Dakota spoke in favor of the bill.
"Many people feel that things are dead or dying in western North Dakota, but it couldn't be further from the truth," said Rep. Denton Zubke, R-Watford City.
Carlson and other legislators said they'll discuss funding for western North Dakota again in a different budget after they have an updated picture of the revenue forecast.
"It does not need to be decided today. It needs to be decided in the second half," Carlson said. |
An order written by presiding Ramsey County District Judge William Leary addresses everything from what people may wear to what time they may arrive and leave the court proceedings in the case pending against Jeronimo Yanez.
Anyone who arrives at the courtroom after a hearing starts, for example, will be ordered to leave, the order says.
And no one will be allowed to walk out of a hearing until the judge calls for a recess.
Another rule restricts wearing any clothes or buttons or carrying signs that in any way "refer to or call attention to (the case), the defendant, parties or witnesses," the order says.
Spectators who can't find a seat in the courtroom will be asked to leave, and no congregating will be allowed in the hallway outside it.
Further, "blocking of or loitering in walkways, doorways, staircases, or near elevator access ... in any part of the (St. Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse)," during proceedings will be prohibited.
Enhanced regulations also will be enforced on cellphone use and other recording devices.
The unusually strict set of rules was issued in the name of providing a "fair and open process that recognizes the responsibility of the state, the rights of the Defendant and the public interest," the order states.
Leary did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for further explanation, nor did Ramsey County Chief Judge John Guthmann.
Yanez was charged in November with one count of second-degree manslaughter and two felony counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm for firing several bullets into Castile's car during a routine traffic stop this past July, killing the 32-year-old black man.
Yanez has said through his attorneys that he shot out of fear for his life after Castile reached for the gun he was carrying in his pocket, despite Yanez's commands what he was not to move.
Prosecutors say that Yanez recklessly shot Castile, a licensed gun owner, after Castile handed over his insurance card and "calmly and in a nonthreatening manner" told the four-year police officer he was carrying a firearm, according to the criminal complaint filed against Yanez.
When first announcing the decision to file charges in the case, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said it was the state's belief that Castile "never removed nor tried to remove his handgun," at any point during the incident.
The shooting drew national attention and stirred protests around the Twin Cities and the country about accusations of police brutality against people of color.
With that in mind, the case should be heavily attended by members of the media and public.
A hearing is scheduled Wednesday for a defense motion filed in December that seeks to have the case against Yanez dismissed on the grounds that Castile was high on marijuana when he was pulled over and therefore culpably negligent in the shooting.
Prosecutors have refuted that assertion in legal filings, saying they had enough evidence to charge Yanez and that the suggestion that Castile somehow caused his own death through negligence is for a jury to decide.
Wednesday's hearing is expected to start at 9 a.m. |
Whether it's the infamous "Veterans For Standing Rock" with their missing $1.1 million, or another organization in the litany of Standing Rock-based pages on the website, rough estimates for the amount raised on these pages have been reported to be around $11 million. Just as a point of reference, the state of North Dakota already has spent more than $30 million managing the crisis these donations were meant to fund.
All of this begs the question of whether GoFundMe shoulders any of the blame for providing a platform to fundraise for illegal protest activities—activities that include repeated violent attacks against our North Dakota law enforcement officers, using everything from Molotov cocktails and other improvised explosive devices to actual guns.
Do the site's owners care that they are actively enabling professional protesters to come into our community and disrupt the lives and livelihoods of both the residents of Morton County and members of the Standing Rock tribe alike?
When you take a deeper look at GoFundMe, it becomes clear that the answer is no.
GoFundMe is a business. And their business is fundraising for "causes" like these protesters. In 2015, Forbes magazine published an article outlining how GoFundMe earns "profits off of controversy." As the company outlines in its "Common Questions" page, GoFundMe takes a 5 percent fee from every contribution made over the site, along with an additional 3 percent processing fee.
Meaning the company has made roughly $880,000 off of these DAPL protests without having to do a thing beyond maintaining the website.
Pretty good haul for just shy of six months.
While the website has no official ideological loyalty, all you have to do is look at members of the company's senior leadership to get an idea of where they fall on the political spectrum.
The company's chairman and CEO, Rob Solomon, gave the maximum amount in contributions allowed by law to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. President and Chief Product Officer David Hahn is a former staffer for ultra-liberal California Senator Diane Feinstein.
And GoFundMe's vice president for communications and policy is none other than Dan Pfeiffer, former senior advisor, White House communications director and long-time confidant of President Obama.
Shockingly, there are no former Republican political staff members serving as executives for GoFundMe.
So the truth is, despite the violent and illegal behavior these GoFundMe pages are supporting, the company probably doesn't care. They are probably indifferent to the close to 600 people who have been arrested during these protests, or the public posting of threats against police officers, community leaders and their families.
They're making a hefty profit while supporting the liberal causes they personally believe in, while never having to leave sunny California.
It's all win-win for them, even if it's all lose-lose for North Dakota and its residents.
Hennen is the host of What's On Your Mind radio show, heard throughout North Dakota on AM 1100 TheFlag and AM 550 KFYR. |
Laboratory tests confirmed the presence of H5N8 avian influenza among backyard birds and at a poultry farm in two rural districts near the western town of Niort, the Deux-Sevres prefecture said in a statement.
The H5N8 strain of the disease is highly contagious among birds and has spread in a number of European countries since late last year. It is not known to be contagious for humans.
France has already confirmed more than 80 cases of H5N8 bird flu among domestic poultry, but these have been in southwestern areas far from the latest outbreaks.
The country, which is has the largest poultry flock in the European Union, was already affected by a severe bird flu episode a year ago in the southwest that led the authorities to suspend duck and goose breeding in the region known for production of foie gras liver pate.
Different strains of bird flu have also spread in Asia in recent weeks, leading to the slaughtering of millions of birds in South Korea and Japan and several human infections in China. |
A previous evacuation order has been reduced to an evacuation warning, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea told a news conference, after water management officials drained enough water from the Oroville Dam.
The warning means that people can return but should be prepared to evacuate again if necessary, Honea said.
Both the primary and backup drainage channels of the dam, known as spillways, were damaged after a buildup of water that resulted from an extraordinarily wet winter in Northern California that followed years of severe drought.
More rain was forecast for as early as Wednesday and through Sunday, according to the National Weather Service.
Swift action by officials led by the state Department of Water Resources relieved pressure on the spillways, Honea said. |
After a brief cold snap moved into the region last week, temperatures have been about 20 degrees above normal, according to the National Weather Service. Grand Forks' high went from 2 degrees last Wednesday to 22 on Thursday and 38 on Friday, a 36-degree jump in two days. Highs have lingered in the high 30s this week and are expected to climb into the low and mid-40s by the weekend, according to the National Weather Service.
"We have gotten into the 44 to 51 range for this week of February," NWS meteorologist Pete Speicher said of past weather readings. "We've been as warm as 51 back in 2000. It's not totally uncommon, but it's still well above seasonal norms."
An extended outlook from NWS favors above-normal temperatures next week for most of the country except for the West Coast and Alaska. Northwest Minnesota and northeast North Dakota have a 70 to 90 percent chance of seeing unseasonably warm weather.
Records possible
Some cities have a shot of setting record highs. The lowest record high for next week was set Feb. 19, 2016, at the Grand Forks International Airport with 44 degrees.
"That would be the easiest to break," Speicher said, adding the forecast for Sunday is 45 degrees.
No high records have been set in February so far this year.
Above-freezing temperatures could be good news for southern and western parts of North Dakota. The warm weather should speed up snowmelt, helping to remove excess moisture from river basins along watersheds.
Fields in the southern part of the Red River Valley have little snow compared with the Red River of the North starting near Hillsboro.
Paths could open up as the snow melts, taking the excess water to rivers, streams and lakes. Areas should be on the lookout for rising water levels, but but the melt taking off that excess water from snowpack slowly could help alleviate flooding in the spring, according to the NWS. Less snow could mean less moisture that could flow over the plains.
"Anything helps," Speicher said. "It definitely helps that we are going back below freezing at night because that slows the flow rate down."
Devils Lake Basin
To the west, Devils Lake could see above-freezing temperatures today and into the weekend, with some days going above 40 degrees.
A slow melt can't hurt the Devils Lake Basin, said Jeff Frith, manager of the Devils lake Basin Joint Water Resource Board. The region surrounding the 150,000-acre lake likely will see major flooding due to heavy snow and saturated soil from a wet summer and fall. NWS meteorologists predict a 2- to 4-foot rise with record runoff and possibly elevations.
There still is a lot of winter left and potential for more snow, though Devils Lake has been lucky since snowfall has been relatively low for moisture accumulation in January and into mid-February, he said.
"A long, slow melt would be just what the doctor ordered, but I think we have way too much winter left to start getting really excited about spring," Frith said.
NWS meteorologists were assessing snowpack and other factors that will play a role in predicting flood outlooks. The agency's second spring flood outlook is due Thursday, though Frith doesn't expect much to change since the last one was released almost three weeks ago.
The Midwest likely will see more precipitation than normal in February, and that trend should continue into April, according to NWS. There is no precipitation forecast for this week, though there is a 50 percent chance of next week being wetter than normal.
Overall, February for almost all of the U.S. should be warmer than normal. Colder-than-normal temperatures could return by the end of February and into early March, NWS meteorologists predict. |
North Dakotans don't take to reorganization.
Rather than going all the way back to statehood, let's just start with 1942, when the Public Administration Service of Chicago did a comprehensive analysis and reorganization plan for North Dakota state government. Some of the recommendations still are gathering dust today, indicating the low priority we place on reorganization.
Rather than implementing the report, state officials of the day thought it would be best to wait until after World War II was over. The connection between reorganization and the war was never explained, but by the time the War was over, dust had buried the recommendations.
In 1966, voters rejected proposals to revamp the judicial, executive and legislative branches of government. So the reinventors thought of a different route—a constitutional convention to dramatize the need for reform.
The convention met. The proposed constitution would have made possible reducing the number of elected state officials down to the nationwide average of six per state. Opposed by every state official and others, the document went down to defeat,
In 1984 and 2000, the voters refused to abolish the office of state treasurer, made obsolete in 1919 with the creation of the Bank of North Dakota.
In November 1980, the voters defeated another general proposal to revise the legislative and executive branches of government. In 1989, a similar measure was swamped at the polls.
Meanwhile, disorganization was spreading in the underbrush. In 2009, Legislative Librarian Marilyn Johnson counted 142 boards, councils and commissions. (If your interest group doesn't have a board, council and/or commission, you simply haven't asked for one.)
We have more local governments per capita, the largest Legislature per capita outside of New Hampshire and the most elected state officials outside of South Carolina. So there is room for a lot of reinventing, but the governor should be forewarned that the holder of every public office will fight him to the death.
That's one reason we pretty much have the same government we started with in 1889.
What this tells us is that North Dakotans like access, even when it means throwing efficiency under the bus.
People want a role—a big role—in government. Having many points at which citizens can be a part of government implements the cultural idea that everybody is important and should "have a say."
If we haven't dissuaded the governor from reinventing, he would be well advised to choose only those entities that have no constituencies, because constituencies rise up with a wrath when abolition or consolidation of their entity is proposed. For example, if he told the barbers he was going to mess with their licensing board, he would have to go out-of-state for a haircut.
While the office holders, agencies and their constituencies will be arrayed against him, the governor will be spending lot of political capital on something about which the citizenry does not care a hoot, meaning that the governor will have no citizen uprising on behalf of reinventing. He'll be out there alone.
Reinventing North Dakota state and local governments would require the effort of a mountain to produce a molehill. As a recovering government reinventor, I wish the governor well but will just sit this one out.
On the other hand, it has been said that those who say it can't be done are sometimes interrupted by somebody doing it.
Omdahl is a retired professor of political science at UND and a former lieutenant governor of North Dakota. |
American authorities have not yet determined exactly how Kim Jong Nam was killed, according to two sources, who did not provide specific evidence to support the U.S. government's view.
A South Korean government source also had said that Kim Jong Nam had been murdered in Malaysia. He did not provide further details.
South Korea's foreign ministry said it could not confirm the reports, and the country's intelligence agency could not immediately be reached for comment.
In Washington, there was no immediate response to a request for comment from the Trump administration, which faces a stiff challenge from a defiant North Korea over its nuclear arms program and the test of a ballistic missile last weekend.
Kim Jong Nam was known to spend a significant amount of his time outside North Korea and had spoken out publicly against his family's dynastic control of the isolated state.
If confirmed as an assassination, it would the latest in a string of killings over the decades at home and abroad meant to silence those perceived by North Korea's leaders as threats to their authority, one of the U.S. sources said on condition of anonymity.
In a statement, Malaysian police said the dead man, 46, held a passport under the name Kim Chol.
Kim Jong Nam has been caught in the past using forged travel documents.
Malaysian police official Fadzil Ahmat said the cause of Kim's death was not yet known, and that a post mortem would be carried out.
"So far there are no suspects, but we have started investigations and are looking at a few possibilities to get leads," Fadzil told Reuters.
According to Fadzil, Kim had been planning to travel to Macau on Monday when he fell ill at the low-cost terminal of Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
"The deceased ... felt like someone grabbed or held his face from behind," Fadzil said. "He felt dizzy, so he asked for help at the ... counter of KLIA."
Kim was taken to an airport clinic where he still felt unwell, and it was decided to take him to hospital. He died in the ambulance on the way to Putrajaya Hospital, Fadzil added.
The U.S. government sources said it was possible that Kim Jong Nam had been poisoned. They said it could not be ruled out that assassins used some kind of "poison pen" device.
South Korea's TV Chosun, a cable-TV network, reported that Kim had been poisoned with a needle by two women believed to be North Korean operatives who fled in a taxi and were at large, citing multiple South Korean government sources.
Reuters could not independently confirm those details.
Malaysia is one of a dwindling number of countries that has close relations with North Korea, which is under tightening global sanctions over its nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches, the latest of which took place on Sunday.
Malaysians and North Koreans can visit each other's country without visas.
A phone call to the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur late on Tuesday went straight to an answering machine.
Kim Jong Nam and Kim Jong Un are both sons of former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who died in late 2011, but they had different mothers.
Kim Jong Nam, the elder of the two, did not attend his father's funeral. His mother was an actress named Song Hye Rim, and Kim Jong Nam said his father kept his parents' relationship secret.
The portly and easygoing Kim Jong Nam was believed to be close to his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, who was North Korea's second most powerful man before being executed on Kim Jong Un's orders in 2013.
In an embarrassing 2001 incident, Kim Jong Nam was caught at an airport in Japan traveling on a forged Dominican Republic passport, saying he had wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He was known to travel to Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China.
Koh Yu-hwan, a professor at Dongguk University in Seoul, said Kim Jong Nam had occasionally been the subject of speculation that he could replace his younger half-brother, the country's third-generation leader.
"Loyalists may have wanted to get rid of him," he said. |
She had overdosed. Someone had brought her to the clinic in the middle of the night, authorities said, but when the clinic was closed, whoever brought her abandoned the car and left. They didn't call 911.
This month, the Grand Forks Police Department put out a reminder that those using and possessing drugs who are present at the time of an overdose will not be prosecuted if they call and cooperate with first responders.
In North Dakota and Minnesota, Good Samaritan laws are on the books that give immunity to those who call in drug overdoses if the caller remains on scene until first responders arrive and cooperate with medical services and law enforcement. The person must be in need of emergency medical services. Up to three people can be granted immunity.
The law also applies to people overdosing from alcohol consumption.
"We want people to be focused on saving a life," said Lt. Jeremy Moe with the special resource bureau.
In 2016, Grand Forks Police responded to 28 calls for overdoses. Three of them were fatal.
State Sen. Howard Anderson Jr., R-Turtle Lake, was a sponsor of the Good Samaritan laws that passed in North Dakota in 2015. The former director of the North Dakota Board of Pharmacy, Anderson said he wanted to sponsor the law to give people a better chance to survive. Information provided by companions can be key to successful care.
"It's hard to find out what they took or what the situation is, so by the time doctors get a chance to figure out what it is, it's too late," Anderson said.
In the process of passing the law, legislators heard testimony from a man whose companions had abandoned him in a dumpster, thinking he'd overdosed, Anderson said.
But too few people know about the law, Anderson said. He also believes law enforcement have been overzealous in pressing charges against people, despite the law.
"They're using the Good Samaritan laws as an excuse to charge people because, obviously, if I gave you drugs, then I'm guilty of providing them for you. It's like a sale even if I gave it to you free," he said. "So we need a little better education with police. If you're trying to save somebody's life for crying out loud, back off a little bit. Catch the crook the next time."
Anderson said users speak to one another, and if law enforcement is too aggressive, it might deter people from calling for help.
Grand Forks Police said they were not aware of any specific incidents in town where immunity had been granted based on the Good Samaritan laws.
Forum News Service contributed to this article. |
The letter, dated Monday and addressed to a White House ethics official, asked President Donald Trump's administration to investigate the incident and gave it two weeks to provide its findings and detail any disciplinary steps taken.
Conway, Trump's presidential campaign manager and now a senior counselor, said on Fox News last week that Americans should "go buy Ivanka's stuff." She spoke after retailer Nordstrom announced it was dropping the branded line of Ivanka Trump, the president's older daughter.
Federal ethics rules prohibit executive branch employees from using their positions to endorse products.
"There is strong reason to believe that Ms. Conway has violated the Standards of Conduct and that disciplinary action is warranted," Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub wrote in the letter.
Stefan Passantino, the White House ethics official named in the letter, declined to comment. A White House spokesman did not reply to a request for comment.
The ethics office has little enforcement power. It can formally recommend disciplinary action if the White House does not act, Shaub said in a separate letter to two U.S. lawmakers who sought a review of Conway's remarks.
Following video from Feb. 10
That recommendation would not be binding, and the process would take until late April or early May, Shaub said. If the ethics office does formally recommend discipline, it would be up to the White House to decide any steps against Conway.
Norman Eisen, who was ethics chief under President Barack Obama, said Congress also could call hearings or subpoena documents if the White House did not act.
Trump himself earlier attacked Nordstrom for dropping his daughter's brand. The ethics rules that bar endorsements do not apply to the president, though critics said his comments were inappropriate.
Nordstrom said it made the decision because sales had steadily declined, especially in the last half of 2016, to where carrying the line "didn't make good business sense."
In his letter to the White House, Shaub wrote that his office's regulatory guidelines include an example violation in which a hypothetical presidential appointee promotes a product in a television commercial. He said Conway's remarks closely mirrored that example of what not to do.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Thursday that Conway had been "counseled," but Shaub wrote that the Office of Government Ethics had not been informed of any corrective steps. |
What I haven't heard from either side, and which I find dismaying, is the acknowledgement and praise of the stellar work of the remarkable women who serve in the Office of the President at UND.
The event coordinator is one of these women. President Mark Kennedy chose not to name her in his letter, and I will respect her privacy and do the same.
But she deserves to be acknowledged and respected for her dedication to UND. There are few on campus who have given as much to this institution with little to no public recognition. If you have ever attended an official UND event that involved the administration or visiting dignitaries, you have seen her.
Events on campus run smoothly not by luck, but by the hard work she puts in before, during and after each event. The staff and faculty understand her worth very well.
A brief note about these "events": They are not simply fundraisers, welcome receptions or retirement receptions. They include visits by acclaimed authors, artists, scientists, and teachers; meetings of the state board; athletic events; alumni events; legislative forums; conferences; media interviews; and the list goes on.
To reduce the impressive multi-tasking that the event coordinator must do to just one of the more trivial duties in the job description is a disservice to her valuable work and presence at UND.
UND's official motto is Lux et Lex — Light and Law. The event coordinator is the embodiment of Lux, allowing students, staff and faculty to be more and achieve more by lighting the path for us. She deserves our praise, respect and profound thanks.
Michelle Bowles
Grand Forks
The writer is the institutional review board coordinator in the Division of Research and Economic Development at UND. The views she expresses are her own and are not meant to be a reflection of the views of the division or university. |
Since 2012, the CDC, which sets public health standards for exposure to lead, has used a blood lead threshold of 5 micrograms per deciliter for children under age 6. While no level of lead exposure is safe for children, those who test at or above that level warrant a public health response, the agency says.
Based on new data from a national health survey, the CDC may lower its reference level to 3.5 micrograms per deciliter in the coming months, according to six people briefed by the agency. The measure will come up for discussion at a CDC meeting January 17 in Atlanta.
But the step, which has been under consideration for months, could prove controversial. One concern: Lowering the threshold could drain sparse resources from the public health response to children who need the most help—those with far higher lead levels.
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
Exposure to lead—typically in peeling old paint, tainted water or contaminated soil—can cause cognitive impairment and other irreversible health impacts.
The CDC adjusts its threshold periodically as nationwide average levels drop. The threshold value is meant to identify children whose blood lead levels put them among the 2.5 percent of those with the heaviest exposure.
"Lead has no biological function in the body, and so the less there is of it in the body the better," Bernard M Y Cheung, a University of Hong Kong professor who studies lead data, told Reuters. "The revision in the blood lead reference level is to push local governments to tighten the regulations on lead in the environment."
The federal agency is talking with state health officials, laboratory operators, medical device makers and public housing authorities about how and when to implement a new threshold.
Since lead was banned in paint and phased out of gasoline nearly 40 years ago, average childhood blood lead levels have fallen more than 90 percent. The average is now around 1 microgram per deciliter.
Yet progress has been uneven, and lead poisoning remains an urgent problem in many U.S. communities.
A Reuters investigation published this month found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates of at least 10 percent, or double those in Flint, Michigan, during that city's water crisis. More than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher than in Flint.
In the worst-affected urban areas, up to 50 percent of children tested in recent years had elevated lead levels.
The CDC has estimated that as many as 500,000 U.S. children have lead levels at or above the current threshold. The agency encourages "case management" for these children, which is often carried out by state or local health departments and can involve educating families about lead safety, ordering more blood tests, home inspections or remediation.
Any change in the threshold level carries financial implications. The CDC budget for assisting states with lead safety programs this year was just $17 million, and many state or local health departments are understaffed to treat children who test high.
Another concern: Many lead testing devices or labs currently have trouble identifying blood lead levels in the 3 micrograms per deciliter range. Test results can have margins of error.
"You could get false positives and false negatives," said Rad Cunningham, an epidemiologist with the Washington State Department of Health. "It's just not very sensitive in that range."
The CDC doesn't hold regulatory power, leaving states to make their own decisions on how to proceed. Many have yet to adapt their lead poisoning prevention programs to the last reference change, implemented four years ago, when the level dropped from 10 to 5 micrograms per deciliter. Other states, including Virginia and Maine, made changes this year.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is close to adopting a rule requiring an environmental inspection—and lead cleanup if hazards are found—in any public housing units where a young child tests at or above the CDC threshold.
If the CDC urges public health action under a new threshold, HUD said it will follow through. "The only thing that will affect our policy is the CDC recommendation for environmental intervention," said Dr. Warren Friedman, with HUD's Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes.
To set the reference value, the CDC relies upon data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey. The latest data suggests that a small child with a blood lead level of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter has higher exposure than 97.5 percent of others in the age group, 1 to 5 years.
But in lead-poisoning hotspots, a far greater portion of children have higher lead levels. Wisconsin data, for instance, shows that around 10 percent of children tested in Milwaukee's most poisoned census tracts had levels double the current CDC standard.
Some worry a lower threshold could produce the opposite effect sought, by diverting money and attention away from children with the worst exposure.
"A lower reference level may actually do harm by masking reality—that significant levels of lead exposure are still a problem throughout the country," said Amy Winslow, chief executive of Magellan Diagnostics, whose blood lead testing machines are used in thousands of U.S. clinics. |
BRASILIA - Around 60 people were killed in a bloody prison riot in the Amazon jungle city of Manaus sparked by a war between rival drug gangs, officials said on Monday, Jan. 2, in the worst violence in over two decades in Brazil's overcrowded penitentiary system.
The head of security for Amazonas state, Sergio Fontes, told a news conference that the death toll could rise as authorities get a clearer idea of the scale of the rebellion sparked by a fight between rival drug gangs.
Fontes told reporters that several of the dead had their decapitated bodies thrown over the prison wall - and that most of those killed came from one gang.
"This was another chapter in the silent and ruthless war of drug trafficking," he said.
Pedro Florencio, the Amazonas state prison secretary, said that the massacre was a "revenge killing" that formed part of an ongoing feud between criminal gangs in Brazil.
The riot began late Sunday and was brought under control by around 7 a.m. on Monday, Fontes said. Authorities were still counting the prisoners to determine how many had escaped, he added, with reports that up to 300 fled.
Just as the riot began in one unit of the Anisio Jobim prison complex, dozens of prisoners in the second unit started a mass escape in what authorities said was a coordinated effort to distract guards.
Overcrowding is extremely common in Brazil's prisons, which suffer endemic violence and what rights groups call medieval conditions with cells so crowded prisoners have no space to lie down and food is scarce.
The Anisio Jobim prison complex currently houses 2,230 inmates despite having a capacity of only 590.
Watchdog groups sharply criticize Brazil for its prisons where deadly riots routinely break out.
"These massacres occur almost daily in Brazil," said Father Valdir Silveira, director of Pastoral Carceraria, a Catholic center that monitors prison conditions in Brazil. "Our prisons were built to annihilate, torture and kill."
The violence was the latest clash between inmates aligned with the Sao Paulo-based First Capital Command drug gang, Brazil's most powerful, and a local Manaus criminal group known as the North Family.
The Manaus-based gang is widely believed to be attacking PCC inmates at the behest of the Rio de Janeiro-based Red Command drug gang, Brazil's second largest.
Security analysts have said that a truce that held for years between the PCC and CV was broken last year, resulting in months of deadly prison battles between the gangs and sparking fears that chaos will spread to other prisons.
In the latest riot, a group of inmates exchanged gunfire with police and held 12 prison guards hostage late on Sunday in the largest prison in Manaus, an industrial city on the banks of the Amazon River, Globo TV reported.
Fontes said that 74 prisoners were taken hostage during the riot, with some executed and some released.
A video posted on the website of the Manaus-based newspaper Em Tempo showed dozens of bloodied and mutilated bodies piled atop each other on the prison floor as other inmates milled about.
Brazil's prison system is precariously overcrowded and conditions in many institutions are horrific. That has sparked a rash of deadly riots in recent years.
Sunday's riot was the deadliest in years. A 1992 rebellion at the Carandiru prison in Sao Paulo state saw 111 inmates killed, nearly all of them by police as they retook the jail.
Maria Canineu, director of Human Rights Watch for Brazil, said the most recent violence was the result of "no government in 20 years giving much attention to the penitentiary system."
Canineu said that for years it's been very difficult for states to receiving any funding help from the federal government for prisons.
President Michel Temer announced last week that the federal government would furnish states with $366 million, mostly to improve infrastructure and security in existing prisons and to build new ones. |
"Last year we lost both houses of the Legislature and suffered a devastating defeat," reads the letter from the Coalition to Draft Rick Nolan for Governor. "We need a candidate for governor who appeals to the broadest number of Minnesotans, based on proven DFL policies and principles."
The group warns: "If we lose the governorship in 2018, we will become Wisconsin," a reference to the Republican control of the Badger State's Legislature and governor's seat.
Nolan's spokeswoman in January said Nolan is considering a run and didn't have a timeline for making a decision.
The coalition that sent the letter includes current and former state legislators such as Joe Begich, Ron Dicklich, Rob Ecklund, Jason Metsa and David Tomassoni. The group also includes Iron Range businesspeople and mining interests and is chaired by 8th District DFL Chair Justin Perpich.
"At a time when the DFL Party is reeling from significant losses in the 2016 elections, Congressman Nolan is the perfect candidate to stop the party's hemorrhaging of working class voters," the group said in an email Tuesday.
Nolan would join a growing field of DFL contenders for governor: State Auditor Rebecca Otto, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and state Rep. Erin Murphy of St. Paul all have thrown their hats in the ring. Minnesota Republican Party Chairman Keith Downey, Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Daudt and Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson are also vying for the nomination from their party.
Incumbent DFL Gov. Mark Dayton has said he will not seek re-election in 2018. |
West Fargo's Courtney Walsh and Talexi Gasal notched two goals each in the win, keeping KnightRider goalies Quinn Kuntz and Teresa Mattson busy with 29 and 20 stops, respectively.
"We got outworked most of the game," said KnightRider coach Alex Hedlund. "We just need to find a way to put 51 minutes together and create more chances."
Grand Forks will open the state tournament against West Fargo next week.
Sacred Heart 66, Hatton-Northwood 64
NORTHWOOD, N.D.—The Sacred Heart boys basketball team edged out a victory against Hatton-Northwood on Tuesday night.
Despite being down 36-28 at halftime, the Eagles rallied behind Jordan Tomkinson, who had 37 points and 11 rebounds. Jack Gerber also had a stout performance for Sacred Heart, notching a double double with 12 points.
"I'm proud of how they fought," said Sacred Heart coach Destry Sterkel.
Park Rapids 59, EGF Senior High 58
PARK RAPIDS, Minn.—The Park Rapids boys basketball team beat East Grand Forks Senior High in a close home victory Tuesday night.
Park Rapids senior center Hunter Jewison posted 22 points, while Senior High's Sam Votava, Christian Dugan and Julian Benson each scored 11 points at the end of Tuesday's loss.
"They came out with a lot of energy and took it to us," said Senior High coach Josh Perkerwicz.
In the end, Park Rapids made a free throw to push ahead of the Green Wave.
Senior High next faces Fosston in a home match Thursday night.
Thief River Falls 3,
EGF Senior High 2
THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn.—Aaron Myers scored two goals, including the game-winner late in the second period, to lead Thief River Falls to a boys hockey win over East Grand Forks Senior High on Tuesday.
Myers scored the winner at 15:42 of the second.
East Grand Forks outshot Thief River Falls 32-14. Nick Corneliuson posted 31 saves in net for the Prowlers.
Coby Stauss led the Green Wave with a goal and an assist.
Sacred Heart 66, Grafton 56
Bolstered by a strong first half, the Sacred Heart girls basketball team defeated Grafton on Tuesday night in East Grand Forks.
"We were up pretty handily at the half, but they came back in the second with strong defense," said Sacred Heart coach Joann Remer.
Anya Edwards paced the Eagles with 28 points to victory.
Following Tuesday's win, Sacred Heart's record now stands at 17-6. Sacred Heart will go on the road Friday to play Climax-Fisher. |
Kingbird was one of about 100 participants who gathered in the parking lot of the John Glas Fieldhouse on Tuesday for Bemidji's first-ever Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Walk. Marchers, including men and children, as well as Native American women, united in solidarity with similar events taking place nationwide, hoping to call attention to the disproportionate amount of violence against Native women.
"We felt that it was very important for us to organize an event for today with the other actions that are happening all over Canada and all over the rest of the United States," said organizer Audrianna Goodwin. "This is a very touching issue for almost all of us in the room ... and we just want to do our part in raising awareness to this issue."
Participants held signs and some wore red shawls during the march from the field house to BSU's Hobson Memorial Union; the group was greeted by honking cars as it traveled along Bemidji Avenue North. Native women and those who had lost family members led the march and allies brought up the rear.
The event was planned by the Indigenous Environmental Network's women's leadership group Ogimaakwewiwin. Group member Simone Senogles said that while Ogimaakwewiwin only became aware of similar marches last week, they decided to do their best to pull together the Tuesday event.
"Even though the time was really, really short we knew that it was something we wanted to do, we wanted to at least try," Senogles told participants. "We're really, really humbled and honored by all of you coming out on this cold day and joining us."
After the march, attendees gathered in the Beaux Arts Ballroom in Hobson. A Planned Parenthood table offered condoms and literature about HIV/AIDS prevention, while Northwoods Battered Women's Shelter and Red Lake shelter Equay Wiigamig also offered information about services. The organizers spoke about violence against Native women both nationwide and locally before jingle dress dancers performed.
"We want to acknowledge that this is a real issue to people," said organizer Anna Goldtooth. "It affects us everywhere, and in our community we've experienced a lot of violence happening in the past few years against Native women."
Each speaker said that much of the violence against indigenous women stems from colonization, even violence within Native communities.
"This violence that's perpetuated against our women isn't who we are. It never was part of our ways to hurt our women," Goodwin said. "I just can't stress enough that this isn't who we are." |
In the nightcap, Red River had 40 second-half points to pull away to a 64-41 boys victory. Jordan Polynice scored 10 of his game-high 22 points in a 21-2 second-half spurt that broke the game open for the Riders. Cody Robertson added 11 points. Aaron Knutson scored 12 points and Jacob Ohnstad 10 to lead Central. |
Joi (left) and Arvid Thompson dance Tuesday afternoon during a Valentine's Day event at Parkwood Senior Living in Grand Forks. Parkwood puts on various events such as the Valentine's Day Dance and Social, which is always a big hit. The Cathy Erickson Band played old tunes from the '60s and '70s. Some couples got up and danced while others just enjoyed old-fashioned conversation. (Joshua Komer / Grand Forks Herald)
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My intent here isn’t to throw dirt on Burgum. He’s had a fantastically successful career in the private sector, and his rise to the highest office in state government last year was remarkable. But in terms of governing he hasn’t, you know, done anything.
Yet. Regardless, the Forum‘s premature honors aren’t his fault.
You can read the rest of this story by clicking here. |
Best of One Foot Tsunami Read a random selection from OFT's very best posts: My Most Expensive Tweet Ever Check out the full Best Of archive.
Tune in to Just The Tip Hear Paul and his good friend Amy Jane Gruber on their mildly-popular Just The Tip comedy podcast. |
Donald Trump's presidency is less than three months old, but in that time there have been massive turnouts for the Women's March, and Tax Day protests in cities across the country demanding that Trump release his returns. This coming Saturday, on Earth Day, scores of March for Science protests are expected.
Helping to guide these actions are veteran activists with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — better known as ACT UP. Thirty years after its founding, some seasoned activists are dusting off their bullhorns and updating their direct-action playbooks to tap into the new wave of activism energized by opposition to Trump's policies.
Founded in 1987, ACT UP never settled for trying to push change quietly or behind the scenes.
They were loud, demanding, and in-your-face with telegenic direct action, a protest that got serious attention and, occasionally, laughs.
Like the time members engulfed the suburban Virginia home of their nemesis, the late Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, in a giant canvas condom that read "Helms Is Deadlier Than A Virus."
Or when ACT UP members posed as news executives and bum-rushed Dan Rather during a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News at the start of the Gulf War.
Then there was the time they stormed the National Institutes of Health, pushing for changes in AIDS research, funding and clinical trials. Over an NIH foyer, activists unfurled a giant banner with their logo and slogan: Silence=Death.
I'm "the snarky, Machiavellian dude behind the Silence=Death image," New York artist and writer Avram Finkelstein says with a chuckle.
That slogan — black and white with a pink triangle — presaged the formation of the radical AIDS advocacy group ACT UP. The slogan helped change the way the world looked at AIDS. At one point, Silence=Death was the most powerful protest slogan around. It became an iconic backdrop to the group's chant for "ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS!"
Now, at 65, Finkelstein is one of several ACT UP veterans from the 1980s and '90s who today is helping shepherd new protesters train and strategize, including the anti-Trump collective Rise and Resist.
"Many people are younger people who work with organizations that were formed by ACT UP. Or were in ACT UP themselves," he says.
He recently led a teach-in on design and imagery for Rise and Resist.
"All of the civil disobedience training is being done by the same exact people who did them at ACT UP," Finkelstein says. "So here is this perfect cross-section of this moment. Here is an inter-generational activist organization. And its meetings are in the community center a spitting distance from where the original ACT UP meetings took place."
In January, Rise and Resist took one of its first actions: scores of members booked brunch reservations at restaurants in several Trump-owned properties including Trump Tower. Over eggs Benedict in the crowded eateries, protesters began to cough and cough some more. The "cough-in" protesters held up signs saying "Trumpcare is making us sick."
"That's the kind of mediagenic sort of action that ACT UP used to needle their opponent," says filmmaker and writer David France, who's behind the book and film How To Survive A Plague. "And Trump is an easy target for needling, and they're working on trying to exploit that weakness of his. The more time he spends in the early morning hours fashioning his tweets in response to perceived slights, the less time he has to advance his agenda."
France and others note the feeling of total powerlessness in the face of Trump and Republican control of Washington echoes the early days of the AIDS crisis.
"Younger generations, the millennials, and even Gen X and Gen Y, have the sense of never having had power, really," France says. "And it's kind of a learning experience for them to realize that there were times in history when others felt the same, and were yet not dispirited by it, but found a way to plow through it and find that power."
ACT UP was certainly not immune to internal fissures and strategic stumbles. Some members broke off into subgroups. But ACT UP remained steadfast in its strategy of being bold, persistent and willing to be unpopular to foster change. It's a template Rise and Resist is trying to emulate, France says.
"I think what they're doing, especially at Rise and Resist, is taking those tactics and strategies and bringing them to the modern era, and making them appropriate for the particular struggles being faced today," he says.
Grassroots anger at president Trump's policies has galvanized protesters on the left, including many new to political action.
While ACT UP is best known for its direct action protests, the group's potency came from a clear-eyed strategy and its well-organized committees, says Maxine Wolfe — another veteran gay rights activist from ACT UP's earliest days, who is now involved in Rise and Resist.
ACT UP had committees on health, research, PR, housing, and more. They did their homework, Wolfe says, and helped ACT UP create a potent "inside-outside" strategy: demanding a seat of power alongside politicians and big pharma while keeping pressure up through creative street protests. The strategy helped turn HIV from a death sentence to a manageable condition.
"We had a women's committee, a people of color committee, the treatment and data committee," Wolfe recalls. "We lobbied peoples, we did civil disobedience. The idea there was that you could use not a huge number of people but a varied playbook," she says. "And [you] would keep coming at it until we won. Which we did."
What's not clear just a few months into Trump's presidency is what tactics and actions by Trump "resistors" will actually have an impact on public opinion and policy. There are sharp tactical disagreements within the inchoate grassroots opposition to Trump's policies over what might prove most effective and sustainable.
Go with massive rallies or small direct actions? Focus on urban population centers or the rural and suburban swing areas that helped elect Trump?
There are ongoing Trump boycott efforts such as Grab Your Wallet as well as get-off- the couch group Run For Something.
"It's the movements that are willing to take risks and willing to do bold action over time that are the most successful," says writer and activist L.A. Kauffman, author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism.
"Obviously you can't stay in crisis mode and at a fever pitch for year after year after year," she adds, "but I see a lot of people recognizing that this is the long haul. What the movements are doing together is creating a crisis for the Trump administration, and in so doing, managing to slow down some of the worst of the harm."
While ACT UP's activism centered on an array of complex issues, the central focus of HIV and AIDS was a unifying and organizing force. But anger at Trump is broad, diffuse and across a range of issues from health care to climate change.
"It's a different animal, there's not one single thing to organize against," Wolfe says. "What we need is how to sustain focus. You can't just do one action, let's say, against (senior presidential adviser Steve) Bannon. You have to do many such actions."
"We know now that nominally democratic governments don't have to listen to social protests," says activist and writer Micah White, who helped launch the Occupy Wall Street protests. "You can get 4 million people into the streets and there is no requirement in our Constitution or in our laws that the president has to listen. He's able to say, 'Thanks. Now go home.' And they go home."
White now advocates a rural, Internet-enabled progressive movement where activists get elected to local offices and prove they can govern.
"As social protesters, we need to stop with this naïve belief that if we just get more people into the streets, then we'll get what we want. It's not true!" White says.
Finkelstein notes that he did not come up with the Silence=Death logo quickly on the back of a napkin one night over a beer. It was, he says, a deliberative, iterative process with five friends that took about six months to produce.
He's not against big marches like January's massive Women's March in cities across America and the world, or the upcoming Earth Day March for Science.
But his lesson from creating the iconic ACT UP logo: there's tremendous power in smaller actions that can reverberate in unexpected ways.
"If that million people were broken into small groups of four and five, think of the power that could have," Finkelstein says. "Pussy Riot was four people with a boombox, and it totally changed the way we thought about Putin's administration."
Rise and Resist and several other anti-Trump groups are still groping, in these early days, with what tactics might have a real impact with a famously media-savvy mogul turned president, who may be thin-skinned, but knows how to punch back.
"A lot of super smart people that I know are so distracted by the scorching lava flow of Trump's campaign, and now his first days in office, that they seem to be unable to think strategically about it," Finkelstein says. "That surprises me, frankly. The toolbox for doing so is right in front of us." |
In Germany this year, the Protestant church is celebrating 500 years since Martin Luther brought about the Reformation. Today, as the number of churchgoers dwindles, the clergy is turning to new media to appeal to those with little time to attend worship in person.
In the eastern city of Magdeburg, the monotone peal of a single church bell calls a modest flock of parishioners to evening prayers at the Walloon Reformed Church of St. Augustine.
As the faithful file into a High Gothic church where Martin Luther once delivered a sermon, most fumble around in handbags and pockets, looking for their cellphones.
But instead of dutifully switching off their phones and putting them away on this Friday evening, these 40 or so churchgoers take a pew and bow their heads over their lit-up devices as if they were prayer books.
This is a Twitter service, where the congregation is encouraged to tweet about the liturgy and share their prayers online.
Pastor Ralf Peter Reimann says it's an experiment. He believes that social media can help the Protestant church retain and even gain followers, even in today's increasingly secular society.
"There are lots of people who live online," he says. "We want to include these people and offer them to participate in a way that's comfortable to them."
While Reimann preaches from behind the lectern, a chorus of young parishioners perching in the choir stalls tweets about his sermon. Above them, a large screen displays a hash-tagged feed which, in real time, shows tweets coming from both within the church and from around Germany.
"Luther talked about the priesthood of all believers," Reimann says. "So if you use social media, it's not only the pastor communicating on behalf of the church, but Christians communicating among each other."
Although such Twitter services are yet to catch on, embracing the latest media trend is nothing new for Protestants.
Five-hundred years ago, when Martin Luther first protested against corruption in the Catholic Church, it was the then relatively new printing press that helped his challenge to papal authority to "go viral."
Luther's supporters printed his radical ideas in pamphlets. Cheap to produce and easy to distribute, these pamphlets fostered public debate.
Ulrike Zitzlsperger, a professor of German studies at the University of Exeter in England, says the 16th century pamphlet was the social media of Luther's day.
"I think the parallels with the use of Twitter today are really strong," Zitzlsperger says. "You've got a topic that engages not just an educated public but really the wider public, the lay people. Everybody has a say."
Luther's followers shared these pamphlets and responded to them by printing their own. These Twitter-like discussions spread so rapidly that the Catholic Church could do little to censor what it called heresy.
Today though, it's no longer dissent but disinterest that threatens the Christian church in Europe.
Back in Magdeburg, the Twitter service is in full swing. Messages from around Germany, where dozens of others participated, are displayed on the church's interactive screen in front of the altar.
Some posts are encouraging, like the one from a Twitter user who tweets in German, "We all make mistakes. God will show us the right way."
Some users share their private prayers, like one who posts: "I pray for the unborn child in my belly and that it is blessed with good health."
Other users are less convinced. "Sorry, this is too hectic," one writes. "I go to church to find inner peace. I'm signing off."
It's also too much for 86-year-old Ingeborg Brunner, who tiptoes out of church before the Twitter service is over. Brunner doesn't own a smartphone, so she feels somewhat left out.
"It was certainly interesting, but it's not my cup of tea" Brunner admits. "I'm a little old for Twitter. I prefer a proper service, when we get to sing hymns."
While Brunner says she's pleased the church is appealing to the digitally devout, regular churchgoers like her would rather sing than tweet.
After all, congregational singing is another major legacy of the Reformation. |
Gandelina Damião, 78, is permanently hunched, carrying her sorrow. She lost three children to heroin in the 1990s.
A quarter century ago, her cobblestone lane, up a grassy hill from Lisbon's Tagus River, was littered with syringes. She recalls having to search for her teenagers in graffitied stone buildings nearby, where they would shoot up.
"It was a huge blow," Damião says, pointing to framed photos on her wall of Paulo, Miguel and Liliana. "I was a good mother. I never gave them money for drugs. But I couldn't save them."
For much of the 20th century, Portugal was a closed, Catholic society, with a military dictator and no drug education. In the early 1970s, young Portuguese men were drafted to fight wars in the country's African colonies, where many were exposed to drugs for the first time. Some came home addicted.
In 1974, there was a revolution — and an explosion of freedom.
"It was a little bit like the Americans in Vietnam. Whiskey was cheaper than water, and cannabis was easy to access. So people came home from war with some [drug] habits," says João Goulão, Portugal's drug czar. "Suddenly everything was different [after the revolution]. Freedom! And drugs were something that came with that freedom. But we were completely naive."
By the 1990s, 1 percent of Portugal's population was hooked on heroin. It was one of the worst drug epidemics in the world, and it prompted Portugal's government to take a novel approach: It decriminalized all drugs. Starting in 2001, possession or use of any drug — even heroin — has been treated as a health issue, not a crime.
Goulão, who had worked as a family physician in his 20s, at the height of the crisis, says there was very little opposition to the policy change.
"Every family had its own drug addict. It was so, so present in everyday life, that it turned public opinion," Goulão says. "We are dealing with a chronic relapsing disease, and this is a disease like any other. I do not put a diabetic in jail, for instance."
Under the 2001 decriminalization law, authored by Goulão, drug dealers are still sent to prison. But anyone caught with less than a 10-day supply of any drug — including heroin — gets mandatory medical treatment. No judge, no courtroom, no jail.
Instead they end up in a sparsely furnished, discreet, unmarked office in downtown Lisbon, for counselling with government sociologists, who decide whether to refer them to drug treatment centers.
"It's cheaper to treat people than to incarcerate them," says sociologist Nuno Cabaz. "If I come across someone who wants my help, I'm in a much better position to provide it than a judge would ever be. Simple as that."
Cabaz's team of 10 counselors handles all of Lisbon's roughly 2,500 drug cases a year. It may sound like a lot, but it's actually a 75 percent drop from the 1990s. Portugal's drug-induced death rate has plummeted to five times lower than the European Union average.
Along a row of abandoned buildings in northern Lisbon, field psychologists took NPR to meet some of Portugal's remaining drug users. The hillside is littered with needles, and bursting with wildflowers. The sky rumbles with airliners landing at the international airport nearby.
There's a philosophy book on a cement stoop next to a middle-aged man who's smoking crack cocaine. He gives his name as Rui, and says the stigma against addicts has eased since decriminalization.
"Now, not so much. It's less, because the methadone is coming, and people are treating this problem," he says. "They see the drugs with another perspective."
Every day, a government van pulls up and gives him a dose of methadone, an opioid that helps wean people off of heroin. It's a step toward harm-reduction. He still does cocaine, but no longer shoots up.
Drug-related HIV infections in Portugal have dropped 95 percent.
Drug workers hand out packets with clean needles and condoms, and listen to another addict, Antonio, describe his anxiety.
"If the drugs hurt too much my body, I escape a little, and then I come back again," he says. "But it's a world I cannot escape! If I turn there, it's there — it's everywhere. I cannot escape."
For every person in Portugal who cannot escape addiction, there's daily methadone, counseling and free treatment. A generation ago, these addicts were put in jail. Now they're on the street.
But polls show the Portuguese — having lived through the ravages of a heroin epidemic — overwhelmingly support this policy. |
Before making revisions to Animal Care Services' strategic plan, the City is gathering public input on how to handle San Antonio's stray pet and animal population.
There are also suggested changes to the Chapter 5 animal ordinance, which include a ban on tethering animals overnight and the number of animals an individual can legally own. Another topic up for discussion is mandatory spaying and neutering.
Citizens can share feedback through a series of public meetings, which began in February and will continue through mid-May. Proposals for ordinance changes will be submitted to City Council later this year.
The next public meeting is scheduled tonight at Miller’s Pond Community Center from 6:30 to 8 p.m. For more dates and an online version of the survey, click here.
Guests:
Officer Shannon Sims, assistant director of the City of San Antonio's Animal Care Services department
Lisa Norwood, public relations and outreach manager at the City of San Antonio's Animal Care Services department
*Audio for this segment will be available by 3:30 p.m. on April 18 |
Every day in this country students come to school without a way to pay for lunch. Right now it's up to the school to decide what happens next.
Since new legislation out of New Mexico on so-called lunch shaming made headlines - we've heard a lot about how schools react.
Some provide kids an alternative lunch, like a cold cheese sandwich. Other schools sometimes will provide hot lunch, but require students do chores, have their hand stamped or wear a wristband showing they're behind in payment. And, some schools will deny students lunch all together.
With policies to handle unpaid meals all over the map, the USDA, which administers the federal school meal program, will soon require that all school districts have a policy on what to do when kids can't pay - a growing problem. By July 1, those policies must be in writing and communicated to staff, parents and the community.
"We're saying feed these children first, and let the grownups sort out the finances," says Jennifer Ramo, who's with the anti-hunger group, New Mexico Appleseed. About nine years ago she says she started hearing stories about kids receiving a tray of food only to have it tossed out by a cafeteria worker when they realized students didn't have the money to pay.
Seeing the need, Ramo worked with New Mexico state Sen. Michael Padilla to write the state law banning schools from shaming children without the ability to pay for meals.
"A lot of people are very disgusted by this practice and they're reaching out – calling their own state senators and state representatives and asking them to get on it immediately," says Sen. Padilla. Since the bill became law earlier this month, he says lawmakers from around the country have reached out to see how they can address the same issues where they are.
Texas and California are already working on similar legislation. California Democratic state Sen. Robert Hertzberg introduced the Child Hunger Prevention and Fair Treatment Act.
"When I presented the bill, the two Republican senators on the committee joined as co-authors. How great is that? It just tells you this is not a partisan issue. It's a basic fundamental human issue everybody gets," he says.
The School Nutrition Association found about 75 percent of districts had some unpaid student meal debt at the end of the last school year. Part of the challenge is that students who qualify for free or reduced priced meals through the federal school lunch program, aren't signed up. The law in New Mexico aims to deal with that fact.
Jennifer Ramo says her state law is leading the way. Perhaps the timing couldn't be better. She says she's confident that because districts must now put their debt policies in writing, they will get much more scrutiny.
"I'm hoping communities really put pressure on their own districts to say, 'We want our children fed,'" she says. |
What we eat can influence more than our waistlines. It turns out, our diets also help determine what we smell like.
A recent study found that women preferred the body odor of men who ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. Whereas men who ate a lot of carbohydrates gave off a smell that was less appealing.
Skeptical? At first, I was, too. I thought this line of inquiry must have been dreamed up by the produce industry. (Makes a good marketing campaign, right?!)
But it's legit. "We've known for a while that odor is an important component of attractiveness, especially for women," says Ian Stephen of Macquarie University in Australia. He studies evolution, genetics and psychology and is an author of the study.
From an evolutionary perspective, scientists say our sweat can help signal our health status, and could possibly play a role in helping attract a mate.
So, how did scientists evaluate the link between diet and the attractiveness of body odor?
They began by recruiting a bunch of healthy, young men. They assessed the men's skin using an instrument called a spectrophotometer. When people eat a lot of colorful veggies, their skin takes on the hue of carotenoids, the plant pigments that are responsible for bright red, yellow and orange foods.
"The carotenoids get deposited in our skin," explains Stephen. The spectrophotometer "flashes a light onto your skin and measures the color reflected back," says Stephen. The results are "a good indicator of how much fruits and vegetables we're eating," he says.
Stephen and his colleagues also had the men in the study compete food frequency questionnaires, so they could determine the men's overall patterns of eating. Then, men were given clean T-shirts and asked to do some exercise.
Afterwards, women in the study were asked to sniff the sweat. (Note: The methodology was much more scientific and precise than my breezy explanation, but you get the picture!) "We asked the women to rate how much they liked it, how floral, how fruity," and a bunch of other descriptors, explains Stephen.
It's a small study, but the results were pretty consistent. "Women basically found that men who ate more vegetables smelled nicer," Stephen told us.
Men who ate a lot of meat did not produce a sweat that was any more — or less — attractive to women. But meat did tend to make men's odor more intense.
"This is not the first study to show that diet influences body odor," says George Preti, an adjunct professor in the dermatology department at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
A study published in 2006 found that women preferred the odor of men who ate a non-meat diet, "characterized by increased intakes of eggs, cheese, soy, fruit and vegetables."
But Preti points out that the relationship between diet and body odor is indirect.
Some people think if they eat a garlic or onion — or a piece of meat — they will smell like that food. "But that's not what happens," Preti says. Your breath might smell like the food you eat, but not your sweat.
Body odor is created when the bacteria on our skin metabolize the compounds that come out of our sweat glands.
"The sweat doesn't come out smelly," Preti explains, "It must be metabolized by the bacteria that live on the surface of the skin."
Now, of course, at a time when good hygiene and deodorant use are commonplace, is the smell of our sweat a big concern?
I put that question to the happy-hour crowd at a bar down the street from the NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C.
"I'm pretty OK with my smell," Stefan Ruffini told me. That evening he was ordering a burger on a bun and a side of fries, along with a beer. When I told him about the findings of the study, he laughed it off.
"I've got a girlfriend, so I don't worry about these things!"he said.
The study did not assess diet and odor attractiveness among same-sex couples.
"As a lesbian, I haven't smelled a man in several years," Stacy Carroll, who was also at happy hour, told me. "I eat a lot of produce, I have a girlfriend, so it's working out!"
Carroll says people who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables are more likely to be interested in their health --"feeling good, looking fit" — than their smell. |
On Saturday, white supremacists converged on Charlottesville, Va. to protest the pending removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Their stated goal: to "take America back" — and to begin doing so by saving Lee's monument, which has become a lightning rod since the local city council voted to remove it earlier this year.
Within hours, three people had died in the chaos surrounding the gathering — one of whom was rammed by a car allegedly driven by a rally attendee.
And within three days, politicians in a number of cities, far from protecting their own Confederate monuments, had instead moved to hasten their removal. In Baltimore and Jacksonville, Fla., in Memphis and Lexington, Ky., local leaders acted to begin getting rid of these long-standing landmarks.
"Mayors are on the razor's edge. When you see the tension. When you see the violence that we saw in Charlottesville," Lexington Mayor Jim Gray told a local CBS affiliate, "then you know that we must act."
He said Sunday he has recommended to the city council that the statues depicting Confederate officers John C. Breckinridge and John Hunt Morgan be relocated to a new site where they would stand side by side with with "two monuments to the Union effort." In their current location, the Confederate monuments stand on land that formerly played host to one of the South's largest slave auction blocks.
"It's just not right that we would continue to honor these Confederate men who fought to preserve slavery on the same ground as men, women and even children were once sold into a life of slavery," Gray said in a video statement. "Relocating these statues and explaining them is the right thing to do."
Meanwhile, in Memphis, city leaders re-asserted their longstanding resistance to Confederate monuments on public land, promising again to fight for those statues' removal. State lawmakers have required that these memorials could only be moved with a waiver from the Tennessee Historical Commission, which has previously rejected the city's attempts to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest.
"What Nathan Bedford Forrest stood for doesn't express the views of this community at this time," City Attorney Bruce McMullen told the local Commercial Appeal, "and it's counterproductive to what we want this community to be, and that is an inclusive community working together."
Along with the still-pending waiver application to have Forrest's statue removed, McMullen told the paper the city plans to apply for a waiver to pull a monument to Confederate President Jefferson Davis from a park.
In Baltimore, too, Mayor Catherine Pugh said Monday that she had reached out to contractors to discuss relocating the city's four monuments to the Confederacy, according to The Baltimore Sun.
The city council president in Jacksonville, Fla., said Monday she is preparing a plan to relocate its Confederate monuments "from public property to museums and educational institutions where they can be respectfully preserved and historically contextualized." Elsewhere in Florida, in Gainesville, construction workers took down a 113-year-old Confederate statue Monday morning.
"There was no riot. No protesters showed up," The Gainesville Sun reported.
Some protesters did not even wait for city leaders. In Durham, N.C., shouting demonstrators pulled down a monument to Confederate soldiers, kicking it after it fell to the ground.
In all, "at least 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy can be found in public spaces across the country, mostly in the Deep South," the Southern Poverty Law Center noted in a report last year. "Most were put in place during the early decades of Jim Crow or in reaction to the civil rights movement."
And many of them remain flashpoints of controversy between those who wish to see them removed and those who see them as crucial markers of their community's past.
As for Lexington, Gray said the relocation of his city's monuments would enable residents to "tell the story accurately and share a truthful history."
"It's true that hiding our history won't allow our future generations to learn and avoid the same mistakes," Gray said. "But keeping monuments to those who fought to preserve slavery on this hallowed ground is simply not right." |
A Denver jury found fully in pop singer Taylor Swift's favor Monday, delivering a unanimous verdict in a trial over whether she was groped by a former radio host during a Denver meet-and-greet. Wanting the trial to serve as an "example to other women," the star had sought a single dollar in damages, which she was granted.
In his closing statements, Swift's lawyer Douglas Baldridge referenced the example that Swift hoped her suit could be for others in similar situations "by returning a verdict on Ms. Swift's counterclaim for a single dollar — a single symbolic dollar, the value of which is immeasurable to all women in this situation."
In his own closing arguments, David Mueller attorney Gabriel McFarland wondered why his client would introduce himself by name and then almost immediately after reach under the skirt of "one of the planet's, one of the country's, biggest superstars?"
The case was largely fought on the credibility of Swift and Mueller.
Late this past Friday, a federal judge threw out part of the case brought against Swift by Mueller, saying he had not proven Swift had set out to get him fired.
Swift countersued Mueller for sexual assault after his own suit was filed in 2015, leading to Denver trial which began jury selection last Monday. Swift initially had sought to keep the incident quiet.
By Friday, most of the principals in the case had been heard from — most notably Ms. Swift herself, who had several sharp rejoinders to questions from Mueller's attorney. Asked about Mueller's firing, Swift responded: "I am not going to allow your client to make me feel like it is anyway my fault, because it isn't." |
The Daily Stormer, a Neo-Nazi website that promoted the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., will no longer be hosted by GoDaddy, after the service received calls to ban the site over its hate-filled stories.
The Daily Stormer is now seen as trying to spin the threat of being taken down, with the site posting a story that claims to be written by hackers affiliated with the activist group Anonymous. That story includes a threat to delete the site within 24 hours. But a main source of news about Anonymous says the group doesn't seem to be involved.
The dispute over the website comes after a violent weekend in Charlottesville culminated in the killing of Heather Heyer, 32, an anti-white nationalist protester. Police say James Alex Fields Jr., 20, killed Heyer when he drove his car into a crowd of people.
The Daily Stormer then published a story mocking Heyer and making light of the events in Virginia, prompting calls for GoDaddy, which hosts the site, to be taken down.
Posting a link to the offending story, women's rights advocate Amy Siskind wrote via Twitter, "@GoDaddy you host The Daily Stormer - they posted this on their site. Please retweet if you think this hate should be taken down & banned."
More than 6,500 people retweeted that message, and the web service replied late Sunday night, "We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service."
In the story on the Daily Stormer, the purported hackers say they'll delete the site by the same deadline set by GoDaddy. But in a break with notable hacking takeovers, the story doesn't appear as a message plastered on the front of the site; instead, it's published alongside other pieces, including the one about Heyer.
The Daily Stormer is published by Andrew Anglin, who also writes much of its most high-profile content; the site is supported by reader donations rather than by advertising.
The alleged hackers' message included the hashtag #TANGODOWN — a term that was quickly used by opponents of the site's views to celebrate its seeming demise. News organizations around the world ran stories about the apparent takeover, which had included the explanation, "this evil cannot be allowed to stand."
But a Twitter account that often relays news about Anonymous states, "We have no confirmation that 'Anonymous' is involved yet. Looks more like a DS stunt. Wonder if they are having issues finding a new host."
Referring to the all-caps message posted on the site — about an elite team targeting Anglin and his site — the account states, "We find claim that it took a 'UNITED FORCE OF ELITE HACKERS' to hack a CMS run by amateurs incredibly amusing."
People commenting on the Daily Stormer site also found the situation amusing, noting that the supposed hackers had said they had located Anglin and would be "sending our allies in Lagos to pay him a visit in person."
"LOL, this meme just won't end," one person wrote about the Lagos reference.
Earlier this year, Anglin's website was linked to an office in Worthington, Ohio, the Columbus suburb where he went to high school. As Columbus Alive reported, "Anglin's current whereabouts remain unknown."
The most popular response on the comment board was one that mocked people on Twitter who had announced the Daily Stormer had been taken over.
"Anglin you are a legend," one person wrote. |
When Javier Duarte stepped down from office last October, the former governor of Mexico's Veracruz state vowed to fight the mounting corruption allegations that unraveled his tenure.
"The circumstances created by false accusations ... force me to dedicate myself full-time to clear my name and that of my family," Duarte said on Oct. 13, according to The Yucatan Times, just one day after he ended his term six weeks early.
Then, Duarte disappeared.
It would be another half-year before the he surfaced — this time in handcuffs, escorted from his hotel at a lakeside resort in Guatemala on Saturday night. Authorities say he had been squirreled away in a hotel room with his wife, attempting to pass as a tourist.
Now he is in a prison cell in Guatemala City, awaiting his widely expected extradition back to Mexico, where Reuters reports he'll face allegations that he diverted public funds for his personal enrichment. That includes a luxury ranch — packed with paintings by masters such as Joan Miro and Leonora Carrington, the BBC reports — that authorities say was paid for by siphoned dollars.
During his roughly six years in office, Duarte's Gulf Coast state also earned the inglorious distinction of becoming "one of the world's most lethal regions for the press," according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The CPJ estimated last year that at least 12 journalists were murdered during Duarte's tenure; other organizations have placed that number even higher.
A 2012 dispatch from CPJ correspondent Mike O'Connor explains the atmosphere that took shape under Duarte:
"Veracruz is a beautiful, long, thin state on the Gulf coast of Mexico where many journalists are terrified not only of the rampant organized crime groups that kill and control, but also of the state government. Fear that state officials will order them murdered for what they investigate or write has forced about a dozen journalists to flee the state, claiming that fear also puts a clamp on coverage for those who remain."
And that's not to mention the mass grave discovered outside Veracruz city last month that contained 252 bodies, many of which are believed to have been buried years ago.
Strikingly, Duarte's allegation-plagued tenure was by no means uncommon. The politician isn't the only former Mexican governor to draw prosecutors' attention — nor was he the only former leader in his own party, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, to go on the lam for an extended period.
Former Tamaulipas Gov. Tomás Yarrington was caught in Florence, Italy, just last week after five years on the run. U.S. prosecutors have alleged he "accepted millions of dollars in drug cartel bribes and invested it in Texas real estate," according to The Associated Press. And The Wall Street Journal, citing orders issued by state police, says that Yarrington had been assigned eight law enforcement officers as bodyguards as late as last year.
Meanwhile former Chihuahua Gov. Cesar Duarte — no relation — has still eluded authorities after he stepped down last year. Once a rising star in the PRI like Javier Duarte (who was suspended from the party around the time of his disappearance) and Yarrington, Cesar Duarte is being pursued over embezzlement charges.
All of this makes for a rather persistent problem for the party's leader, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has been battling historically terrible approval ratings.
So it's not too much of a surprise that, as the AP reports, the PRI cheered the capture of the former Veracruz governor, who the party said should "be punished in an exemplary fashion, as well as anyone who is confirmed to have taken part in his criminal ring."
Still, it will do little to erase the rather unexemplary records of many governors across Mexico — and not just those in the PRI. The Duartes have plenty of company.
The Los Angeles Times breaks it down: In a country of 31 states and one federal district, nearly a dozen governors recently out of office are on the lam, under investigation or already in prison. |
The Symphony of the Hills has its first concert of the new year this Saturday night. If you don't know them, the Symphony of the Hills is situated in Kerrville, but people come from all around to hear symphonic music they won't otherwise hear. Gene Dowdy is its conductor.
"We're very proud that people come from all over: Junction, Hunt, Harper, Fredericksburg, Comfort, Boerne. People drive from San Antonio; I've got friends who come up, watch the shows."
As the Symphony normally does, this first concert of the year is thematic. Its theme: The Best of Broadway.
"We're going to kick off the night with Phantom of the Opera, so those big, thundering chords...bum-bum-bum! But we're also going to do both new and old, so A Chorus Line, Marvin Hamlisch's great book. Fiddler on the Roof. We're doing a beautiful orchestral setting, and this is really cool, arranged by the great film composer John Williams."
Dowdy continued with his rundown.
"And then My Fair Lady--Lerner and Lowe, just a wonderful duo--I Could've Danced All Night. Second half we're going to kick off with something newer--the music from Wicked. Very wonderful Steven Schwartz music. Cabaret--Fabulous musical. And it is interesting how these musicals tend to jump to Hollywood. Here's one that went the other way: The Lion King. Started as this wonderful animated special. Music by Elton John, Hans Zimmer, great collaborators, but then jumped to Broadway. And then we're going to end the concert with Oklahoma...Rodgers and Hammerstein, the great orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett. Oh What a Beautiful Morning."
For those thinking of going it all happens 7:30 this Saturday at Kerrville's Kathleen Cailloux Theater.
"This music is timeless. We're looking forward to welcoming everybody for a new year and a new season."
Find more on the Symphony of the Hills here. |
If you haven’t filed your taxes yet, there’s still time since the IRS extended the deadline to Tuesday this year.
Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson gets advice on last-minute ways to save you time and money on your taxes with CBS News’ Jill Schlesinger (@jillonmoney), host of “Jill on Money” and the podcast “Better Off.” |
There's an unplanned experiment going on in the northern Rocky Mountains. What's happening is that spring is arriving earlier, and it's generally warmer and drier than usual. And that's messing with some of the fish that live there.
The fish is the iconic cutthroat trout. It's a native North American fish that thrives in cold, small streams. Explorer Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark Expedition fame was among the first European-Americans to catch this spangly, spotted fish. He used deer spleen as bait.
It's relative rarity now makes it a favorite for catch-and-release anglers. But biologists have now found that it's in danger. The much more common rainbow trout is invading cutthroat streams and mating with the native fish. Ecologist Clint Muhlfeld says that creates hybrids.
"It jumbles up the genes that are linked to the locally adapted traits that these fish have evolved with," says Muhlfeld, who's with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Montana's Flathead Lake Biological Station.
Those traits have allowed cutthroats to survive through millennia in cold northern streams. And cold streams were thought to protect them from rainbows, which prefer warmer water.
But climate change is warming many high-altitude streams, and they frequently have less water, another change that favors rainbows. So they're moving in.
Muhlfeld says that when rainbows and cutthroats breed, the resulting hybrids are feeble — "less fit," in biological terms. "They don't survive as well as the native fish," he says. And hybrids that do survive continue to make more hybrids; there's no going back to making cutthroats again.
Writing in the journal Global Change Biology, Muhlfeld and a team of scientists from several research institutions studied fish in hundreds of locations in the northern Rockies. Hybridization was widespread. It was most common in places where fish and game departments have introduced rainbow trout, a practice that goes back to the 19th century.
Some states are trying to solve the problem by getting rid of rainbow trout. That might not please some anglers, but Muhlfeld says the cutthroat species could disappear otherwise.
"There are so many places around the world where you can go catch a rainbow trout," he says; it's been introduced all over the world. "There's very few places where you can actually go and catch a native fish that's been around for thousands and thousands of years.
"Extinction is permanent. Once the native genomes and adaptive traits are gone, they are gone forever." |
Here's what we've been told about passwords:
Make them complicated.
Use numbers, question marks and hash marks.
Change them regularly.
Use different passwords for each app and website.
Of course, these guidelines often leave users frustrated and struggling to remember them all.
Now, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is about the make all of our lives much easier. The organization recently revised its guidelines on creating passwords, and the new advice sharply diverges from previous rules.
"The traditional guidance is actually producing passwords that are easy for bad guys and hard for legitimate users," says Paul Grassi, senior standards and technology adviser at NIST, who led the new revision of guidelines.
The organization suggests keeping passwords simple, long and memorable. Phrases, lowercase letters and typical English words work well, Grassi tells NPR's Audie Cornish. Experts no longer suggest special characters and a mixture of lower and uppercase letters. And passwords never need to expire.
"We focus on the cognitive side of this, which is what tools can users use to remember these things?" Grassi says. "So if you can picture it in your head, and no one else could, that's a good password."
While these rules may seem suspiciously easy, Grassi says these guidelines help users create longer passwords that are harder for hackers to break. And he says the computer security industry in both the public and private sectors has received these new rules positively.
"It works because we are creating longer passwords that cryptographically are harder to break than the shorter ones, even with all those special character requirements," Grassi says. "We are really bad at random passwords, so the longer the better."
Previously, security experts recommended the use of password manager apps to ensure users' accounts were protected. Grassi says these apps are useful because they completely randomize the password, but he says they aren't necessary to maintain security.
Grassi stands by these new guidelines because he says previous tips for passwords impacted users negatively and did not do much to boost security. When users change their passwords every 90 days, they often aren't dramatically changing the password, Grassi says.
"I'm pretty sure you're not changing your entire password; you're shifting one character," he says. "Everyone does that, and the bad guys know that." |
Florinda Lorenzo has been in the U.S. illegally for more than a decade but checks in with federal immigration agents in Baltimore several times a year. Until recently, it had become routine, almost like a trip to the dentist.
Many immigrants — like Lorenzo — who are here illegally are not in hiding. Hundreds of thousands of them report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a regular basis. They've been allowed to stay because past administrations considered them a low priority for deportation.
But with the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, that once-routine check-in has become a nerve-wracking experience. In recent weeks, some immigrants say they've been detained without warning at their ICE check-ins.
"It creates a lot of chaos for me," Lorenzo says through an interpreter. "I know lots of people are getting deported now, and I wouldn't want to be deported."
Lorenzo came to the U.S. from Guatemala 14 years ago. She has three children, two of them U.S. citizens who were born here. Lorenzo was arrested in 2010 and charged with selling prepaid phone cards without a license. The charges were dropped, but she's been required to check in with ICE since then.
Before her most recent appointment earlier this month, Lorenzo looked nervous. Her eyes were red.
"It's hard for my family, for me ... my kids, my husband," Lorenzo says. "It's very painful and stressful for me. ... I just hope I go back to my children today."
A few dozen friends gathered to pray and show their support — both for Lorenzo's sake, and for ICE officials, in case they were watching. Nick Katz, a lawyer with CASA de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy group, accompanied Lorenzo to provide legal help in case she was detained.
"The environment is so uncertain," Katz says. "We've heard stories of people being taken into custody. We know of at least one mother who was taken into custody out of a check-in."
Across the U.S., judges have issued final removal orders for more than 900,000 people in the country illegally. Many remain as long as they check in regularly with ICE.
Under the Obama administration, they were not considered priorities for deportation because they had clean criminal records, or strong ties to their communities. The Trump administration, however, is taking a more aggressive enforcement stance.
President Trump signed executive orders that broadly expanded the number of people who are priorities for deportation. That category now includes many immigrants whose only offense may be entering or staying in the country illegally.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, applauded the move. Von Spakovsky says criminals should be the priority. But, he says, that doesn't mean everyone else should get a free pass.
"You're in the United States illegally; you broke the law to come here illegally," von Spakovsky says. "And the government agency is basically saying, 'That's OK, we're not going to do anything about it.' That just to me is a complete violation of the rule of law."
An ICE spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the check-ins.
Several cases of unauthorized immigrants being detained at their ICE appointments have gotten widespread attention. That could have unintended consequences, says Alonzo Pena, who served as deputy director of ICE in the Obama administration. If agents detain large numbers of immigrants at their check-ins, he says, other immigrants may decide it's too risky to report.
"It's going to send a bad message to others, and it's going to really backfire," Pena says. "They lose faith in the system ... and you don't know where they're at.
"There's nothing good that will come out of that," he says.
Lorenzo emerges from her appointment in the ICE field office with a smile on her face.
"I feel very happy right now. ... My heart isn't as heavy anymore," Lorenzo says. "I don't have the words, but I feel relief."
Lorenzo found out that she can stay, at least for a few more months. She doesn't have to check in with ICE again until October. But neither Lorenzo nor her lawyers can say what will happen when she does. |
Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET
Almost 48 hours after violence engulfed Charlottesville, Va., President Trump called out white nationalist groups by name. Trump's remarks on Monday followed criticism that his initial statement about the clash of protesters did not condemn racist groups specifically.
"Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans," the president said from the White House.
Trump began his remarks talking about his economic accomplishments and plans for trade negotiations before turning his attention to the events over the weekend in Virginia. After the Charlottesville City Council had voted earlier this year to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from one of its parks, white nationalist groups — including white supremacists, the alt-right, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis — descended on the city for a "Unite the Right" rally.
On Friday night, they marched on the normally sleepy college town, home to the University of Virginia, carrying torches. On Saturday conditions turned deadly as hundreds of the white nationalists, some carrying Confederate flags and shields and others in militia-like gear, clashed with counterprotesters in the city streets.
At one point a silver Dodge Challenger, allegedly driven by 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio, rammed into a street filled with counterprotesters. Heather Heyer, 32, was killed, and at least 19 others were injured. Fields was charged with one count of second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and one count of hit and run.
President Trump expressed sympathy to Heyer's family as well as to the families of Virginia State Troopers Lt. H. Jay Cullen and Berke M.M. Bates, who died when their helicopter that was patrolling Saturday's event crashed.
"These three fallen Americans embody the goodness and decency of our nation," Trump said. "In times such as these, America has always shown its true character, responding to hate with love, division with unity, and violence with an unwavering resolve for justice."
Trump spoke after meeting with newly installed FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the White House. He said that the Department of Justice had opened a civil rights investigation into the car attack.
"To anyone who acted criminally at this weekend's racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered," the president said.
Sessions told ABC News on Monday morning that the car crash that had killed Heyer "does meet the definition of domestic terrorism."
"You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation towards the most serious charges that can be brought, because this is unequivocally an unacceptable, evil attack," he said.
The president's condemnations may be too little, too late for those who criticized Trump's initial remarks — and Trump may have missed a critical moment to be the nation's healer in chief. On Saturday, Trump claimed that the clashes were a result of "hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides." Top Republicans, among others, quickly criticized him for not calling out by name the white supremacists, alt-right, KKK and neo-Nazi groups that began the protests.
"Mr. President — we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism," Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., who heads up the GOP Senate campaign committee, tweeted on Saturday.
The White House put out an unsigned statement on Sunday morning, saying that, "The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred and of course that includes white Supremacists, KKK, neo-nazi and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together."
Vice President Pence had gone further than the president in his own comments, telling reporters Sunday night while traveling in Colombia, "We have no tolerance for hate and violence from white supremacists, neo-Nazis or the KKK. These dangerous fringe groups have no place in American public life and in the American debate, and we condemn them in the strongest possible terms."
Trump has been blamed for being slow to criticize white supremacist groups in the past — even as he regularly attacks other targets on Twitter. During the 2016 campaign, Trump came under fire for not immediately disavowing the endorsement of David Duke, a former KKK grand wizard.
Duke, who attended the march in Virginia, said on Saturday that participants' aim was "to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That's what we believed in. That's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he's going to take our country back."
Duke later responded to one of the president's tweets condemning the violence by saying, "I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists." |
A rally with white nationalists chanting phrases like "Jews will not replace us" and "end immigration, one people, one nation" was, as many expressed online, disturbing yet not really all that surprising.
Within hours of the tragedy in Charlottesville, journalists, scholars and other leading voices weighed in around the Internet, with analysis and deeper understanding of how this unfolded.
Below are some of the most revealing pieces we read.
Here at Code Switch, my teammate Gene Demby wrote about about how white nationalists are edging their movement out of the shadows:
"Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader and University of Virginia alum who coined the term 'alt-right,' would likely count that openness as its own incremental success. 'If you greeted someone in 1985 and you said, 'all gays should marry,' you actually would get a lot of laughs,' Spencer told The Atlantic last year, not long after the election. 'By 2015, gay marriage is popular. What is possible has shifted. That's what the alt-right is doing. It's shifting the reality of what's possible, and imagining a reality in which they are.' "
Code Switch alum Matt Thompson, now executive editor at The Atlantic, riffed on the brazenness of the white supremacists who marched this weekend, compared with Klan members of decades past who hid under white hoods. "The shameless return of white supremacy into America's public spaces seems to be happening by degrees, and quickly," Thompson wrote.
Dara Lind, a reporter at Vox who wrote an explainer of the rally and its origins, described it as a "coming-out party for resurgent white nationalism in America."
Nathan Guttman, a reporter with Forward, an online news site aimed at Jewish Americans, penned a vivid piece about covering the march. He recounted watching as Spencer launched into a rant about the mayor of Charlottesville, Michael Signer.
" '[L]ittle Mayor Signer — SEE-NER — how do you pronounce this little creep's name?' asked Richard Spencer, a right-wing leader who dreams of a 'white ethnostate,' as he stood on a bench under a tree to rally his troops, deprived of their protest. The crowd knew exactly how to pronounce his name: 'Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew' some shouted out. The rest burst out in laughter. And that was one of the only moments of levity the alt-right audience gathered under the tree enjoyed."
And Jia Tolentino, a writer for The New Yorker and a graduate of the University of Virginia, meditated on Charlottesville's progressive guise and ability to hide its dark racial past. "While I was at U.V.A., the fact that slaves had built the school was hardly discussed, and the most prominent acknowledgment that Jefferson was a slave owner came on Valentine's Day, when signs went up all over campus that said 'TJ ♥s Sally.' "
Many writers also took on the response from President Trump, whose initial reaction to the violence in Charlottesville condemned equally both sides of the protest. "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides," Trump said, in remarks that brought condemnation from both Democrats and Republicans.
Writing for The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb parsed Trump's initial response further:
"We have seen a great number of false equivalencies in the past two years, and the most recent Presidential election was defined by them. Yet it remains striking to hear Trump imply that Nazis and the interracial group of demonstrators who gathered to oppose them were, in essence, equally wrong. It would have been naïve to expect the President to unambiguously condemn neo-Confederates ("Heritage, not hate," etc.), but Nazis? For reasons that are not hard to discern, the swastika, at least in the United States, has always been more clearly legible as a symbol of racial bigotry than the Confederate flag."
Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, lambasted Trump in a Washington Post piece, writing that the current president was "incapable" of speaking for the nation in the face of tragedy:
"If great words can heal and inspire, base words can corrupt. Trump has been delivering the poison of prejudice in small but increasing doses. In Charlottesville, the effect became fully evident. And the president had no intention of decisively repudiating his work. What do we do with a president who is incapable or unwilling to perform his basic duties? What do we do when he is incapable of outrage at outrageous things? What do we do with a president who provides barely veiled cover for the darkest instincts of the human heart? These questions lead to the dead end of political realism — a hopeless recognition of limited options. But the questions intensify."
On Monday, Trump responded to the increasing pressure to respond more forcefully, and gave a stronger rebuke. "Racism is evil," Trump said. "And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans."
In a piece for Commentary Magazine, John Podhoretz, a former speechwriter for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, cast a skeptical eye toward Trump's remarks on Monday:
"You can choose to have whatever opinion you have on the president's statement today condemning white supremacists, but it's hard to believe he would have read it out if he'd had his druthers. No, the real Donald Trump was the one we saw on Saturday when he decided to condemn violence 'on many sides' in response to the deliberately provocative and intentionally violent neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia; when he decided to refer to the events as 'sad' in tweets; when he wished 'best regards' to those injured by the car that was deliberately smashed into them, killing 1 and injuring 20. When he acted in that way, he was operating according to his instinct. And his instinct said: Do not attack the white supremacists."
What Trump's comments Monday mean for how, exactly, he will handle the resurgence of white supremacists, remains unclear.
As Maggie Haberman of The New York Times tweeted shortly after Trump's remarks on Monday: |
In a neighborhood of Istanbul that's plastered with Arabic signs, a Syrian refugee whips up his specialty — avocado cream smoothies — at the small, colorful cafe where he works.
Majd al-Hassan has been in Turkey for two years, but has yet to learn much Turkish. He doesn't need to. This area is filled with fellow Syrians. He's paid in cash, under the table, and has yet to really integrate into Turkish society, he acknowledges.
"We've got Syrian supermarkets, Syrian restaurants — just like back home," says Hassan, 26. "I haven't even applied for a Turkish ID card. If peace comes to Syria, I'll go home tomorrow."
Nearby, a resident who describes herself as one of the last Turks living on this street near Istanbul's Fatih Mosque says she no longer recognizes her neighborhood.
"Before, this area was only Turkish people, mostly. But now, here, there, everywhere, it's all Syrian people," says Tulay Suleyman, who was born here. "Some Turkish people, they don't like these [new] people. Their culture is a little bit different than ours. [They're] mostly ignorant people — homeless people, low-class."
Xenophobia has flared with the arrival of migrants in parts of Europe. That has not been as big a problem in Turkey, even though there are some 3 million Syrians here — more than in all of Europe combined.
As in Europe, many of the Syrians in Turkey are educated professionals who are under-employed, working off the books for low pay — part of Turkey's swelling black-market economy.
At first, when Syrian refugees began streaming over the Turkish border in 2011, the Turkish government granted them a special protected status — but no work permits.
Many thought the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad would fall quickly — another domino in the Arab Spring — and that Syrian refugees would be able to cross back over the border and return home swiftly.
With the Syrian war now in its seventh year, Turkey has opened a path to Syrians for official employment. But few have taken it.
One of the government's motives in trying to regularize Syrians is that Turks have been worried about having their wages undercut.
"There was a public concern that Turkish people would be unemployed because of the Syrians being employed with lower fees [wages]," says labor lawyer Mehmet Ata Sarikaripoglu. "We see what happened in Europe, and how the politics in Europe has changed after that."
Fearing a political backlash, Turkey started a program in January 2016 to increase work permits for refugees. The government also now requires companies to give Syrians the same pay and benefits as Turks. But the roll-out has been slow.
Integrating Syrians is political too. They tend to be more religious and conservative than many Turks — and they tend to support Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He's floated the idea of offering them Turkish citizenship, but that has prompted a backlash from some opposition parties and more secular Turks.
At an Istanbul municipal office, long lines of Syrians snake across the lobby. People are registering for Turkish ID cards and health care, and signing up their children for public schools — all services they get for free as refugees.
One man yells and shakes with frustration. He says bureaucrats keep telling him to come back tomorrow. Turkey's social services are overloaded with newcomers like himself, he says.
Behind the lobby's front desk, Yahiya Osman helps Syrians register for ID cards and health care. He's a Syrian refugee himself, and has worked here for four years — even though he only got a work permit two weeks ago.
"It makes me eligible for private health insurance, a pension and worker's compensation," says Osman, 33. "You've got to think ahead. We're not sure what's going to happen in Syria. We might have to stay here in Turkey forever."
But Turkish government statistics show out of the 3 million Syrians here, fewer than 14,000 had work permits by January — a year into the program.
"It's a very exhausting procedure," says Sule Akarsu, who manages a charity that teaches Syrian refugees how to do bricklaying and other construction work.
Her work is dedicated to helping Syrian refugees. Yet even she has not applied for work permits for her Syrian staff.
"It takes nearly three months to get permission for the Syrians," she says. "It's also difficult for Turkish industry, doing all these procedures."
Only companies can apply for these permits, not employees, and they must pay monthly social security for each worker — even if it's a Syrian who doesn't plan to stay in Turkey long-term. Some employers say it's not worth the hassle and expense.
There are questions about how much Turkey's government really wants to implement this policy. It has threatened to fine companies that hire Syrians without permits. But the fines are rarely enforced.
At an Istanbul cafe, Adnan Hadad, another Syrian, says it's not just the bureaucracy that slows things down. He's dragged his feet too. When he arrived four years ago, he thought he'd be in Turkey "a couple of years," he says.
"But the Syrian war, and how it eventually evolved, made me realize I'll be here a lot longer," Hadad says.
He still dreams of growing old back home in Syria. But for now, he's starting in on some Turkish paperwork. |
When a young African-American woman headed out solo along the Appalachian Trail, she learned a lot about the politics of race in the great outdoors.
Every year, the Appalachian Trail calls a new crop of hikers, drawn to its grand sweep – 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine. If that’s you this year, you know it’s go time if you want to finish before winter. Rahawa Haile heard the call and followed it all the way, end to end. And she did it alone as a young African-American woman. That is unusual. People of color are under-represented in America’s great outdoors. Rahawa Haile’s got stories. This hour On Point, hiking while black on the Appalachian Trail. — Tom Ashbrook
Guests
Rahawa Haile, essayist and short story writer. She through-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2016. (@RahawaHaile)
Carolyn Finney, professor of geography at the University of Kentucky. Author of “Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans To The Great Outdoors.” (@cfinney4)
From Tom’s Reading List
Outside: Going It Alone — “It will be several months before I realize that most AT hikers in 2016 are unaware of the clear division that exists between what hikers of color experience on the trail (generally positive) and in town (not so much). While fellow through-hikers and trail angels are some of the kindest and most generous people I’ll ever encounter, many trail towns have no idea what to make of people who look like me. They say they don’t see much of ‘my kind’ around here and leave the rest hanging in the air.”
Atlas Obscura: Exit Interview: I Was a Black, Female Thru-Hiker on the Appalachian Trail — “Last year, Rahawa Haile, a writer now based in Oakland, California, became one of the very few black women to attempt to hike the entire trail. (She was able to find exactly one other attempting the feat in 2016.) In March, she began in Georgia, the more popular end of the trail to start on, and by the middle of October had hiked its entire length. She carried along with her, too, a series of books by black authors, which she left in trail shelters along the way.”
BuzzFeed: How Black Books Lit My Way Along The Appalachian Trail — “Everyone had something out here. The love I carried was books. Exceptional books. Books by black authors, their photos often the only black faces I would talk to for weeks. These were writers who had endured more than I’d ever been asked to, whose strength gave me strength in turn. I wanted to show them beauty from heights that a history of terror had made clear were never intended to be theirs. I sought out these titles wherever I could.”
See Photos From Rahawa Haile’s Appalachian Trail Journey |
The Trump administration is giving insurance companies an extra three weeks to decide whether to offer insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act markets, and how much to charge.
The extension comes as insurance companies wait for President Trump to decide whether he will continue to make payments to insurance companies that are called for under the Affordable Care Act but that some Republicans have opposed.
The payments — known as cost-sharing reduction payments — reimburse insurance companies for discounts on copayments and deductibles that they're required by law to offer to low-income customers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the payments this year would be about $7 billion.
Trump has said he may end the reimbursements, which he calls "bailouts," and has been leaving insurers to wonder month to month about whether they will receive a check.
A White House spokesman says Trump is "working with his staff and his Cabinet to consider the issues raised by the CSR payments."
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says it is offering the extra time so insurance companies can plan ahead in case the government decides to end the payments. In a memo Friday, the agency said many states are now requiring companies to file their rates for 2018 on the assumption that they won't be reimbursed.
Several companies say that without the cost-sharing payments, their rates will see double-digit increases. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina says ending the payments would push its rates up 14.1 percent.
And Marc Harrison, CEO of Intermountain Healthcare, which covers 173,000 people in Idaho and Utah, says premium increases could be "astonishing."
Still, he says, his company will stick with the Obamacare markets. "These are our patients. We're not going anywhere. We're going to keep trying to figure this out."
The HHS memo says "there have been no changes regarding HHS's ability to make cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers."
But it then says the agency intends to change the ACA's risk adjustment program to compensate for the loss of cost-sharing payments.
The changes are technical and complex, but Timothy Jost, professor emeritus at Washington & Lee University's law school, says in a Health Affairs blog that the memo just deepens the confusion.
"We still do not know if all of this is needed or not — the Trump administration has not made up its mind," he says.
The cost-sharing payments have been at the center of a political battle over the Affordable Care Act since before President Trump took office.
House Republicans opposed to the health law sued then-President Barack Obama, saying the payments were illegal because Congress hadn't appropriated money for them. A judge agreed but allowed the administration to continue making the payments during an appeal.
Now that Trump is in the White House, and Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act have failed, many Republicans are urging the president to continue the payments rather than undermine the health care markets. |
The Trump administration has begun the process of rolling back tough fuel standards for America's car and light truck fleet.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department have opened the public comment period on the rewriting of standards for greenhouse gas emissions for cars and light trucks for model years 2022-2025.
"We are moving forward with an open and robust review of emissions standards, consistent with the timeframe provided in our regulations," EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said Friday. The 45-day period allows for the public to comment about regulations before proposed changes.
Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules were first put into place after the OPEC oil crisis in the 1970s. During the Obama administration, the CAFE rules were toughened in the wake of the financial crisis and the car company bankruptcies. The new standards called for an increased reliance on electric vehicles.
Low gas prices and sluggish sales of alternative fuel vehicles have made meeting those standards tough, especially for those companies more reliant on larger vehicles. Earlier this year, the EPA announced it would reconsider a decision late in the Obama administration to make the rules permanent.
The auto industry has hailed the decision to reopen the fuel standards. With the announcement, Mitch Bainwol, president and CEO of the Auto Alliance, a group of auto manufacturers, says, "the Administration is fulfilling its commitment to reinstate the midterm evaluation of future vehicle fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards."
Environmental and consumer advocacy groups decried the move. "By reopening the midterm evaluation, EPA is bringing back questions that have already been asked and answered," said Consumers Union, the policy arm of Consumer Reports.
Shannon Baker-Branstetter with Consumer's Union says her organization's studies show people want to save money on gas. According to a recent survey, 90 percent of Americans want automakers to raise fuel efficiency. Baker-Branstetter says adds "In fact, consumers are especially concerned about the fuel efficiency of the crossovers and SUVs they've been gravitating toward in recent years."
"What kind of changes may or may not be introduced is far from clear", says Stephanie Brinley, senior automotive analyst, IHS Markit. The agencies are expected to expand the data used to make the determination, specifically taking into consideration consumer behavior, she says.
The public comment period allows the car companies and others to lobby to keep or make changes.
"Pressures from other government requirements and consumer interest in reducing fuel emissions are expected to continue to be aggressive," Brinley says.
Even if the U.S. scales back, she says, the movement toward higher standards will likely continue in other countries. Already this year, several countries said they would ban the sale of gasoline vehicles altogether within decades. Many analysts believe that rolling back fuel standards could jeopardize the near term future for electric vehicles. |
Here in San Antonio, the Confederate monument in downtown’s Travis Park was at the center of separate protests this weekend. Confederate supporters gathered in Travis Park to voice opposition to the monument's potential relocation while those who want it removed held a demonstration of their own. The words exchanged between the two sides were heated, but the protests were without violence.
Confederate, U.S. and Texas flags decorated one corner of Travis Park as about 250 people – some armed with long rifles and other fire arms – sang the song of Dixie.
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Paul Gramling is a commander with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He came to protest from Shreveport, Louisiana. He says confederate monuments across the country are war memorials and symbols of heritage.
“They were put in spots where they are to remember and memorialize the dead soldiers - our dead men - who didn’t’ come off the battlefield, who never made it home. That’s what these monuments are for,” Gramling said.
The protest was organized by a group called This is Texas Freedom Force in response to a request by San Antonio City Council members Roberto Trevino and Cruz Shaw to re-locate the monument; possibly to a museum.
The tall obelisk like monument features an unnamed soldier at the top. It was erected in the late 1890s by the daughters of the confederacy.
Short video of both sides from today's protests over the Travis Park Confederate Monument @TPRNews pic.twitter.com/z290er7uW9 — Joey Palacios (@Joeycules) August 12, 2017
Across the park nearly another 250 people held a rally of their own in support of removing it, chanting “Take it down, take it down.” Jonathan David Jones is a community activist and often participates in Black Lives Matter events.
“This monument should have been gone a long a time ago. It needs to go now. We don’t care what they do with it. They can put it in one of their homes if they want to, but it doesn’t belong in public space,” Jones said.
Jones feels the confederacy stood for white supremacy. “They say it’s for heritage, they say it’s for history, but we know what it’s really about,” he added.
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San Antonio Police had the two sides separated with barricades. Police Chief William McManus says it was to prevent physical confrontations. “My issue is keeping the peace during these types of demonstrations and having had about 28 years of experience with this in DC the most effective way to keep these folks separate is putting up fencing,” McManus said.
SAPD estimates at least 500 people were present in the park. The fencing kept the sides mostly apart. That didn’t stop them from taunting each other with wars of words. Travis Park seemed to mirror the mood of the country in recent months.
There were no violent confrontations. At least one person was arrested from the counter protestors’ side. Police charged 20-year-old Michael Murphy with assault.
The PA systems on both ends dueled with each other. On the confederate supporters side, Jeffrey Addicott, a professor at St. Mary’s University said the group did not stand for racism.
“We’ve got black individuals out here, we’ve got white, we’ve got grey, we’ve got yellow, we’ve got a diversity of people. This is not about racism. And if any of you are racist in here please see me afterwards, I’d love to beat the living daylights out of you,” Addicott said.
On the removal side, Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert said this country tore itself apart over the institution of slavery. “We stand together united, black, white, brown, gay, straight, of every color, Native American to say this is our country, we’re united we’re together, we love each other, we don’t want to hurt each other, we want everybody to prosper,” Calvert said. “This is our America and we’re not going back.”
Moving the monument is not a done deal. It will take action from the full San Antonio City Council. Councilman Shaw and Trevino are asking for the monument to be placed in an area where it can be integrated into historical context. It’s unknown when the proposal will be heard by a council committee. |
You wouldn't expect a 73-year-old to be on the crime beat, but Maximino Rodriguez Palacios couldn't help himself, says Cuauhtemoc Morgan, editor of the Baja California news blog Colectivo Pericu.
"It was totally by chance," he tells NPR. "In November 2014, Max called me about a shooting near his home in La Paz. And then he sent me a story and photos about what happened. From that moment, he was our crime reporter."
Rodriguez's passion to cover crime led to his death. Gunned down Friday as he pulled up in front of a supermarket, he became the fourth journalist murdered in Mexico in just six weeks. The country continues to be one of the deadliest places in the world to report the news.
For decades, Rodriguez had worked in journalism and in public relations for the state government. He came out of retirement to take up the crime beat for Colectivo Pericu, and in the following years his work became increasingly important. His home state, Baja California Sur, has become one of Mexico's most violent in recent months as drug cartels fought over the territory. In January 2017 the state recorded its most murders ever in a single month.
Through this, Rodriguez built up a following. A Facebook Live video from April 5 got more than 15,000 views. In it, he runs up to the police tape around a crime scene and, winded, tells his audience that the subject is dead. The victim would turn out to be a plainclothes police officer.
Several police officers had been murdered in recent months, and Rodriguez chased the story. In the last column he wrote for Colectivo Pericu, he cited anonymous sources to identify the leader of a local cartel as the mastermind. But this turned deadly.
"Our comments sections [on the blog] are open, so it has become routine for us to receive threats there," says Morgan.
Rodriguez's final column had five comments on it. Four were threats. Among expletives, one comment ominously reads, "You're lighting the candles for your own funeral, Max."
Three days later, Rodriguez was dead. His bullet-riddled car was the exact kind of crime scene he would have run to cover, camera phone in hand.
On Sunday night, the state attorney general's office said that ballistics tests showed that the firearm used against Rodriguez was the same one used in the killing of the police officer that Rodriguez had covered a week earlier. The investigation points toward Rodriguez being targeted for his work.
Since President Enrique Peña Nieto was elected in 2012, 31 journalists have been murdered in Mexico. Dozens more have been threatened or attacked. Reporters under threat have become hardened to this reality.
"When I hear of another murder, I just think 'who's next?' " says Noe Zavaleta, a reporter in Veracruz state. "It sounds crude to say, but it's the way I have to think about it now."
Zavaleta knows the danger of reporting well, as 20 journalists have been murdered in his home state since 2010. He began writing for the investigative magazine Proceso after his predecessor, Regina Martinez, was strangled to death in her home. One of his best friends and colleagues, photojournalist Ruben Espinoza, was murdered in Mexico City after seeking refuge there. But Zavaleta is back in Veracruz after briefly fleeing to Mexico City for his safety.
"Things haven't changed — if anything, it's gotten worse," he says. "But this is what I know how to do, and I refuse to leave because of intimidation. Maybe it's pride or my ego, but I won't leave."
The Mexican government recently has beefed up protection measures for journalists, as well as a specialized unit that investigates these types of crimes. But journalists don't just need protection from organized crime.
"[These protections] feel imaginary, because I have filed complaints about threats I have received from government authorities and their cronies," says Zavaleta. "I don't expect them to go anywhere, but I file them anyway so that other journalists can document what has happened to me."
The systems to protect reporters aren't working in practice, says Carlos Lauria, the Americas director for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
"Unfortunately, these bodies and mechanisms have clearly been insufficient to fight the violence and solve crimes against the press," says Lauria. "Impunity is still pervasive. Even in the cases where progress has been made, masterminds are still free and justice is losing."
By CPJ's estimate, 87 percent of the murders committed against journalists in Mexico since 1990 either have not been investigated or have no arrests.
But the journalists themselves aren't the only victims of press violence, says Lauria: With many reporters too scared to cover news that could anger criminals or corrupt politicians, the public often doesn't get to see the most important stories.
In Baja California Sur, it's unclear if reporters will be silenced by Max's death. Cuauhtemoc Morgan says he's talked to some journalists who want to get off the crime beat after the murder. But not everyone will stay quiet.
"My wife [the co-editor of Colectivo Pericu] and I are reflecting on what to do," he says. "But right now, we don't plan to stop reporting on this type of news."
On Monday, Colectivo Pericu kept publishing, like it was just another day.
Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
In the last six weeks, four reporters have been murdered in Mexico. The latest victim was Maximino Rodriguez. He was gunned down in his car on Friday afternoon in La Paz, near the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula. As James Fredrick reports, Mexico continues to be one of the world's deadliest places to report the news.
JAMES FREDRICK, BYLINE: At 73 years old, Max Rodriguez wasn't the kind of person you'd expect to be on the police beat. But he couldn't help himself, says Cuauhtemoc Morgan, the co-founder of Colectivo Pericu, the blog where Max worked. I catch him on his cell as he's driving to a memorial for Max.
CUAUHTEMOC MORGAN: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: "It was totally by chance," he said. "In November 2014, Max called me about a shooting near his home in La Paz. And then he sent me a story and photos about what happened. From that moment, he was our crime reporter." After decades as a reporter and government spokesman, Max Rodriguez came out of retirement to cover crime. He didn't know at the time how important the work would become.
Murders have recently spiked in his state as a feud broke out between drug cartels. January of this year set a record for the most murders there ever. A week before his death, Max posted this Facebook Live video which got 15,000 views.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAXIMINO RODRIGUEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: He's running up to a crime scene outside a local prison. A man had been shot and would turn out to be a plainclothes police officer. But this type of reporting put Max at risk for exposing crimes and sometimes the criminals behind them.
MORGAN: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: "Our outlet promotes freedom of expression," says Morgan. "Our comments sections are open, so it's become routine for us to receive threats there." Last week, Max wrote about a string of murdered police officers and named the head of a local gang as the mastermind. There are five comments on the story. One ominously reads you're lighting the candles for your own funeral, Max.
Three days later, Rodriguez were shot to death as he pulled up in front of a supermarket. It was the exact kind of crime he would have run to cover, camera phone in hand.
On Sunday night, the state government said that the same weapon was used in the murder of Max and the police officer Max had reported on the week before, meaning he was likely targeted for his work. Max's death on Friday is the latest in a long list of murdered reporters throughout Mexico. Three others were murdered in March alone.
NOE ZAVALETA: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: Noe Zavaleta knows the risks journalists face as well as anyone. His predecessor at investigative magazine Proceso was strangled to death in her home. And a photojournalist he often worked with was killed after fleeing to Mexico City.
ZAVALETA: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: "We journalists face real threats," says Zavaleta. "Organized crime, that's obvious. Another is the state that tries to oppress our voices. And the third are corrupt media outlets that work with the first two to try to smear journalists who become victims." Murdered journalists have become so common as to harden Zavaleta's reaction to another death.
ZAVALETA: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: "When I hear of another murder, I just think who's next? It sounds crude to say but it's the way I have to think about it now." Now with this climate of fear and intimidation all over Mexico, the most important stories often can't be covered. Cuahtemoc Morgan says some of the reporters in his state want to get off the crime beat after Max's murder.
MORGAN: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: "My wife and I are reflecting on what to do," he says, "but right now, we don't plan to stop reporting this type of news." For NPR News, I'm James Fredrick in Mexico City.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. |
Sixteen-year-old Murad Rahimov peered down into a gigantic space he had only dreamed about before: the world's largest clean room, kept scrupulously free of any dust or contamination, where NASA assembles and tests spacecraft before launch.
Murad's eyes gleamed and a smile played on his face as he took it all in — the scientists encased in sterile white suits; the replica of the massive new space telescope, the most powerful ever built, that will study the first galaxies born after the Big Bang.
Murad is obsessed with space. He has been ever since he was three, back in his home country Uzbekistan. His young imagination was sparked when his aunt gave him a picture book about space, and he couldn't stop looking at the images of the solar system. Soon after, he told his parents his dream: He wanted to become an astronaut and work for NASA.
On this recent day, he was getting a private tour of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., thanks to an NPR listener who heard about Murad's passion for space in a story that aired earlier this year. In January, NPR profiled the Rahimov family on the day they became naturalized as U.S. citizens. The Rahimovs immigrated to the U.S. from Uzbekistan in 2010, when Murad was nine. When they first landed in Kansas City, Murad spoke no English. Now, heading into his junior year of high school, he's on an accelerated track, taking extra classes in the summer and packing his schedule with AP courses.
Listener Aaron Schnittman heard that story on the radio, and his ears perked up when he heard that Murad's goal is to work for NASA. He emailed NPR that same day, that his brother is a research astronomer working for NASA at Goddard. "I think it would be a cool follow up to connect the son to my brother and help him make the connections needed to pursue studies in astronomy," he wrote.
Cool, indeed. The connection was made, emails were exchanged, and last week, at the invitation of Jeremy Schnittman, Murad and his mother, Limara Rahimova, made the trip to Goddard outside Washington, D.C. Schnittman, an astrophysicist who specializes in black holes, spent several hours showing the Rahimovs the inner workings of the space flight center and sharing his enthusiasm for space science.
Murad was clearly in his element, sporting a t-shirt with a picture of the Millennium Falcon spaceship from Star Wars, and a line from the movie: "the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy."
He and his mother got to see the giant cryo-vac chamber where spacecraft are tested to find out if they'll withstand the extreme temperatures of space. They walked inside the acoustic chamber that blasts spacecraft with earsplitting sound to simulate the vibration of launch. They toured the laser lab where scientists are fine-tuning measurements to detect gravitational waves. "Amazing," Murad marveled.
Back in his office, ("black hole central," as he calls it) Schnittman talked with Murad about his research into how light gets bent around black holes. Naturally, they both share a hero in Albert Einstein, whose photo Schnittman keeps pinned above his desk. "It's remarkable," Schnittman said. "It's over 100 years since Einstein did all of this stuff, and still, everything is Einstein. Einstein, Einstein, Einstein."
When Murad mused about the possibilities of time travel, Schnittman sounded optimistic. "It's really not that much of a stretch to say that we're one step closer to time travel," he told Murad. "This is something that Einstein predicted 100 years ago. According to the theory, the equations, time travel should be possible. The trick is just building it and getting it to work, but as far as we can tell, there's no rule against it."
The astrophysicist and the would-be astronaut parted ways with the promise to stay in touch.
Later Murad said he loves science because it shows "the sheer awesomeness, the sheer scale of how insignificant and alone we are in the universe. All these petty fights that people have between themselves, they are just insignificant. When you start thinking about space, you get lost in the vastness of it. That's what captivates me the most."
Now that he's a U.S. citizen, he believes his dream of becoming an astronaut is more within reach. He and his brother automatically became citizens when their parents did. Murad was at school the day they took the oath: "I came home and looked at my parents, and felt all this pride," he said. "You could sense that something has changed. They were smiling from ear to ear."
For his mother, Limara, becoming a U.S. citizen has grounded her in a new way. "I felt before like I'm between countries," she said. "But now I feel like I'm staying ...both my feet here in this land."
Limara works at a school, and each morning they all stand for the pledge of allegiance. Before, she said, "it didn't touch me. But now, yes! And I know what each word in the pledge of allegiance means. And it means, for me, a lot."
As for Murad? The rising high school junior has his sights set on going to Cal Tech, and on the Mars mission he dreams of one day leading. "Some people, they tell me to try to get a real job," he said, "of maybe not shooting so high. But nah. I'm shooting for it. I'm gonna chase my dreams."
Meantime, there's a celestial show about to happen, one he's been excited about for years: the total solar eclipse.
Murad's hometown, Kansas City, is a perfect spot to see it: right in the path of totality.
Next Monday he will be outside, watching in awe as the moon slides over the sun, and dreaming big dreams of space. |
At the center of Charlottesville's violent white nationalist rally was a long-simmering controversy over the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Controversies over Confederate symbols have been brewing around the country — most notably in South Carolina, where the Confederate flag was lowered from the state house grounds two years ago, and New Orleans, where statues came down earlier this year.
But in Charlottesville, the movement to remove a Lee statue and the backlash that followed have become particularly intense thanks to an ongoing court battle and questions over whether the city council has the authority to remove it.
Now, the planned removal of the statue became a rallying cause for the alt-right — and symbol of growing discontent.
One hundred years ago, in 1917, the 26-foot-high statue was commissioned by a philanthropist and given to the city along with the surrounding land in honor of his parents. The statue took seven years and three sculptors (the first one died) to complete. According to the city of Charlottesville's website, the statue was unveiled in 1924 by 100 cadets from the Virginia Military Institute who "paraded through the center of Charlottesville decorated with Confederate colors." The new statue was also reportedly greeted with loud cheers and a speech by then-president of "the University of Virginia Edwin Alderman and followed by parties and balls.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. The registration form from the Department of the Interior states that the sculpture "remains undisturbed in its original location. Charlottesville will undoubtedly keep it there, for the monument is a unique to the most eminent Confederate hero of all and an outstanding example of the outdoor sculpture of the late City Beautiful movement."
It is now doubtful — though still possible — that Charlottesville will "keep it there." In February, the city council voted 3-2 to sell the statue, ignoring the recommendation of a commission that suggested moving it.
A group called Virginia's Sons of Confederate Veterans sued the city, alleging it did not have the right to remove the statute since it was a war memorial. A related group, and others, filed a lawsuit in New Orleans to block the removal of a Gen. Lee statue as well as one of Jefferson Davis. A federal appeals court said that city could remove its Confederate monuments.
City Councilor Bob Fenwick, who cast a tie-breaking vote in Charlottesville in April (that vote allowed the city to sell the statue), hoped the city council's action would put to bed more than a year of heated debate in his city. "For now, it is now time for our city to rest," he said, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
But that didn't happen. The movement against removal of the statue grew — there is a Facebook group to Save the Robert E. Lee Statue and call for donations to "fund litigation to preserve our monuments." The backlash to the planned removal culminated in a white nationalist rally last weekend, which used the planned removal as a rallying cause. It is important to note, however, that the group behind hte lawsuit, SVC, condemned the Charlottesville rallies. Chaplain-in-chief Ray Parker wrote on Facebook over the weekend: "I condemn in the strongest possible way the actions, words, and beliefs of the KKK and other white supremacist groups."
The statue has also been tagged with graffiti several times in the past few years, including with "black lives matter" and "native land."
In May, a judge granted a temporary injunction, which meant the statue could not be removed for next six months. So, for now, the statue is still standing in what used to be Lee Park. Only the city council also voted earlier this year to rename the park, an action that was upheld by a judge. Gen. Lee now, rather ironically, sits in Emancipation Park. |
Republicans are trying to prevent a political tremor from happening Tuesday night just north of Atlanta that would be a blow to President Trump and a boon to the rising Democratic opposition to him.
"I'm very concerned," said Tom Boyle, a 76-year-old retiree from Roswell, Ga., as he was making calls at a Republican phone bank on Monday afternoon.
In a closely watched Georgia special election that Democrats have tried to turn into a referendum on Trump, if Democrat Jon Ossoff is able to top 50 percent in Tuesday's all-party primary featuring 18 candidates he'll win outright here.
That's a result that was thought impossible months ago. This is a district, after all, that was held for two decades by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and for the past 12 years by Tom Price, an anti-Obamacare champion, who vacated the seat when he was appointed as Trump's Health and Human Services secretary.
While an outright Ossoff win Tuesday night still remains improbable, it's no longer thought to be impossible. Still, given the Republican leanings of this district, and a strong push from GOP outside groups, an outright win Tuesday might be Ossoff's best chance at winning the seat.
The stakes are high for both parties. If Republicans lose, it would send a warning signal to the Trump White House ahead of next year's midterms, as Republicans look to hold onto control of Congress — and Trump's agenda. But if Democrats can't win, either now or in a June runoff, given all the money and resources poured into the contest, it will raise questions about their ability to compete in the types of districts they'll need to win back the House, beginning with one like this in Georgia.
"A chance to make a statement"
Ossoff, a 30-year-old documentary filmmaker and former Capitol Hill aide, has raised eye-popping amounts of money (much of it from outside the state) and captured national attention.
"The eyes of the whole country are on us right now," Ossoff told volunteers gathered Saturday evening to canvass at his Chamblee campaign office. "The eyes of the world are on us right now. We are the first up to bat in the country with a chance to make a statement about what we stand for."
Sensing opportunity, Democrats have poured in resources — and the race has drawn celebrity attention. Actor Samuel L. Jackson, for example, cut a radio ad supporting Ossoff, warning, "Remember what happened the last time people stayed home — we got stuck with Trump." Actress Alyssa Milano helped drive early voters to the polls.
The Democratic congressional hopeful didn't mention the president by name in addressing his supporters, and some of his ads don't either. In fact, some of them don't mention his party affiliation at all and tick off some downright Republican-sounding ideas, such as cutting spending, boosting infrastructure and attracting more local tech jobs. Some of his ads do take explicit aim at Trump though, with one trolling him for his rabid tweeting habit and another where he promises to hold the president accountable.
In a brief interview with NPR after an afternoon canvass launch Saturday, Ossoff admitted that the race had somewhat taken on a life of its own, but he continued to stress many of the local issues at the core of his economic message. He maintained he can win outright, but if that doesn't happen, his strategy won't change.
"A win on Tuesday is certainly within reach, and special elections are always unpredictable," Ossoff said. "If we don't clear 50, we'll be able to fight and win in a runoff."
Democrats are trying to capitalize on Trump's unpopularity, and this is one of the first chances for them to take out their frustrations with his presidency. Giving Democrats hope is that even though this is a right-leaning district, it isn't exactly Trump country. While Price was easily re-elected with more than 60 percent of the vote, Trump won the district by less than 2 points. It's indicative of the kind of place Trump struggled throughout the country — rapidly growing, diverse and well-educated suburbs, where Republicans usually do well.
The president himself underscored the importance of the race — and the possible blowback a loss could have for his own political capital. He recorded a last-minute robocall against Ossoff and poked Democrats with at least four tweets in the last 24 hours about the race:
The election comes on the heels of a better-than-expected finish for a Democrat in a special election in a very Republican district in Kansas last week — something Democrats hope portends well in this more moderate district. That result may have also helped to wake up Republicans, who hope that late attacks on Ossoff — tying him to the national party and pointing out the bulk of the $8.3 million he's raised has come from out of state — have at least stunted his rise in the polls.
That may be why even rank-and-file Republicans here were on message, toeing the party line, in the final hours. Boyle, for example, described Ossoff, as "the man who's being bankrolled by the West Coast. When people out of state start throwing in $6 million to $8 million, I get worried. I don't like outsiders dictating what we do in Georgia."
Ossoff is one of five Democrats on the ballot Tuesday, but the national party lined up quickly behind him, in large part due to the strong support he had from the district's neighboring congressmen, Reps. John Lewis and Hank Johnson. Ossoff himself actually lives just outside the district (though he grew up in it). Republicans have hammered him on that fact and claimed he's tried to inflate his resume and the national-security work he did as an aide for Johnson. They've tried to highlight his age ,too. Ossoff and his supporters argue fresh, young blood isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro was on hand to help Ossoff on Saturday, and he was quick to underscore the national implications of the race on Tuesday and beyond, especially in the wake of that Kansas special election last week, where the Democratic candidate outperformed Trump by 20 points in the district.
"For everyone out there who is a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that the Republicans control everything, especially with a president that is so erratic, the best way to make sure that we can have some balance is to make sure that the Democrats take back the House," Castro said — an effort he underscored began on Tuesday.
For Democrats shocked by last November's results, Ossoff's campaign has become a vehicle for them to try to affect change. Megan Prince-Miller, 33, was one of the many volunteers who came out on Saturday to campaign for Ossoff on a warm spring day, ready to knock on doors even though she was heavily pregnant and due in three weeks.
"We're having our first baby, a daughter, and, you know, it's just been on the back of our minds — what kind of world is she going to live in? And I don't want it to be the world that I think that President Trump is creating," Prince-Miller said.
Can Republicans divided become united?
Republicans vying to take on Ossoff here are reflecting the broader national divide among the GOP. They've been hampered by splits within their own base, which is choosing between 11 GOP candidates. It's become something of a circular firing squad among the Republican hopefuls.
But many of them aren't exactly running away from the president, despite the middling results he got here last November.
Former Johns Creek City Councilman Bob Gray, one of the leading GOP contenders, has pictures of Trump plastered across his main field office, along with the president's signs that read "Make America Great Again" and "America First." In an interview Friday night after a canvass kick-off, Gray praised the president for being a "disrupter" in Washington, and said he wanted to go to D.C. to be his ally.
"He needs willing partners in Congress to be there with him to try and affect that agenda, and I intend to do so," Gray said.
He's been endorsed by the anti-tax Club for Growth, who's attacking his chief rival, former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel as a career politician — the same moniker Trump was able to successfully apply to some of his own GOP primary rivals.
In fact, on the GOP side, it's almost a similar scenario that played out during the 2016 presidential race happening — many different Republican candidates occupying different part of the GOP ideological spectrum fighting amongst themselves. There have been shots lobbed among the top Republican contenders during the campaign at each other as much as at Ossoff.
Nevertheless, Republicans maintain they'll eventually come together.
"If you don't have a muddy, bloody fight in a Republican primary, you haven't had a Republican primary in this state. But we always get back together," said Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul, a former Georgia GOP chairman who was campaigning Monday morning with Handel at the Egg Harbor Cafe. Still, he said he'll support whoever ends up against Ossoff.
Handel, who has high name ID from several unsuccessful statewide runs, has come in second in most polls and said she feels good about her chances. And while other rivals have attacked her as a career politician, she argued that's an asset, not a liability.
"Our folks, it just took them a little more time to make their minds up because we believe in competition," Handel said, hitting Democrats for "coronating" Ossoff. "And we've had a very spirited, competitive primary on our side."
While Handel said she's supportive of the president, she's not exactly wearing it on her sleeve like Gray and other candidates are.
"This race is not about President Trump," she said. "This race is about who is the best suited to to be the next congressman."
Dalton State College students Jacob Ledford and Wesley Ross were canvassing on Saturday for former state Sen. Dan Moody, who's been endorsed by Sen. David Perdue. He's another candidate who could make the runoff, along with state Sen. Judson Hill — who has the backing of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who once represented parts of the district, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who won this district in the GOP presidential primary.
After knocking on door after door, Ledford and Ross were getting a lot of people not home or who didn't want to talk about the race — a common theme both sides are hearing in the closing days, with voters simply fed up with incessant calls and door knocks.
They recalled how Democrats have boasted about turning Georgia blue before and have put up top-flight candidates in recent elections — Jason Carter, the grandson of former president Jimmy Carter, ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2014, while Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn, lost to Perdue the same year.
"Republicans always get behind their candidate, we get out to vote, and that's something the other side struggles with a lot," said Ross.
But as they were crossing the streets in a neighborhood in Alpharetta, they spied some Ossoff canvassers nearby — underscoring the massive presence the Democratic frontrunner has been able to build in the district with his army of volunteers and paid staff.
Special elections — imperfect predictors?
In some recent political cycles, special elections have been harbingers of things to come, and that's what Democrats hope Tuesday ends up being. In January 2010, Republican Scott Brown campaigned against the health care bill and ended up winning the Massachusetts special Senate election to succeed the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy — foreshadowing major losses for Democrats that fall.
But they're not always perfect predictors, either. Democrat Mark Critz won a special election in Pennsylvania in May 2010, giving his party hope going into the midterms. Democrats, however, would lose 63 House seats that cycle.
But what special elections can be are snapshots in time to gauge how an issue is playing with the electorate. And for Democrats, the Georgia race is an important test of whether their months of marches and protests can translate into real votes at the ballot box.
If Ossoff does win — either on Tuesday or in two months — he'll have a major target on his back from Republicans in 2018. But a victory would still fire up the Democratic grassroots and send a warning shot to already worried Republicans about the midterms, when the president's party typically loses an average of 29 seats. Democrats need 24 seats to take back the House next fall — 23 if Ossoff wins.
However, if all their money and hype fall short, it may be back to the drawing board for a party already perplexed by Hillary Clinton's loss to despite all her money and staff — just like Ossoff has managed to corral. |
Standing in the dappled shade of a driveway hundreds of miles from Charlottesville, Va., Mark Heyer spoke of the violence that claimed his daughter's life — and, with voice occasionally quavering, called on people to answer hate with forgiveness.
"My daughter was a strong woman that had passionate opinions about the equality of everyone — and she tried to stand up for that," the Sharpes, Fla., resident told Florida Today in a videotaped interview. "With her, it wasn't lip service. It was real."
Just two days earlier, a driver rammed a car into a group of people protesting a white supremacist rally, killing Heyer's daughter Heather, 32, and wounding 19 other people. Federal authorities have opened a civil rights investigation into the attack, saying "such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred."
The man allegedly behind the wheel, James Alex Fields Jr., had long harbored sympathies for Nazi ideas, according to a former teacher. Fields has been charged with one count of second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and one count of hit-and-run.
But the hatred espoused by white supremacists and others in Charlottesville this weekend must not be met with a response that's "twisted into something negative" in its own right, Mark Heyer told the local newspaper.
"People need to stop hating, and they need to forgive each other. And I include myself in that, in forgiving the guy that did this," he said. "He doesn't know no better. You know, I just think of what the Lord said on the cross. Lord forgive him, they don't know what they're doing."
In this respect, he said he aspires to follow his daughter's example.
"You know, my daughter's life — she's ..." he paused, searching for words. "I'm proud of her for standing up. She had more courage than I did. She had more courage than I did. She had a stubborn backbone. She thought she was right. She would stand there and defy you.
"But if I understand her," he added, "she wanted to do it peacefully and with a fierceness of heart that comes with her conviction."
In interviews with multiple media outlets over the weekend, Heather's mother, Susan Bro, also praised the way her daughter balanced peaceful efforts with a "very strong sense of right and wrong."
"It was important to her to speak up for people that she felt were not being heard, to speak up when injustices were happening," Bro said, "and she saw in the lives of many of her African-American friends particularly and her gay friends that equal rights were not being given."
One day after the violent gathering that saw protesters and counterprotesters punching and kicking one another — and later saw Heather Heyer killed, along with two state troopers whose helicopter crashed — peaceful protests took shape in cities across the U.S. In Seattle and New York City, Atlanta and in Grand Rapids, Mich., demonstrators sought to respond to the message promulgated in Charlottesville and, in the words of one protester, "resist it fearlessly."
"I hope that her life and what has transpired changes people's hearts," Mark Heyer said. "You can fight all you want and fuss and cuss and do all that stuff, but when you take your last breath, it's over. It's done!
"You're going to take away what a person has and everything else they're going to have. There is no more — not here, you know," he added. "And that's — that's pretty much all I got, brother." |
They didn't wear hoods as they chanted "Jews will not replace us." They weren't hiding their faces as they waved Confederate flags, racist signs and swastikas. They looked straight at a sea of cameras as they made the Nazi salute.
As Matt Thompson wrote for The Atlantic, the white supremacist march and rally this past weekend wasn't a KKK rally: "It was a pride march."
The bare-faced shamelessness was the point. But it was also an opening.
On the Internet, some people are crowd-sourcing efforts to identify and shame the people participating in the rally. Most prominently, on Twitter, the account called "Yes, You're Racist" has been soliciting help and posting IDs. "I'll make them famous," the account pledged.
So far, at least one protester is no longer employed after being publicly named and shamed.
Cole White, who used to work at a hot dog restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., "voluntarily resigned" on Saturday after his employer confronted him about his participation in the event, according to the Berkeleyside news site.
@YesYoureRacist is not a new Twitter account. Since 2012, the account has been calling out "casual racism on Twitter," according to the user's fundraising page. It would post screenshots of deleted racist tweets, highlight offensive comments by elected officials and retweet everyday users who would say "I'm not racist but ..." followed by something, well, racist.
But after the rally in Charlottesville, Yes You're Racist pivoted from highlighting online remarks to identifying real-world marchers.
Many of the people it named had publicly declared their plans to go to Charlottesville. The account identified one man as "Illegal Aryan," who wrote on the white supremacist site Daily Stormer last month, "See you in Charlottesville!"
"Illegal Aryan," real name Mark Daniel Reardon, was identified by an antifascist group this spring and confirmed on Daily Stormer that he lost his job as a result.
Another identified marcher, who has repeatedly tweeted holocaust denials and says he is a member of the Proud Boys, said on Twitter he was at Charlottesville. After he was identified, he said he's received death threats.
Of course, there's a long and not entirely noble tradition of online humiliation for perceived moral trespasses.
Jon Ronson, who literally wrote the book on the phenomenon (it's called So You've Been Publicly Shamed), chimed in on Twitter to give his take on the public identification of the white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville.
"They were undisguised in a massively contentious rally surrounded by the media," he said, noting also that there's "a big difference" between making a thoughtless or offensive comment online and marching in the name of white power.
That said, Twitter is "a terrible information swapping service," he said, and some innocent people would inevitably get caught up in the process.
Indeed, the "Yes You're Racist" account has made, and acknowledged, some mistakes.
One of the photos it examined was from a previous Trump rally, not the Charlottesville march or rally. (That image featured a man wearing a Nazi armband. He said on Youtube he wore it as a "social experiment" to prove that "not all Trump supporters are Nazis. I went to the Trump rally as a Nazi and they kicked me out and disavowed me ... I dressed up as a Nazi to prove a point, not to spread a message of hate.")
Another photo was misidentified as the white supremacist Billy Roper. Roper, who has called for non-white races to be "eliminated" or "become extinct," did not actually attend the Charlottesville event. Roper, who is vehemently anti-Semitic, objected to the fact that one of the speakers at the event works with a Jewish fundraiser.
Roper wrote on his blog that he actively contributed to the confusion over the identity of the "Arkansas Engineering" marcher:
"Early on in the game, I decided to troll them by alternately confirming then denying that I was the person in the picture, in order to confuse the trail and distract them from the guy they were after. So, I spent the better part of the evening schooling some and gaming others."
As Roper muddied the waters, others on the Internet misidentified the man in the photo as a University of Arkansas professor, which was false.
Meanwhile, one young man who was photographed screaming at the torchlit march told a local news station that it was definitely him — but he insisted he's "not the angry racist" people see in the photo.
"As a white nationalist, I care for all people," said Peter Cvjetanovic, who is studying history and political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.
"I did not expect the photo to be shared as much as it was," he told KTVN.
A "Yes, You're Racist" tweet about Peter Cvjetanovic was retweeted more than 32,000 times. |
Anyone who gets to see the total solar eclipse on August 21 will be lucky — and humanity is lucky to live on a planet that even has this kind of celestial event.
Mercury and Venus, after all, don't even have moons. Mars has a couple, but they're too small to completely blot out the sun. Gas giants like Jupiter do have big moons, but they don't have solid surfaces where you could stand and enjoy an eclipse.
And, even with solid land and a moon, Earth only gets its gorgeous total solar eclipses because of a cosmic coincidence.
"They appear to be the same size because of their distance away from us," explains Amber Porter, an astronomer at Clemson University, which is in the path of the upcoming eclipse. The diameter of Earth's moon is about 400 times smaller than the diameter of the sun, but "even though the moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun, it's about 400 times closer to us here on Earth, which is how that perfect kind of magic happens."
Because of this quirk, the tiny moon can obscure the entire face of the sun and reveal its eerie corona, at least right now. In the past, Earth's eclipses did not look like this.
"The size of the sun hasn't really changed over the age of Earth, but the moon has been moving away from Earth over eons. So in the past it looked bigger," says Matija Cuk, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute.
The moon is still moving away from Earth, he says. Every year, it shifts outward about an inch-and-half.
"So actually for billions of years you can have a total eclipse, but this very evenly matched eclipse, where it is barely total, that happens for a relatively short amount of time," says Cuk.
In only about 600 million years, the moon will look small enough that it no longer completely covers the sun, and whoever is left on Earth won't see any more total solar eclipses. So, get them while you can. |
A 23-year-old, Russian-born violinist named Artem Kolesov is capturing international attention after posting a YouTube video in which he comes out as gay.
The son of two Pentecostal pastors in a small town an hour away from Moscow, Kolesov says that he has struggled for most of his life to reconcile his sexual orientation with his Christian beliefs and his family's views. "In my family," Kolesov says in his video, "I often heard that all gays should be destroyed, that they should be bombed, and that if anyone in our family turns out to be gay, my family should kill them with their bare hands."
In the video, Kolesov also recounts wrenching episodes from throughout his life. At age seven, he prayed that he would die before his mother found out that he liked boys. He also endured physical and sexual abuse from one of his brothers, who threatened to out him to his parents if Kolesov told anyone about the abuse, and later attempted suicide several times.
Growing up, he says, "I never heard anything good about gay people. All I knew was that gays are the people who everyone should hate. I was scared because I knew that I was gay. I didn't know anyone who I could talk to about it. It seemed that I was the only gay person in Russia."
The violinist made his video as part of the Russian "Children-404" project, which invites teenagers to share their stories and discuss LGBT issues in Russia. In most of their photos and videos, participants shield their identities by holding up a "Children-404" sign in front of their faces.
Instead of creating an anonymous contribution, Kolesov chose to share his name and face, to let fellow LGBT youth in Russia feel less isolated. He recorded the video in Russian, but also provided English subtitles. "We don't come out for heterosexual people to know," he says in his video, which he published on March 29. "We don't come out for the ones who hate us to know. We shout and make as much noise as possible just so other people like us who are scared and can't be themselves would know that they are not a mistake and they are not alone."
Formerly based in Canada, Kolesov now lives in Chicago, where he is first violinist in the Yas Quartet, which is in residence at Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts. Last summer, his ensemble took third prize in the Chamber Division at the Schoenfeld International String Competition which was held in Harbin, China.
In his video, Kolesov contrasts his family's pleasure in his musical accomplishments with their reaction to his coming out. "They are ashamed to have a gay son and brother," he says. "They wish that this part of my identity didn't exist. Interesting that my family is proud of me for being a violinist, and is so ashamed of me for being gay, though both of these are parts of my identity."
In the aftermath of releasing his video, Kolesov told BuzzFeed that he's already begun to experience the impact of his decision to come out so publicly. He has received many positive messages from friends and strangers alike, but he said that he is afraid of being arrested if he returns to Russia, under enforcement of a vaguely worded but broad "anti-gay propaganda" law. Earlier this month, there were reports that more than 100 gay men in Chechnya were arrested and tortured, with some of them reportedly killed by police. (Authorities have denied both the arrests and the deaths.)
Kolesov is also not currently on speaking terms with his relatives, and told BuzzFeed, "Even if I go back to Russia, I'm not sure I would be feeling completely safe with my own family." |
The crisis in Syria has displaced around 1.4 million children and teenagers from their homes. An estimated 900,000 of them are not in school.
Historically, in conflict zones, education has taken a backseat to immediate needs like food, shelter and medical care. But more recently, there has been a movement in the international aid community to provide better "education in emergencies."
Many private companies and nonprofits are stepping up to do just this — but their efforts are not always well balanced or well coordinated, a new report claims.
Would-be students have many immediate needs. They have universally experienced some form of trauma. There is a lack of schools, teachers, books, uniforms and food. Yet, according to this study, nearly half of the donors have chosen to supply educational technology, far more than are building schools, providing basic books and materials or employing teachers.
"Many of these companies are based in Silicon Valley, and they do not have a very clear picture of the context they are delivering to," says Zeena Zakharia at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the coauthor of the report.
Zakharia has been researching education in Middle East conflict zones for over a decade, and she noted the growing role taken by the private sector, both philanthropies and corporations. "I was like, isn't this interesting!" she tells NPR Ed. At the same time, her colleague Francine Menashy, whose research focuses on the privatization of education, had noticed the same phenomenon.
The two collaborated on research, interviewing more than two dozen people dealing with the education of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. Education International, a global federation of teachers' unions, released the report.
Zakharia and Menashy catalogued a recent, and overwhelming surge of interest among donors in supporting education for refugee children.
This survey doesn't capture every form of aid available to Syrian refugees, who are assisted by international governments and nonprofits like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. The authors were trying to get a sense of what the private sector was up to. They counted 46 businesses, such as Accenture, Bridge International Academies, Goldman Sachs, Hewlett Packard, IBM, McKinsey & Co, Microsoft and Pearson Education, with money or projects in the area. In addition they counted 15 philanthropies, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, IKEA Foundation, Open Society Foundation, and Vitol Foundation. (The Gates Foundation and Open Society Foundation also fund NPR).
These private organizations often back more than one type of educational activity, but there are clear trends. The authors found that 1 percent of organizations focused resources on social and emotional skills; 5 percent on extracurriculars such as sports; while fully half were focused on providing education technology. To oversimplify a bit, for every donor funding a soccer ball there are 10 backing tablets, educational games, online courses or learning platforms.
She says one school leader in Lebanon told her she was approached "every week" with offers of technology.
"And I say, 'Oh great, come visit us, see how we operate. And they do not.' "
This is a problem, Zakharia says, because based on her interviews, ed-tech isn't necessarily what existing schools need or are asking for.
For example, in many settings with Syrian refugee children, there is electricity one hour a day at best, so keeping devices charged can be a problem. "If you don't have the resources to build latrines or to pay teachers, I mean ... investing in technology isn't well placed," another interviewee told the researchers.
In addition to the desire to help, many of the business donors Zakharia interviewed talked about the financial motivations behind their initiatives, such as improving their brand image, breaking into the lucrative, untapped Middle East market, and testing new innovations. The idea of dual motivation is nothing new for corporate philanthropy, of course. But, says Zakharia, there is always a risk when these business motives come into play.
"What happens when the initiative is not seen as profitable? Education is a very long-term commitment." |
It's a series of gatherings for those who treasure the spoken and written word. Sherry Kafka Wagner created the gatherings, and they grew out of her love for literature. Because of that, she spent a lifetime buying and reading books. Recently, she gave them all away.
"Those books have found a home in the Hotel Emma at the Pearl," she says of the quirky lending library near the hotel's lobby.
Kafka Wagner grew up in Arkansas, where front porch storytelling and music made the pre-air conditioned summer nights not just tolerable, but fascinating.
"We would all gather on my great grandparent's front porch and listen to stories and drink ice tea," Kafka Wagner says.
She says that those front porch storytelling nights were great equalizers.
"You were sitting out there and anybody who happened to wander by would just come up and sit on the porch with you," she says. "Very often a story would be told that would start out with 'well I saw ol' John So-and-so yesterday and he told me this good story.'"
In the spirit of that tradition, she will read an excerpt from chosen authors in the Hotel Emma's library.
"We will hear a story each week from a different southern woman writer of the 20th century," Kafka Wagner says. "What better story than having Katherine Ann Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullough and Flannery O'Conner tell those stories."
The next four Tuesdays, Kafka Wagner will read excerpts from those authors along with a discussion and hopes that soon, the local storytelling will begin.
"It will start at 6:30 p.m. and go to 8 o'clock," she says. "Admission is $15 which covers cocktails and snacks. There's something very social about sharing a story, and thinking about the person who wrote the story."
And in so doing, the solitary exercise of reading becomes a shared one.
"I used to say that in my family it didn't matter so much if you were smart or successful, but it mattered a lot if you were funny or musical."
For Kafka Wagner, that family tradition lives on. |
American students lag behind many other industrialized countries in math and science. And now, some students are enrolling in after-school programs called “Russian math.”
It relies mainly on Russian teachers and methods to help American students from kindergarten to high school. It began in the Northeast, but is now spreading across the country — as far as San Diego, Seattle and San Jose. Carey Goldberg (@commonhealth) of Here & Now contributor WBUR reports. |
The children pile into the stadium in shiny clothes, clutching green-and-white Pakistani flags. Their parents light the area with cell phones to record the event as they scream, chant and cheer, watching soldiers close a gate that separates India from Pakistan.
In the evening ritual at the Wagah-Attari border, near Lahore and Amritsar, soldiers from both countries high-kick, shake their fists, then shake hands – and slam the gate shut.
It is deeply visceral for many Pakistanis: an acknowledgement of their border, of a plucky country they feel they have sacrificed so much to create.
Pakistan was imagined more than 70 years ago by a stern, British-educated, whiskey-drinking Shiite lawyer. Muhammad Ali Jinnah hoped for a nation as cosmopolitan as he was. He led the fight to carve the country out of British-ruled India. In a new, independent India, Muslims were fearful that they would be dominated by a Hindu majority.
But in the decades since, the sense of who is a citizen in the Muslim state hasn't been resolved. The question has come at a high price: Although Pakistan's constitution specifies the protection of minority rights, "the government limited freedom of religion," according to the State Department. The country's tiny minorities of Sikhs, Christians and Hindus are vulnerable to persecution. Certain laws, such as blasphemy laws, are often used to target them.
Within the Muslim community as well, the definition of who exactly is a Muslim has narrowed.
The seeds of Pakistan's intolerance were sown within the country's very ideology as a Muslim state, says Taimur Rehman, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.
That intolerance was "inherent in the very way in which Pakistan was created and the very purpose which it was supposed to serve of being a Muslim state," he says. "By its very definition, it has already singled out a community in opposition to another one," he says, referring to Muslims and Hindus. "And it's very easy for that community to be to be narrowed further."
Over the decades, he argues, the narrowing has been exacerbated by the military, Pakistan's most powerful institution, which cultivated hard-line Islamists to wage a jihad in the disputed region of Kashmir, among other things.
This has given right-wing religious groups outsize influence. "Despite never having won an election," Rehman says, "they are nonetheless able to dictate the narrative in the country because of the support that they have from the military establishment."
Perhaps none have suffered more than members of a small Muslim sect, known as Ahmadis, whose beliefs clash with the dominant Sunni version of Islam. They played a key role in founding Pakistan. They are a community of over-achievers: An Ahmadi physicist, Abdus Salam, received one of only two Nobel prizes awarded to Pakistanis.
But the state declared Ahmadis as heretics via a constitutional amendment in the 1970s and restricted their rights further in the 1980s. They're not allowed to call themselves Muslims, and can't refer to their houses of worship as mosques. Over the years, militants have attacked their mosques and targeted them in killings.
In a leafy suburb near Lahore, the Khans live in a two-story home behind a high gate that's firmly bolted. Mrs. Khan stands on the balcony every morning, waiting for her husband to return from prayers at their local mosque. She's terrified that somebody will kill him.
"We are frightened," she says. "For the life." (Her first name isn't being published out of concern for the family's safety.)
Most of her family already fled overseas.
So far, Mrs. Khan insists on staying. She runs a clinic that dispenses free medicine to her poorer neighbors. "If I go, the people will suffer," she says.
She doesn't want to "just sit and eat" in exile. "This is not the meaning of life."
She's also worried about her nephew. Twice, somebody threw a note into his house warning him to convert to Sunni Islam — or die. He hides out here when he's afraid.
He repeatedly tried to flee Pakistan – but he says the U.K., Sweden and Canada all rejected applications.
The roots of intolerance run deeper than just how Pakistan defines itself as a Muslim state, says Anam Zakariya, an oral historian in Islamabad.
She traces it back to Pakistan's birth story – at the time of Partition, in 1947, when millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled to India and Muslims to Pakistan. Mobs raped and butchered each other — around a million people died.
But Zakariya says those events are pushed aside. Pakistan focuses on celebrating its creation – and emphasizes how Muslims were victims.
"Now if it's your biggest victory to date," Zakariya says, "you have to make sure that the bloodshed is portrayed to the younger generations as perpetrated by Indians — Hindus and Sikhs."
It's to drive home the point: "And that's why there was a need to create Pakistan."
There are challenges emerging to that narrative. In a sprawling park in the heart of noisy, smoggy Lahore, a museum will soon open that will look at Partition through the stories of the people who witnessed it. It's a collaboration between the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, a nonprofit, and the government of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province.
"This is the first place in the entire country where you'll experience what the refugees in 1947 experienced," says Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker and head of the Citizens Archive.
Being exposed to stories from survivors of Partition will help create a more inclusive Pakistan, she believes, but it's a race against time – the people who lived through Partition are fading away.
And 70 years on, the very idea of what Pakistan is meant to be – an Islamic state, in opposition to Hindu-dominated India – feels hard to shake.
Near the museum construction site, the Abdul Aziz family huddles under a shelter as a sudden summer rain drenches the park. Their patriarch, Yousef, isn't sure of his age, but says he used to work in fields alongside Hindus – and so he predates Partition. When the Hindus left Pakistan, he said, Muslims became free.
"We are now in a country where we can say, 'There is no God but God and Muhammed is his messenger,'" he says, reciting the Muslim declaration of faith.
In Pakistan, he says, "There is no idolatry" – a reference to polytheist Hinduism.
His granddaughters Sania, 22, and Aya, 19, nod in agreement. He says he's proud of Pakistan, which he describes as a "fort of Islam" where it's safe for his grandchildren to grow up.
Sania says she's not interested in a museum. She's already heard her grandfather's stories of Partition, and she'll tell them one day to her own children.
Besides, she says, "I know history — the Islamic history of Pakistan." |
The opioid crisis is described now as a “national emergency” by the president. Will this open the floodgates for more funding, more help?
Last week, the president said he’s declaring a national emergency of opioid abuse. What might that mean? The details are still to come, but the country is watching. 60,000 drug-related deaths predicted for the latest year. That’s a 9/11 every three weeks, says Chris Christie, chairman of the president’s commission on opioid abuse. So, if there’s an emergency level response, where will that focus? On treatment? On police? On a wall? This hour On Point: the presidents “national emergency” on opioids. — Tom Ashbrook
Guests
Lenny Bernstein, health and medicine reporter for the Washington Post. (@LennyMBernstein)
Bertha Madras, member of President Trump’s five-person Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. Psychobiologist at McLean Hospital, and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Helen Jones-Kelley, executive director of the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services for Montgomery County, Ohio.
From Tom’s Reading List
Washington Post: Trump says opioid crisis is a national emergency, pledges more money and attention — “President Trump on Thursday declared the country’s opioid crisis a national emergency, saying the epidemic exceeded anything he had seen with other drugs in his lifetime. The statement by the president came in response to a question as he spoke to reporters outside a national security briefing at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., where he is on a working vacation.”
Financial Times: Drug industry faces ‘tidal wave’ of litigation over opioid crisis — “Companies that make or distribute opioid painkillers are facing a “tidal wave” of litigation as US officials seek to raise funds to fight the country’s addiction epidemic and punish those they accuse of fuelling the crisis. The number of government officials launching legal action against drugmakers and wholesalers has soared in the past year in what some lawyers see as a harbinger of a settlement that could echo the more than $200bn extracted from the tobacco industry in 1998.”
NPR: What Could Happen If Trump Formally Declares Opioids A National Emergency — “The president could ask HHS Secretary Price to declare an emergency under the Public Health Service Act. Unlike FEMA, HHS doesn’t have a standing emergency fund (although during last year’s Zika virus scare, many people urged that one be established), but money could be freed up. Right now, public health workers and researchers are working on projects defined by grants from HHS. If Price were to declare an emergency, those workers could be redeployed temporarily, from working on AIDS outreach for example, to work on substance abuse issues.” |
How should educators confront bigotry, racism and white supremacy? The incidents in Charlottesville, Va., this past weekend pushed that question from history to current events.
One teacher wondering aloud about his role is Derek Weimer. He taught James Alex Fields Jr., the man charged with murdering a woman and injuring multiple others by driving his car into a crowd of anti-racist marchers this weekend.
Weimer says he taught Fields in three classes at Cooper High School in Union, Ky. As NPR reported, he told member station WVXU reporter Bill Rinehart:
Weimer says Fields was intelligent and didn't cause trouble. But he says the quiet boy was also deeply into Adolf Hitler and white supremacy. Weimer says he did his best to steer Fields away from those interests and thought he had succeeded in doing so. On hearing about the incident in Charlottesville, Weimer said he felt that he failed as a teacher.
For 40 years, the nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves has been training teachers to confront racism and bigotry. By studying the moral decisions facing people at historical moments, from Reconstruction to Kristallnacht to the civil rights era, they hope "to empower students to work against bigotry and injustice or improper uses of power," says Roger Brooks, president and CEO. "We sum everything up by saying people make choices and choices make history."
Studies show that the curriculum produces academic, social and emotional gains in students. A time like this, says Brooks, is the ultimate teachable moment:
"There's a whole lot teachers can slow down and unpack with their students rather than get completely caught up in the emotion of the moment."
Indeed, just hours after the attack, teachers were sharing resources online, and we heard from more after reaching out in our newsletter. Here are some resources and ideas for the fast-approaching school year.
Just starting out
More than 80 percent of public school teachers are white, while half of all students are people of color. Some teachers may never have directly talked about race or racism, particularly with younger children. Brooks suggests they start by making an "identity chart". This is a way to find commonalities as well as celebrate differences.
Diverse books: Some teachers will introduce topics of racism, civil rights and diversity, especially to younger students, through books. Here is a curated list of 50 social justice books from the nonprofit Teaching for Change. Here is a second, broken down by grade level, by The National Network of State Teachers of the Year.
Teaching Tolerance has lesson plans for students as young as kindergarten that cover bias and social justice.
Historical background
The Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation at The University of Virginia in Charlottesville published a syllabus on Medium that includes primary and secondary historical resources on the local history of segregationism, as well as the urban renewal that displaced African-Americans in the city. There is also background on the dispute over the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that was the focal point of the rally this past weekend.
Facing History and Ourselves is an evidence-based social studies curriculum for middle and high school students that grounds discussions of racism and prejudice in students' own moral dilemmas.
American Federation for Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, shared some collections of lesson plans from AFT's Share My Lesson platform: on racial profiling and stereotyping, on civil rights and social justice, on bullying and helping children cope with traumatic events.
Ripped from the headlines
The Atlantic contributing writer Melinda Anderson created the hashtag #CharlottesvilleCurriculum on Twitter to serve as an ongoing list of resources to teach responsively to current events. Sources highlighted include the Equal Justice Initiative and the Citizenship and Social Justice Curriculum.
To help make sense of the news, the Critical Media Project of the University of Southern California offers lesson plans and resources for talking about media literacy as it relates to race, ethnicity and identity.
If you have more to add, we'd love to hear from you @npr_ed on Twitter. |
Growing up in southwestern Virginia in recent decades, poet Molly McCully Brown often passed by a state institution in Amherst County that was once known as the "Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded."
Since 1983 the facility, which was founded in 1910, has been called the Central Virginia Training Center, and it is now a residential home for people with various intellectual disabilities. But in the early 20th century, the place Brown now refers to as "the colony" was part of the eugenics movement taking hold in the U.S., and a variety of treatments now considered inhumane were practiced there — including forced sterilization. Brown, who has cerebral palsy, notes that had she been born in an earlier era, she might have been sent to live at the institution herself.
"It is impossible to know that for sure," she says. "I can look at my life and look at my family and look at my parents and think, No, never. That never would have happened. But I also understand that if I had been born 50 years earlier, the climate was very different."
She hopes to give voice to those early generations of residents, in her book of poetry, The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics And Feebleminded.
For Brown, the themes of disability and poetry have been constant throughout her life: "In my life, there has always been my body in some state of falling apart or disrepair or attempting to be fixed, and there has always been poetry. And I couldn't untwine those things if I tried."
Interview Highlights
On seeing the buildings and grounds of the old facility
It was incredibly moving and incredibly powerful. The place is interesting because it is still an operational facility for adults with really serious disabilities, although it is in the process of closing. But like a lot of things in Virginia, it was initially built on an enormous amount of land. And, so, a really interesting thing happened, which is that as the buildings that were originally part of the colony fell into disrepair, they were largely just moved out of — and new buildings were built on accompanying land, but those original buildings were not necessarily torn down. So the place itself is this really strange combination of functioning facility and ghost town of everything that it has been. I've never been in a place that felt more acutely haunted in my life.
On how some people assume her physical disability means she also has an intellectual disability
We do have a strange tendency in this country to equate any kind of disability with less intellectual capability and with even a less complete humanity. Certainly as a child and as a teenager — and even now as an adult — [I] encountered people who assumed that just because I used a wheelchair, maybe I couldn't even speak to them. I often get questions directed at people I'm with, as opposed to me, and that's a really interesting phenomenon.
On the connection between poetry and theology
Both poetry and theology for me are about paying attention to the world in a very intentional way, and about admitting a mystery that is bigger than anything that I rationally understand. ... I think poetry has always been for me a kind of prayer. So those things feel very linked for me. And, again, poetry does feel like the first — and in some ways best — language I ever had for mystery and for my sense of what exists beyond the world we're currently living in.
On how Catholicism has helped her accept her body
One of the things that I find so moving about Catholicism is that it never forgets that to be a person is inherently and inescapably and necessarily to be in a body — a body that brings you pain, a body that brings you pleasure, a body that can be a barrier to thinking more completely about your life and your soul — but [that it] can also be a vehicle to delivering you into better communion with the world, with other people and to whatever divinity it is that you believe in.
What Catholicism did for me, in part, is give me a framework in which to understand my body as not an accident or a punishment or a mistake, but as the body that I am meant to have and that is constitutive of so much of who I am and what I've done and what I hope I will do in the world.
More and more ... I've come to see my body as a place of pride and potential, and as something that gives me a unique outlook onto the world. And I'd rather that, I guess, than be infuriated by it.
On her twin sister, who died shortly after birth
She lived about 36 hours after we were born. ... It's a phenomenon in my life that I have not a lot of rational explanation for, ... but it is true that I miss my sister with a kind of intense specificity that has no rational explanation, and that I feel aware of her presence in this way that I can't exactly explain or articulate, but which feels undeniable to me. ...
I do think that that sort of gave me no other option than to believe in some kind of something beyond this current mortal life that we're living. Because what is the explanation otherwise for the fact that I feel like I miss and I know this person who only lived a matter of hours? And for the fact as much as I know that she is dead and is gone in a real way, she doesn't feel "disappeared" to me.
On how her physical disability and her poetry are intertwined
I think the easiest way I have of describing it is I have two [early] memories. ... One of them is of sitting on a table in a hospital room in the children's hospital in St. Louis, choosing the flavor of the anesthetic gas I was going to breathe when they put me under to do my first major surgery. I was picking between cherry and butterscotch and grape. And the second memory that I have is of my father reading a Robert Hayden poem called "Those Winter Sundays."
Roberta Shorrock and Therese Madden produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin adapted it for the Web. |
John Essey and family live in a modest, two-story home on a tree-lined street in the suburbs north of Pittsburgh. From the outside, it looks like any other house in the neighborhood, but this house has a brain.
"It knows we're home. Doors unlock, [it] kinda sets the mood for the rest of the house too, turns on lights, sets the thermostat accordingly," Essey says.
Essey is an engineer at Uber and an early adopter of the Internet of things. He can control his lights with his Amazon Echo or an array of touchpad sensors he's installed throughout the home. Sensors tell him when there's water in the basement or a leak under the sink.
While Essey's setup might sound a little like science fiction it's a prototype of the future. Some critics are worried these devices won't be secure and that companies will use them to spy on us to make money.
Gierad Laput, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, says as the Internet of things becomes more engrained in our daily lives, there are a couple of ways people are turning ordinary homes into smart homes.
"One way is basically to buy all the appliances, smart oven, smart dishwasher, smart microwave, smart toaster, all these things," Laput says.
But that stuff is really expensive. Smart refrigerators can cost $3,000 or more. And Laput said those devices don't always talk to each other, especially if they're made by different manufacturers.
The other way is to get sensors, and put them on everything you want to monitor.
"But then those get really unwieldy and you've got all these things sticking around and they look ugly and socially obtrusive," Laput says.
So Laput and his team wanted to see if they could build just one sensor that could monitor a whole range of activity in a room. And they did. It doesn't look like much; just a little 2-inch-square circuit board that plugs into the wall. The board senses about a dozen different facets of its environment: vibrations, sounds, light color and so on. The sensor communicates wirelessly with a computer, which interprets everything it picks up.
Laput demonstrated how the sensor works by turning on a blender. Almost immediately, a text box saying "blender running" popped up on a computer screen along with a purple squiggly line representing the blender's vibration.
Laput turned on a light, and the screen said, "light on."
Laput says he imagines both domestic and commercial applications for such a sensor. It could tell you that you left your stove on or that you're almost out of paper towels in the bathroom at the restaurant you own.
But critics say there's a catch.
"Surveillance is now the business model of the Internet. Companies make money spying on you," says Bruce Schneier, an Internet security expert and the chief technology officer at IBM's cybersecurity arm. "When the app says I can detect when you're out of paper towels, they're not doing it for your best interest, they're doing it because they want to sell you paper towels."
Schneier pointed to Roomba, the little automated vacuum from iRobot. The company's CEO said last month that the device could soon start mapping your home, raising concerns that that data could be sold for a profit. The company swiftly clarified that it would only collect and share data if customers consented.
But on top of the issue of surveillance, Schneier says makers of Internet-of-things devices just aren't prioritizing security.
"We're building a world-sized robot without even realizing it," he says.
That robot has eyes and ears that collect data, brains that process it and arms and legs that take action in the real world.
But arms and legs can kick and punch, and more eyes and ears — like Laput's sensor — could make those kicks and punches both more accurate and more devastating. |
In the last year, there's been a big drop in support for charter schools, while other forms of school choice are getting a little less unpopular. That's the top line of a national poll released today.
President Trump and his education secretary Betsy DeVos have put school choice front and center on their education agenda. The general idea of "choice," however, takes many forms.
Charter schools are paid for by tax dollars, charge no tuition and are managed independently of public school districts.
Vouchers allow students to use tax dollars to pay tuition at private schools.
Tax-credit scholarships, now available in 17 states, which allow individuals and companies to get a tax credit for donating to scholarship funds that are used in turn for private school tuition.
U.S. opinion on these ideas seems to be shifting, according to a new poll from EducationNext, an opinion and policy journal associated with free-market education reform ideas. They've been asking similar questions for the past decade.
Here are the latest results:
Charters: Last year 51 percent of the public supported "the formation of charter schools"; this year it's just 39 percent, a 12 point drop in one year.
Vouchers: 45 percent are either strongly or somewhat supportive of universal vouchers. That's a bounce from last year, but more or less in line with the five years before.
Tax credits: This was the most popular form of school choice with 55 percent of the general public supporting this year; also a one-year bounce, but in line with longer-term trends.
There's no one obvious explanation for the change in opinion on charter schools. The drop was seen among both Democrats and Republicans and amongst all racial and ethnic groups.
"That's the largest change on any survey item, and one of the largest single-year changes in opinion that we've seen over the 11-year history of the survey," Martin West, the editor in chief of EducationNext, said on a press conference call.
The wording of the question — about the formation of charter schools — may hold a clue. In theory, it might be possible to have very positive feelings about the charter schools currently in your community, yet still oppose new ones.
And the expansion of charters is exactly what communities around the country have been fighting over.
Last year the NAACP and Black Lives Matter called for a moratorium on the growth of charter schools (the NAACP called more recently for a ban on for-profit management of these schools). The state of Massachusetts saw a bruising fight over its charter cap. Detroit's proliferation of charters has been labeled "a glut" and "chaos." And charter expansion was the central issue in the school board race in Los Angeles, one of the biggest public school districts in the country.
The nationally representative poll breaks down respondents by political party, and there's a clear partisan divide on many issues, even as public opinion shifts. Last year, for example, 57 percent of Democrats favored universal vouchers, against 45 percent of Republicans. This year they've switched places: 62 percent of Republicans like them and only 50 percent of Democrats agree.
Zeroing in on that political divide, pollsters also measured what they called the "Trump effect." That is, how do responses change when some people are told that the president supports or opposes a particular issue?
They found that self-identified Republicans are more likely to support an issue if they are informed that Trump also supports it, while Democrats are the opposite. However, Trump's net influence is nearly nil, which makes him less of a force than President Obama was in this poll in 2009. Back then, when respondents on all sides were told the new President supported an education issue, they were more likely to back it, by double digits.
This poll, then, serves as a snapshot of what some have called the breakdown of a long-standing bipartisan consensus on education that dated back to No Child Left Behind.
Still, there is one enduring issue where blue- and red-state opinions are near-identical: approval of the local public schools. 55 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Democrats give local schools a B or an A. |
Ever since last November's election night, millions in America and around the world have wondered what happened to Hillary Clinton, who was widely expected to become the first woman president of the United States.
In fact, nearly everyone in the business of politics thought she would win –-including many of Trump's own people.
So: How did she lose?
Providing that answer is the mission accepted by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. It is by no means the last word on 2016, but Allen and Parnes must be regarded as early front-runners in the race to make sense of it all.
They saw and heard far more than most of us, exploring deep inside "Clintonworld" in search of the real story. And in these pages, they share enough of what they witnessed to enable us to reach our own conclusions.
There is no Big Reveal, no shocking secret answer. Instead we get a slow-building case against the concept and execution of the Clinton campaign, with plenty of fault falling squarely on the candidate herself.
Far from a juggernaut, the campaign we see in these pages is plagued with division, unease and anxiety practically from the outset. When things go right, it only means they are soon to go terribly wrong. Win a primary, lose a caucus. Quash a rumor, see three more go viral. Close one wound and find another torn open again.
Among those wounds, the first cut is the deepest. The email stories that began in March 2015 never go away. First, it's Clinton's own private server, then the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the endless email dump stolen from campaign chairman John Podesta. Email becomes the cyber-incubus the campaign cannot shed.
Whether anyone with Trump connections was colluding or complicit in the Wikileaks-Russian caper or not, the continual media focus on email issues could scarcely have been more convenient for the Trump campaign.
The authors also see lasting damage inflicted by her Democratic-primary rival Bernie Sanders' challenge from the left. Sanders' rather quixotic campaign not only tested Clinton, it played perfectly into Trump's own critique of "crooked Hillary" and his tactic of tying her to globalism and Wall Street.
"For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything that was wrong with America," the authors conclude. "At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers of a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary's a corrupt insider who has helped rig the political and economic systems in favor of the powerful."
But in the end, Allen and Parnes contend, the worst blows Clinton suffered were self-inflicted. If the controversies and corruption memes came to define her, they write, it was largely because she never managed to define herself.
The Clinton we see here seems uniquely qualified for the highest office and yet acutely ill-suited to winning it. Something about her nature, at its best and its worst, continually inhibits her. Her struggle to escape her caricature only contributes to it.
Clinton kept questioning staff why she was losing working-class whites, her most loyal voters in 2008. "Why aren't they with me?" she asked during the 2016 primaries. "Why can't we bring them on board?' "
Such uncertainty is a recurring theme. The book begins with Clinton searching for the right notes for her announcement speech, and it ends as she wrestles with a concession speech she never expected to give.
In fact, the book often dwells on her problematic speech prep. All major politicians have ghostwriters, but Clinton had panels of them. Writers, consultants, script doctors and kibitzers crawl over every page and paragraph of her scripts — sometimes until just minutes before delivery.
Where exactly is the candidate herself in all this messaging mélange? Does she have something she really wants to say? Everyone agrees she has plans for every policy problem in the world, but voters want to know what's inside you. And they also want to know what's in it for them.
The tone of the Allen-Parnes narrative is unsparing but not unsympathetic, noting campaign flaws and missteps without rue or recrimination. Having collaborated on a book-length profile of Clinton in 2014, the authors extended their research and sources for this insider account. We can readily imagine them setting out to write a very different book about the first woman president.
Instead, the authors often seem to be shaking their heads at the unforced errors, internal squabbles and media scrutiny that did in that dream. "Hillary distributed power so broadly that none of her aides or advisors had control of the whole apparatus," they write.
We learn that campaign manager Robby Mook, the wunderkind whose heart belongs to data, pushes voter modeling and analytics and models, while pinching pennies on everything else. He clashes with more senior aides who want to invest in more conventional polling, field organizers and yard signs. He also crosses swords with campaign chairman John Podesta, who is twice his age and steeped in official Washington, an intimate advisor to both Clintons and President Obama.
We also feel the widely shared exasperation with Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's longtime confidante. Abedin shields her boss from campaign stress, but also reinforces her penchant for privacy. The mystery of Abedin represents what is remote about Clinton herself.
To be sure, such infighting has enlivened accounts of past campaigns, especially in the bestseller Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's best-seller about the political personality wars of 2008. But those personalities were more compelling and telegenic, calling out to turn themselves into the TV movie they became. (We may well see more of that sort of character when we turn to the internal tale of the Trump team.)
This volume may not belong on the same shelf with the series of Theodore H. White classics (The Making of the President) from decades ago, or the quadrennial volumes by reporters Jules Witcover and Jack Germond, or the novelistic What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer.
But Allen and Parnes offer a first bridge beyond the journalism of the campaign year to the scholarship of the historians and other scholars who will process all this material for generations to come.
Clinton could hold on to enough of the contemporary Democratic Party to beat back Sanders and win the popular vote in November. But she had no answer to the populist appeal Trump enjoyed among white males and non-college working people in general. Her extraordinary career prepared her to be president, but not to understand ordinary Americans.
Ultimately, Allen and Parnes get inside the campaign but not inside the mind of Hillary Clinton. Much the same seems to have been true for most of her staff and, ultimately, the voters. Maybe we never really know the person we send to the White House, but we usually think we do. With Clinton, we never quite got there. |
After soaring to $4,000 on exchange markets over the weekend, the bitcoin cryptocurrency is continuing to rise, topping a record $4,300 on Monday — nearly $1,000 above its rate one week ago, according to data from the Coinbase currency exchange.
Bitcoin settled back under the $4,300 mark after reaching a new high Monday morning, according to several exchanges that track the decentralized currency.
"The bitcoin market cap soared past $70 billion," says CryptoCoins News, adding that a "flippening" that has been anticipated for years in the cryptocurrency community had finally come to pass, as "bitcoin now has a greater total valuation than payment-processing behemoth PayPal."
A bitcoin could be bought for around $570 just 12 months ago — reflecting a rise of around 645 percent to today's exchange rate.
Reporting on the rise, the Coindesk site says the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies reached a record $138 billion on Monday.
The steep ascent can be attributed to a number of factors, from political concerns to a recent split into two currencies — bitcoin classic and bitcoin cash. That change, which became official on Aug. 1, was made to give the currency a more robust infrastructure; it was also tied to a move to allow large trades in the currency to occur more frequently.
Formally introduced in 2009, bitcoin has steadily accumulated both users and investors. And blockchain, the technology that underlies bitcoin, has been embraced by both academics and banking giants such as Fidelity — which now lets customers track investments in cryptocurrency — and Goldman Sachs.
Other factors, such as bitcoin's role as a hedge against political uncertainty, also play a role. A finance executive tells CNBC that South Koreans have shown a "surge of interest" in the currency as the U.S. and North Korea trade threats. The network also says there's strong interest in bitcoin in Japan, with the yen accounting for 42 percent of bitcoin currency purchases.
It's been a heady summer for bitcoin holders. After the virtual currency hit a record $2,420 in May, The Economist ran a story asking, "What if the bitcoin bubble bursts?" and wondering if its rise could be compared to historic market crazes — like the one over tulips.
Noting that "Anyone clever or lucky enough to have bought $1,000 of bitcoins in July 2010, when the price stood at $0.05, would now have a stash worth $46 million," The Economist added that "Ascents this steep are rarely sustainable" — before concluding, "If there is such a thing as a healthy bubble, this is it." |
A nonprofit organization that has orchestrated a wide-reaching campaign against foreign drug imports has deep ties to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, the powerful lobbying group that includes Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Bayer.
The nonprofit, called the Partnership for Safe Medicines, has recently emerged as a leading voice against Senate bills that would allow drugs to be imported from Canada.
Both the lobbying group and the nonprofit partnership have gone to great lengths to show that drugmakers are not driving what they describe as a grass-roots effort to fight imports, including an expensive advertising blitz and an event last week that featured high-profile former FBI officials and a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner.
However, a Kaiser Health News analysis of groups involved in the partnership shows more than one-third have received PhRMA funding or are local chapters of groups that have received PhRMA funding, according to PhRMA tax disclosures from 2013 to 2015.
Forty-seven of the organizations listed in the ads appear to be advocacy organizations that received no money from PhRMA in those years.
A PhRMA senior vice president, Scott LaGanga, previously led the Partnership for Safe Medicines for 10 years. At PhRMA, LaGanga was responsible for the lobbying group's alliances with patient advocacy groups, and he was simultaneously listed as the executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines on each of that group's annual tax filings since 2007, the earliest year for which they are available from ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.
LaGanga wrote a 2011 article about the partnership's origins. Published in the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, it described "public-private partnerships in addressing counterfeit medicines." His PhRMA job was not disclosed in the article.
From 2010 to 2014, the organization hosted a conference called the Partnership for Safe Medicines Interchange. In a video from a 2013 event, LaGanga thanks pharmaceutical companies, most of them PhRMA members, for sponsoring the event.
In February, LaGanga moved to a senior role at PhRMA and stepped down as executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, just as the group's campaign to stop import legislation was revving up.
The partnership's new executive director, Shabbir Safdar, said LaGanga resigned from the group to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.
"That's why Scott's not executive director anymore," he said. PhRMA declined to make LaGanga available for an interview.
Considering Legislation
The Senate push to allow Americans to buy pharmaceuticals from Canada comes as more patients balk at filling prescriptions because of soaring drug prices. Prescription medicines purchased in the U.S. can run three times what they cost in Canada, data from the company PharmacyChecker.com show.
In 2016, about 19 million Americans purchased pharmaceuticals illegally from foreign sources through online pharmacies or while traveling, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Many survey respondents cited pricing disparities as the reason.
A bill cosponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would provide a mechanism for Canadian drug manufacturers to sell to U.S. consumers and pharmacies. Sanders introduced the bill in February. In January, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also introduced a bill to allow drug imports from Canada.
In the House, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) introduced a similar bill to Sanders', along with 23 other Democrats.
The U.S. drug industry has strongly opposed efforts to open the borders to drug imports, but the PhRMA lobbying group is not mentioned in the nonprofit partnership's recent advertising blitz against the proposed legislation. The nonprofit says its grass-roots effort is supported by 170 members, including professional organizations and trade groups.
The nonprofit describes PhRMA as a dues-paying member with no larger role in shaping the group's activities. Partnership spokeswoman Clare Krusing would not say how much each member contributes. PhRMA spokeswoman Allyson Funk declined to say whether PhRMA funds the partnership.
"PhRMA engages with stakeholders across the health care system to hear their perspectives and priorities," Funk said. "We work with many organizations with which we have both agreements and disagreements on public policy issues, and believe engagement and dialogue are critical."
Campaigning Against Drug Imports
The partnership recently launched its ad campaign, warning against the alleged dangers of legalizing Canadian drug imports. It includes television commercials, promoted search results on Google and a full-page print ad in The Washington Post and The Hill. The group's YouTube page shows recent commercials targeted to viewers in 13 states.
"We don't disclose specific ad figures, but the campaign is in the high six figures," Safdar said.
The commercials ask voters to urge their senators to "oppose dangerous drug importation legislation."
The newspaper ad reads, "Keep the nation's prescription drug supply safe. Urge the Senate to reject drug importation measures." Its headline declares that "170 healthcare advocacy groups oppose drug importation," noting a letter to Congress signed by its members. The ad lists 160 members who signed the letter, and PhRMA's name is not included.
"Having a big membership allows the coalition to present what looks like a unified show of grass-roots support ... but it does raise questions about which members of the coalition are really driving and funding the group's policy-making," said Matthew McCoy, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who studies patient advocacy groups.
The list of groups includes at least 64 trade organizations representing the biomedical industry, professional associations representing pharmacists, a private research company and two insurance companies.
One group that signed the letter, the "Citrus Council, National Kidney Foundation of Florida Inc.," represents a single volunteer, according to an email from the group. A spokesman for the National Kidney Foundation of Florida said the volunteer's views contradict the position of the umbrella group, and said the foundation supports "any sort of drug importation that allows our patients to have access to drugs at the best price."
Two of the hepatitis patients' advocacy groups that were listed, the National Association of Hepatitis Task Forces and the California Hepatitis C Task Force, are run by the same person, Bill Remak. Remak said the groups receive small amounts of PhRMA funding.
"I don't enjoy having to take this extreme position of saying we shouldn't import at all, but until we have some oversight regime, some way of protecting consumers, it's a really tough call," he said.
"Current drug importation proposals do not appear to have equal safety and chain-of-custody accountability laid out adequately for patient safety concerns," said William Arnold, president of the Community Access National Network, which is also listed in the ad and is an advocacy and support group for people living with HIV/AIDS or hepatitis in Washington, D.C. His group did not accept money from PhRMA between 2013 to 2015, the Kaiser Health News analysis found.
Concerns About Safety And Price
Last week, the partnership hosted a panel at the National Press Club featuring former FBI director Louis Freeh and former FDA commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach. The discussion focused on the alleged health and legal dangers of online pharmacies.
"You can talk about lowering prices, but if a drug comes with a high probability of toxicity and death, that comes at a high cost to the patient," von Eschenbach said. "That's what's at issue with drug importation."
Each speaker argued that the bill co-sponsored by Sanders would be harmful to patients. Around the same time that bill was introduced, the partnership also sent emails to member organizations seeking help to stop such a measure.
Speakers at the partnership event claimed importation would lead to a flood of counterfeit medicines laced with arsenic, fentanyl and lead paint.
"These drugs are manufactured in jungles, in tin drums, in basements. ... Those are the sort of sanitary conditions we're talking about here," said George Karavetsos, a former director of the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations.
Both von Eschenbach and Karavetsos have ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Von Eschenbach left the FDA in 2009 to join Greenleaf Health, which counsels pharmaceutical clients, before starting his own consulting company, and Karavetsos counsels pharmaceutical clients at DLA Piper, a Washington, D.C., law firm.
In an interview, Josh Miller-Lewis, Sanders' deputy director of communications, refuted Karavetsos' arguments. He said Canadian drugmakers can apply for licenses, and all drugs would have to come from FDA-inspected plants.
Politico reported in October that PhRMA is bolstering its war chest by another $100 million per year, suggesting to many industry analysts that drugmakers are gearing up for a ferocious fight.
"I think it's safe to say pharmaceutical corporations are prepared to spend some fraction of their multibillion-dollar profits to fight drug importation and any other policy that might end the plague of overpriced medicine," said Rick Claypool, research director for Public Citizen, a watchdog group critical of the drug industry.
Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent newsroom that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. |
Updated at 2:10 p.m. ET
A judge declined to set bond for an Ohio man during his first court appearance after allegedly ramming a vehicle into a crowd of people demonstrating against a white supremacist rally Saturday in Charlottesville, Va.
Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer was killed, and at least 19 other people were in injured in the attack.
The Charlottesville Police Department said Saturday that James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Maumee, Ohio, was charged with one count of second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and one count of hit-and run.
During today's Charlottesville court hearing, as NPR's Debbie Elliott reports, Fields "appeared by video from jail, dressed in a gray and white-striped prison jumpsuit."
He answered the judge's questions with a simple "Yes, sir" and "No, sir," according to The Associated Press.
Fields told Judge Robert Downer that he could not afford a lawyer. "Downer assigned a court-appointed attorney to represent Fields, and set another hearing for Aug. 25," Debbie adds. "Until then, the judge said, Fields would remain in jail with no bond in part because he has no ties to the area."
The AP adds that the judge told the court that the "public defenders' office informed him it could not represent Fields because a relative of someone in the office was injured in Saturday's protest." Fields was taken into custody on Saturday after the incident.
Details are emerging about Fields' background and his interest in Nazi Germany. One of the suspect's high school teachers in Ohio told member station WVXU that Fields "was intelligent and didn't cause trouble," but was "also deeply into Adolf Hitler and white supremacy."
Derek Weimer, who had Fields in three classes at Randall K. Cooper High School in Union, Ky., told WVXU, "He went to a good school. Lived in a good neighborhood. There were plenty of people around to try to guide him in the right direction. My first feeling is we failed. I failed."
Fields' mother, Samantha Bloom, told The Toledo Blade that she was aware her son was going to what he called an "alt-right" rally. "I told him to be careful," Bloom said, according to the newspaper. "[And] if they're going to rally to make sure he's doing it peacefully." |
British Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that she is calling for early elections on June 8.
"At this moment of enormous national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster," she said in televised remarks in front of 10 Downing Street, referring to the U.K.'s negotiations to leave the European Union.
"But instead, there is division," May said, accusing other political parties of putting up obstacles.
"What they are doing jeopardizes the work we must do to prepare for Brexit at home, and it weakens the government's negotiating position in Europe," May added. "If we do not hold a general election now, their political game-playing will continue, and the negotiations with the European Union will reach their most difficult stage in the run-up to the next scheduled election."
Watch her remarks here:
Before this announcement, the next U.K. general election was scheduled to take place in 2020. |
More than two hundred people have been killed and hundreds more are still missing after torrential rains on the outskirts of Sierra Leone's capital Freetown caused a mountainside to collapse onto a residential community.
A government morgue has received 205 bodies from the mudslide, and at least 71 injured people have been transferred to hospitals, Abu Bakarr Tarawallie, the head of communications for Sierra Leone's Red Cross Society, tells The Two-Way.
Some 600 people remain unaccounted for as rescuers continue digging through the mountain of mud to find survivors and recover bodies, Tarawallie said.
"It is likely that hundreds are lying dead underneath the rubble," Sierra Leone's Vice President Victor Foh told Reuters while visiting the scene of the mudslide. "This disaster is so serious that I feel myself broken. ... We're trying to cordon the area. Evacuate the people."
Tarawallie says recovery efforts face serious challenges. "We are not sure if we will be able to recover all of them considering the herculean task of reaching them out of the depths of the huge mud brought down by the slide," Tarawallie says. "We're not sure of the capacity that exists for them to be reached before they decompose."
Video posted by the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation show strong, churning rivers of mud flowing down streets and through houses. "It appears many people were still sleeping when heavy rains triggered the mudslide which engulfed the area," NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reported.
The damage is extreme, says International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Programme Coordinator Abdul Nasir: "In places, entire communities seem to have been washed away and whatever is left is covered in mud," he said.
Up to 3,000 people are believed to have lost their homes, Tarawallie says. "It is estimated that over 100 houses are affected, and about 25 houses were submerged in the mud."
Efforts to aid the people who have lost their homes have been "a little bit chaotic," he says. "No organized structure or shelter has been put in place for them." He says that the Red Cross is currently working on a response to help the people who have survived the mudslide.
Reuters spoke with Salimatu Bangura, who lives in the flooded area and lost her brother this morning. "We were asleep when we heard the noise of one of the walls falling down. By the time we got up water was flowing in and the whole house was flooded," she said.
Tarawallie stresses that Sierra Leone regularly experiences floods and mudslides due to heavy downpours. He adds: "The only particularity of this is that it is unprecedented that for the first time we are having this magnitude of impact and huge loss of property and lives."
According to the wire service, deforestation and poor urban planning have exacerbated the dangers in Sierra Leone during the rainy season.
"There is little to no urban planning going on in the city at all levels of society," Jamie Hitchen of the Africa Research Institute told The Guardian. "The government is failing to provide housing for the poorest in society. There is a chronic housing deficit in the city and the issues only get discussed on an annual basis when flooding happens and [it] comes into the spotlight." |
President Trump on Monday authorized his top trade official to look into whether China is guilty of intellectual property theft, a move that could eventually lead to trade sanctions.
Trump called his action "a very big move" against practices that cost our nation "millions of jobs and billions and billions of dollars each and every year."
He cited not just the theft of intellectual property such as computer software, but also Beijing's requirement that U.S. companies turn over proprietary technology as a condition of entering China's markets.
"We will safeguard the copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and other intellectual property that is so vital to our security and to our prosperity," Trump said at the White House. He was flanked by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and members of his economic team.
Monday's steps were very preliminary, and analysts say that it could be a long time, if ever, before significant trade sanctions are imposed on China.
Eventually, it could lead the administration to initiate what's called a Section 301 investigation, a sanctions mechanism that's part of the Trade Act of 1974.
Section 301 was widely used in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, but subsequent presidents have chosen to hear trade disputes at the World Trade Organization.
Matt Gold, a former deputy assistant U.S. trade representative, told NPR that Section 301 can be imposed unilaterally and is generally seen as quicker than the alternatives, such as the WTO.
"It saves time," he said. A WTO case "would take a few years for us to bring it to a WTO panel, get a decision, then it will get appealed to the WTO appellate body. Then we get another decision. Then we have to go through another WTO process to get authorization for specific types of trade barriers. ... So it can take a few years to get the WTO authorization."
The White House move was applauded by technology groups, which have long complained about intellectual property theft. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation issued a statement saying "for too long China has flouted the spirit, if not always the letter of its commitments under the WTO and other agreements."
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said launching the investigation sends a strong signal to China that it will be held accountable if it doesn't work with the United States to level the playing field. But he said the Trump administration needs to go further to address dumping of products such as steel.
"We need to follow through with meaningful action and that means the president needs to get serious about trade enforcement, especially on steel," Brown said.
But there are risks to the White House approach. Carolyn Freund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says U.S. companies that try to do business with China could get hurt in several ways.
"China is likely to retaliate with tariffs on their own of U.S. goods, and then U.S. companies will be further hurt in China," she said. "It won't lead to anything positive."
In an editorial on Monday, the state-run newspaper China Daily said the investigation will "poison" relations.
But Freund also points out that for all of Trump's rhetoric about China while on the campaign trail, the White House so far has been slow to take action against unfair trade practices. Trump backed off of labeling China a currency manipulator for instance, and a long promised report on steel dumping has been delayed.
She says that's because it's one thing to talk about steel tariffs, but imposing them hurts other U.S. manufacturers, such as automakers and appliance companies. |
From Texas Standard:
On Saturday, members of the media received a press release titled: “Today Charlottesville, Tomorrow Texas A&M.” The message came from a group organizing a White Lives Matter rally featuring white nationalist Richard Spencer, scheduled to take place on September 11th at the Texas university. There's plenty of outrage on social media, and a counter-protest has already been planned.
Adam Key, an organizer of BTHO Hate, says the counter-protest will be non-violent and is meant to challenge the hateful and bigoted ideology perpetuated by Spencer.
Indeed, Key organized another protest to a Spencer event last December on campus, but says protesters weren’t allowed into the Memorial Student Center where he was speaking.
“The goal of our protest was not to get in and disrupt his event. …We simply wanted to use our free speech to collectively represent our opposition to his ideas,” he says.
Even in the midst of events like Charlottesville, when the stakes seem highest for opposition groups like BTHO Hate, Key says peaceful protest is the most important thing to do.
“I understand that people are afraid after Charlottesville…but simultaneously, if we don’t speak up because we’re afraid, then they’ve already won,” he says.
But there was violence in Charlottesville: A driver plowed through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one person and injuring dozens. Some are criticizing the police for not doing enough to prevent physical clashes, but Key says he’s confident the same thing won’t happen at A&M.
“I have great faith in the great men and women of the university police department. …I expect just like December, we’ll have state troopers there and I believe the FBI was there last time as well,” he says.
For good measure, BTHO Hate’s protest will take place at a distance from the Spencer event. And there will be what he calls a “maroon wall,” or a human barrier, that will obscure onlookers’ view of the white lives matter rally.
“Our goal is to have the two be separate things, to discourage the type of physical interaction that happened in Charlottesville,” Key says.
Whatever BTHO Hate does to prevent violence, the Spencer event and counter-protest will likely draw extensive media attention, which could fuel tensions. Key is aware of that possibility, but says it’s still important his group speaks up to promote inclusivity, especially because of A&M’s historical exclusion of black students.
“It’s incredibly important as Aggies that we stand up and express that our campus welcomes all races, creeds, colors, religions and sexual orientations. But the one thing we don’t welcome is hatred and intolerance. By remaining silent, we basically do nothing and we allow evil to go on,” he says.
Written by Caroline Covington. |
At a federal court in Wisconsin, a British cybersecurity expert pleaded not guilty to charges over an alleged malware scheme to steal personal banking information.
Before these accusations, Marcus Hutchins was known for his role in finding the "kill switch" to the WannaCry ransomware cyber-attack last May that "threatened over 150 countries," NPR's Leila Fadel reported.
After today's hearing, Hutchins' lawyer Marcia Hofmann described him as a "brilliant young man and a hero," and said that "when the evidence comes to light, we are confident he will be fully vindicated."
The FBI took Hutchins into custody earlier this month in Las Vegas, where he had been attending a cybersecurity conference.
In July, a federal grand jury indicted him and an unnamed co-defendant on six counts dating from July 2014 to July 2015.
The indictment accuses Hutchins of creating the malware, which is called Kronos. The two co-defendents then allegedly advertised it on internet forums and sold it.
Hutchins is charged with "one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, three counts of distributing and advertising an electronic communication interception device, one count of endeavoring to intercept electronic communications, and one count of attempting to access a computer without authorization," as Leila reported.
She added that other members of his community were shocked at the accusations, because they are counter to his reputation as a person devoted to preventing this kind of attack.
Hutchins was "granted bail on 5 August after $30,000 ...was raised by friends and family," according to the BBC.
But his release comes with strict conditions, as detailed by The Associated Press:
"His bond has been modified so that he can stay in Los Angeles near his attorney and travel anywhere in the U.S., but he cannot leave the country. He was also granted access to use a computer for work, a change from an earlier judge's order barring him from using any device with access to the internet. Hutchins has been working for a network security company, according to prosecutors, who did not oppose allowing him access to a computer for work." "Hutchins is required to wear a GPS monitor, but [Magistrate Judge William] Duffin said the court will consider removing that requirement once Hutchins has found a home in Los Angeles and is complying with the terms of his bond."
The wire service adds that the next hearing is scheduled for Oct. 17. |
A fixture of the London landscape and soundscape, Big Ben, is falling silent for four years. The bell will cease its regular tolling while extensive repairs are made to the famous clock tower that looms over the Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament.
The massive bell will mark the hour for the last time at noon on Aug. 21 and then pause for four years while the Elizabeth Tower, which houses the Great Clock and the Great Bell, aka Big Ben, is restored. A larger restoration of the Parliament buildings is likely to begin in the early 2020s, according to a Parliament website.
Quieting Big Ben's mighty bongs will help preserve the hearing of workers involved in the project.
The keeper of the Great Clock, Steve Jaggs, said in a statement that the pause "is a significant milestone in this crucial conservation project." If you're in London next Monday you may want to accept Jaggs' invitation to gather in Parliament Square "to hear Big Ben's final bongs until they return in 2021." However, Big Ben will still bong for important national events such as New Year's Eve and Remembrance Sunday.
The Great Bell has chimed nearly every hour for the past 157 years. It has had previous breaks in service for maintenance and conservation in 2007, in 1983-1985 and in 1976. The 13.7-ton bell, which was forged in the 1850s, is accompanied by smaller chimes that ring out each quarter hour.
The Great Clock has a Victorian-era clockwork mechanism that triggers the bell and chimes. That mechanism and the clock's four faces will also get refurbished, which will require the faces to be covered.
To make sure Londoners don't get completely disoriented and lose track of the correct time, Jaggs says at least one clock face will remain visible. It will keep time with the aid of a modern electric motor, while the Victorian mechanism is being repaired. |
In the Alabama Republican Senate race, every candidate wants to be just like Donald Trump.
But in Tuesday's primary, the leading candidate sounds and acts more like the president, while it's the incumbent, an appointed senator just fighting to make it into a likely runoff, who has Trump's actual blessing — but also the curse of being Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's favorite candidate.
That's the conundrum of the Republican contest, largely seen as a three-way race between front-runner Roy Moore, a controversial former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice; Sen. Luther Strange, appointed back in February to fill the seat of now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions; and Rep. Mo Brooks, who's seized on an anti-McConnell platform as the president's attacks against the Senate's top Republican have intensified recently.
Moore has consistently polled atop the field, and looks likely to claim a spot in a probable September runoff. His ads sound downright Trumpian, promising to "drain the swamp" and taking a swipe at D.C. elites.
Moore is well-known throughout the state — and the country — too. He first gained national notoriety when he refused to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from a state judicial building despite a federal court order; Moore himself was then removed from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003. He won election to the same post again in 2012, but was then suspended after he ordered judges to enforce the state's ban on same-sex marriage despite the Supreme Court's 2015 decision in favor of gay marriage nationwide under the federal Constitution. He resigned earlier this year to challenge Strange.
To state observers, it's not surprising that Moore has been able to build a strong following and even expand beyond what might be his typical conservative base in the state.
"Alabama voters supported Trump because he spoke his mind and said all the things they had been thinking about government," said Brent Buchanan, a GOP strategist and pollster in the state. "Out of all the candidates, Roy Moore has some of those similar characteristics. You may not agree with all of his policy or personal preferences, but you know that Roy Moore is going to do what Roy Moore believes."
That's why it was so, well, strange last week when Trump tweeted out his support for Strange, saying the incumbent has his "complete and total endorsement!"
The senator has benefited from millions of dollars in ads from the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund super PAC. The very next day after endorsing Strange, Trump started going on Twitter tirades against the GOP Senate leader for failing to pass a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
Strange has tried to prove his loyalty to the president ever since he was appointed under less than auspicious circumstances. As Alabama's attorney general, Strange was investigating then-Gov. Robert Bentley for misuse of his office amid a sex scandal when Bentley chose Strange to replace Sessions. Facing impeachment, Bentley eventually resigned, and the new governor, Kay Ivey, moved up the date for the special election to replace Sessions long-term.
Polling done in the wake of Trump's surprise endorsement showed that the president's blessing had done little — yet — to move the needle toward Strange. One by cygnal, Buchanan's firm, conducted partly after the endorsement, showed Moore still with a lead and high favorables, Strange remained static and it was Brooks who took a hit.
Buchanan said the Trump endorsement could help Strange turn out some who were less likely to vote on Tuesday, which could be key in what's already expected to be a very low-turnout affair.
And the pro-Trump America First Action super PAC also announced late Friday it would be spending up to $200,000 on digital ads targeting Trump voters to encourage them to come out for Strange.
However, although he's slipping in polling, Brooks is hoping to turn McConnell's fervent support for Strange into a last-ditch way to get into the likely runoff against Moore. He's hitched a "Ditch Mitch" banner to his campaign bus in the final days, and in his closing ad he echoes Trump's frustration with McConnell's inability to push through an Obamacare repeal.
"McConnell and Strange are weak, but together we can be strong," Brooks says. "Mr. President, isn't it time we tell McConnell and Strange, 'You're fired?'"
Ultimately, the Huntsville-area congressman hasn't had the resources the other two candidates have had, and he hasn't been elected statewide before like Moore and Strange. And, perhaps most damaging, he was certainly no fan of Trump during the GOP presidential primaries last year, during which he supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. McConnell's super PAC has pointed that out in ads, saying Brooks sided with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
If Strange does fall short of the runoff, University of Alabama political science professor emeritus William Stewart, a longtime political observer in the state, said that's a big problem for McConnell. And, if Strange does make it to the likely September runoff, expect that to be a big point Moore can use against Strange, too.
"The McConnell support for Strange will not be helpful because McConnell, as the president says, hasn't been successful at pushing through the president's agenda, " Stewart said. "If Strange doesn't make the runoff, that's a definite blow to McConnell," more so than Trump.
Polling shows Moore is still the favorite against Strange in a runoff, and that's where the McConnell ties could be the most deadly — and place the president in a more precarious spot given his surprising endorsement. Stewart said it would be interesting to watch how much Trump puts his muscle behind Strange later, and something like traveling to Alabama — one of Trump's best states in 2016 — for a rally on the senator's behalf would certainly give Strange a boost.
No matter who wins the GOP nomination though, they'll be the heavy favorite in the December general election, even if it's the more controversial Moore. Democrats are expected to nominate Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney, though he could face a runoff against the aptly-named Robert Kennedy Jr., a Naval veteran who is not related to the famous Democratic political family.
If Moore is the GOP nominee, it will be interesting to watch whether the Democrats can make it even a mildly competitive contest — something Stewart, the former University of Alabama professor, said is doubtful, and is emblematic of the problems the party faces overall in the South.
"Right now the Democratic Party is very impotent here," Stewart said. "I think whomever the Republicans choose as their nominee will be the winner." |
Two Kenyan runners, both of them making their Boston Marathon debut, have won the prestigious race.
Edna Kiplagat, a Kenyan policewoman and two-time world champion marathoner, finished first in the women's race with a time of 2:21:52. Rose Chelimo, a Kenyan-born Bahraini runner, placed second.
Geoffrey Kirui, also of Kenya, won the mens' race at 2:09:37 — his first-ever marathon victory. He edged out Portland runner Galen Rupp by 21 seconds.
It was a big day for debut runners at Boston, according to Runner's World.
In the women's race, 25-year-old Jordan Hasay ran her first-ever marathon in 2:23:00 to place third. It was the fastest-ever debut by an American woman, Runner's World says.
And in the men's race, 26-year-old Suguru Osako of Japan — also competing in his first marathon — placed third with 2:10:28.
Meanwhile, competitors in the wheelchair race finished in world-best times, The Associated Press reports:
"Manuela Schar of Switzerland finished in 1 hour, 28 minutes, 17 seconds — shattering the world best by more than five minutes. Fellow Swiss Marcel Hug took the men's race in 1:18:04, also the fastest time ever. "The winners' times are considered a world best and not a world record. The straight-line Boston course doesn't qualify for world records because of the possibility of a supportive tailwind like the one on Monday."
The athletes had a tailwind of 13 mph, the AP reports. |
Walk down the aisle of your local pharmacy or grocery store and you'll be bombarded by a dizzying array of bleaching products, from gels and strips to paint-on bleach.
Cosmetic tooth bleaching is a $3.2 billion global industry, according to market analysts, and it's getting bigger fast. It's easy to see why. Strikingly white, bright smiles dominate TV and social media, and people tend to prefer the bright teeth of youth rather than those that have been yellowed by trauma or age.
But if you decide that you, too, want a brighter smile, it's hard to know where to start.
"I'm a dentist, but I'm also a consumer and I can certainly get confused by all the products," says Ruchi Sahota who practices in Fremont, Calif. A colleague of hers describes the tooth product aisle in stores as the "dental aisle of confusion," because there are so many options. "You can easily get bewildered standing there trying to figure out which option is the best," she says.
The dilemma isn't helped by regulators. Tooth whitening products don't need approval from the Food and Drug Administration before hitting the market, because the agency considers them "cosmetic," a designation that's much more lightly regulated than drugs. And, the FDA says it has not determined that any ingredients contained in currently marketed products are unsafe.
The American Dental Association does offer some guidance in choosing a bleaching product — its ADA seal of acceptance. "The seal is rooted in science," says chemist Jamie Spomer, director of the ADA's seal of acceptance program; she notes that when a manufacturer applies for the seal, an independent panel of dentists analyzes the company's data and sometimes performs studies of their own.
The seal is a "symbol that an independent panel reviewed and approved the product for its safety and effectiveness," Spomer says. Many toothpastes carry the ADA seal. So far only one over-the-counter-bleaching product does — Crest 3D White Glamorous White Whitestrips.
Even so, Sahota says many over-the-counter products that don't carry the seal can still be effective if used as directed. Most cause some tooth sensitivity during the bleaching process, but that goes away once the process is complete, she says. Depending on which product is used, bleaching can take anywhere from two to six weeks.
And, if you're not careful, Sahota says the products can leak onto the gums, causing inflammation and "extra sensitivity" to pressure, temperature and touch.
A safer but more costly option might be to buy a custom-made tray from your dentist, Sahota says. Unlike the one-size-fits-all trays sold over the counter, a dentist makes the tray "just for you" she says.
The tray hugs the teeth and ensures the gel is kept where it should be and is evenly applied. The kits cost about $400; this at-home whitening process can take up to four weeks, depending on how stained the teeth are to begin with. Generally, the trays are worn for one or two hours a day.
If you want an even faster route, you'll have to pay more. Bleaching in the dental office can run more than $1,000, but results are quick and more dramatic. Dentists use bleaching gels that rely on high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide (up to 40 percent hydrogen peroxide, compared to a 5 to 6 percent concentration in drugstore kits and a 10 to 15 percent solution in the home-kits from dentists).
So the whole process in the dentist's office can take just an hour or two to complete. And because the peroxide concentrations used there are much higher, the results can be many shades lighter than with take-home kits and over-the-counter products.
An important caveat: Insurance companies consider in-office teeth whitening "cosmetic" so the procedures are almost never covered.
Nonetheless, more Americans are opting for in-office whitening. In 2015, in-office bleaching procedures rose 29 percent over the year before, according to an American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry survey. And there's at least a little evidence that the whiter the smile the more attractive the person – in a 2012 study both men and women said they prefer white teeth when choosing a mate.
But go to the dentist before you start bleaching, says Ada Cooper, a New York City dentist.
"Tooth discoloration can be caused by cavities and other oral problems," she says. "It's more important to maintain healthy teeth."
It's also important to note that not all stains are the same. Some are mostly on the surface of the teeth and come from consuming lots of dark colored liquids like coffee, tea and red wine, as well as foods with vibrant yellow spices like turmeric. The tar and nicotine from cigarettes are also huge culprits. Often surface stains can be diminished by routine brushing, flossing and biannual professional cleaning in the dentist's office.
Unfortunately, there are deeper stains you just can't avoid by being careful about what you eat and drink. These come with aging and years of chewing, which causes millions of tiny cracks in the outer enamel of the tooth. These cracks can fill up with stain. On top of that, the thinning enamel can allow the yellow core of the tooth to become more visible. Grinding teeth at night and brushing too hard can also weaken and thin tooth enamel. Bleaching agents can penetrate these deeper stains and turn the tooth whiter — typically two to seven shades lighter.
There are some discolorations that just can't be bleached away. Trauma to a tooth — such as a chip or break — can also permanently discolor it from the inside, and stains from ingesting the antibiotic tetracycline or large amounts of fluoride are also permanent. In these cases, the only option for whiter teeth is a crown or veneer.
All types of bleaching — whether over-the-counter, take-home kits or in the dental office — are temporary, requiring touch-ups at some point. As for homespun remedies promoted online, in social media and in magazines as being "natural whitening" agents (including charcoal, baking soda or lemon juice), the ADA says there is no evidence these methods work. |
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions was asked how he viewed the car attack in Charlottesville, Va., here's how he responded:
"It does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute," he told ABC's Good Morning America.
That certainly seems to suggest the government is looking into a possible terrorism charge against the suspect, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. At Saturday's rally organized by white supremacists, a car slammed into counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19.
But according to the Justice Department and legal analysts, it's simply not possible for the government to file charges of domestic terrorism, because no such criminal law exists.
The Patriot Act does define domestic terrorism, and under this designation, the Justice Department has broad powers to investigate, said Neal Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who served as former President Barack Obama's acting solicitor general and as the national security adviser to the Justice Department.
He said the government has three basic ways to approach the Charlottesville case.
"No. 1, this is a hate crime, under the hate crime statutes," he said. "The second is that this is a conspiracy to deprive individuals of civil rights."
"And the third is, this is an act of domestic terror, which isn't itself a crime," he noted. In short, the government can't file a criminal charge of domestic terrorism, but so defining the incident does allow it to investigate not only an individual suspect, but also any group the suspect may be affiliated with.
In an email to NPR, the Justice Department made the same point.
The commonwealth of Virginia, meanwhile, has charged Fields with second-degree murder and other crimes.
The Charlottesville case has again spurred a discussion about describing far-right violence as terrorism. After the al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism was associated primarily with radical Islamist groups based abroad.
The State Department has a list of nearly 60 groups, all foreign, that are identified as terrorist organizations. The vast majority are radical Islamists. And the government can charge a person — American or foreign — with terrorism on behalf of these international groups.
Consider this hypothetical: If the Charlottesville attacker emerged from the car and said he was acting on behalf of the Islamic State, he could be charged with international terrorism, according to Katyal.
Inside the U.S., the political debate appears to be shifting, with growing numbers calling for far-right extremism to be identified as terrorism. But that's almost entirely a political discussion, not a legal one.
On the legal front, there's still a good deal of resistance to creating a criminal charge of domestic terrorism.
"It's an incredibly broad label," said Hina Shamsi, director of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union. "There's a real danger of the government criminalizing ideology, theology and beliefs rather than focusing on specific criminal acts."
She said creating a domestic terrorism charge could quickly raise all sorts of political questions about free speech and religion. The ACLU opposes any such law, believing it could be politicized and used, for example, against anti-war groups or environmental activists.
Back in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people with a truck bomb at a federal building in Oklahoma City, it was widely described as the worst act of domestic terrorism to that point.
Yet he was charged with, convicted of and executed for killing federal agents and other crimes — but not terrorism.
The government has historically used the term "terrorism" as a general description for a range of violent acts, including those by right-wing extremists, as well as environmental, anti-abortion and far-left groups. But the specific criminal charge is never domestic terrorism.
Another case came to light Monday, when the Justice Department announced it had arrested a man for allegedly attempting to set off a truck bomb in front of a bank in Oklahoma City on Saturday.
The bomb didn't detonate, the department said. But its description of the case is similar to McVeigh's attack, claiming the suspect, Jerry Varnell, 23, was angry with the government.
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is leading what's being described as a "domestic terrorism investigation." Yet the formal charge against Varnell is "attempting to use explosives to destroy a building in interstate commerce."
Not terrorism. |
A few years ago, my daughter requested that her nightly lullaby be replaced with a bedtime story.
I was happy to comply, and promptly invented stories full of imaginary creatures in elaborate plots intended to convey some important lesson about patience or hard work or being kind to others.
But my daughter was not pleased. She had very particular ideas about what her bedtime stories should be about. She wanted stories about a little girl planning a birthday party. A human girl. A human girl about her age. And what fascinated her were the mundane details: the theme for the party, the location, who was invited, and (most importantly) what they had for dessert.
It turns out my daughter is not alone. Her passion for birthday party stories, in particular, may be somewhat idiosyncratic, but children often prefer the factual over the fantastical. And a growing body of work suggests that when it comes to storybooks, they also learn better from stories that are realistic. For example, preschool-aged children are more likely to learn new facts about animals when the animals are portrayed realistically as opposed to anthropomorphically, and they're more likely to apply the solution to a problem presented in a storybook to a new scenario when the storybook involves real people (as opposed to fictional characters) and a realistic plot (as opposed to a space adventure).
A new study by Nicole Larson, Kang Lee, and Patricia Ganea, forthcoming in the journal Developmental Science, reveals that learning about good behavior is no exception. When children read a realistic storybook about humans who shared, they were more likely to do so themselves.
In the study, 4- to 6-year-old children were read a story about sharing that featured either human characters or anthropomorphic animals. Both before and after the story, children had the opportunity to share stickers with other children. The number of stickers each child set aside for others provided a quantifiable measure of sharing.
The key finding was that, on average, children who heard the story featuring a human who shared increased the number of stickers they shared, whereas those who heard the story featuring an anthropomorphic animal that shared did not. In other words, young children applied the lesson from the story to their own behavior, but only when the story featured humans.
The researchers also found that when children in another group were allowed to choose whether to read the story about humans or the story about anthropomorphic animals, they had no reliable preference. This suggests that the story about humans wasn't more effective in promoting sharing simply because children found it more appealing, and also that children weren't reliably drawn to the more fantastical alternative.
The findings from the study reinforce the idea that young children have an easier time exporting what they learn from a fictional storybook to the real world when the storybook is realistic. The leap from a fictional human to a real one is simply smaller than the leap from an anthropomorphic raccoon to a human. But it could be that as children grow older they become better at making these leaps, or that parents can help them make the leaps more readily.
In a paper just published in the journal Cognition, for example, developmental psychologist Caren Walker and I found that prompting 5- and 6-year-old children to explain key events in a storybook made them better at extracting the moral of the story and then applying it to a real-world problem. This is something parents can do easily as they read storybooks with their children, asking them why (say) an anthropomorphic raccoon did or didn't share, and why other characters responded as they did. If the theory in our paper is right, this should help children relate the unrealistic aspects of the story to what they know about the real world, and thus appreciate the patterns that hold across both the fictional world of the story and the real world around them.
The lesson I've learned from research on children's stories is this: When my daughter asks for a (realistic) birthday party story tonight, I'll indulge her. It will be about a human girl who celebrates her 7th birthday. But it will also include some realistic problems with realistic solutions — and I'll throw in some lessons about sharing and some prompts to explain for good measure.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo |
Central Texans are expressing solidarity and concern after Saturday’s deadly white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On Sunday morning, about 10 strangers, all of them white, gathered in a room at the Triumphant Love Lutheran Church in Northwest Austin. Most were drawn by a post for a Facebook event, which said a Charlottesville solidarity event was being held at the church. After a few minutes of pleasantries, people began talking about their roles as allies.
“We’re mostly white folks here,” said Austin resident Hans Maverick. “There’s a lot of tools online that explain how to really listen to people of color.”
Several other attendees echoed Maverick’s points about the need to listen to the experiences of African- Americans and other people of color. Temple, Texas resident Cecily Luft drove about an hour to Austin to attend the gathering. Luft, who is in the process of converting to Judaism, said it was surreal to see images of Saturday's neo-Nazi rally.
“I went to Facebook, and I saw page after page of white men carrying torches… swastikas, and I immediately just had to turn it off,” Luft said. “I felt an overwhelming sense of, ‘I can’t let this happen without a fight.’”
Eventually the group grew to about 30 people. A few people of color, and the event organizer Margaret Haule, arrived. Haule, who is African American and the founder of Black Lives Matter Austin, led an hour-long discussion on racial tension and how to show support for minority groups. She fielded questions on everything from which charities to support to whether wearing safety pins on your shirt is an effective means of showing solidarity. Haule said Saturday’s events in Charlottesville touched a nerve for many people, regardless of race.
“People need an outlet for what they were feeling, what they were experiencing,” Haule said. “This was a way for people to express their pain, express their grief, and just to do a catharsis.”
Haule also said that in her experience, white people and even some minority groups tend to unload their stories of racist experiences and guilt onto African-Americans.
“There’s a time and place, and also, black people are not monolithic, so it’s important that you tap into your humanity before you just assume that they want for you to bear your burden on them without them having the time to process their own burden,” she said.
One man pushed back on Haule’s statements, asking her whether the point of the event was to tell people everything they are doing wrong as allies. He said in his view, it was important to share stories of the human experience.
One of the few people of color in attendance was Margarita Bamba. She immigrated from the Philippines and recently became an American citizen. Bamba became emotional when talking to the group about raising her two young sons in a racially charged climate.
"I want to teach them what it means to be part of this country and do things that you believe in," Bamba said.
Speaking after the event, Bamba said that when people talk about being allies, it's important not to oversimplify the narratives of minority groups.
"When everybody was talking about people of color, I think I was grateful that there are so many white people here, but it felt almost like an out-of-body experience, like people were talking about me in the third person, like I wasn't in the room," she said. "It's become this idea of people of color, that we're this monolithic group, and we're not."
A white supremacist rally and a counter protest are planned for September 11th on the Texas A&M campus. Haule isn’t directly involved in that counter protest, and she says she’ll leave that effort up to local organizers in College Station, Texas. To those who want to be an ally, she says one of the most important things to do is listen. |
If you think your job is more stressful than it should be, you're not alone.
Americans work hard, and it takes a physical and mental toll, not to mention that it frequently cuts into personal time, according to a comprehensive survey on working conditions the nonpartisan RAND Corporation published Monday. But having a good boss and good friends on the job can make work feel less taxing.
In 2015, RAND researchers, along with Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Los Angeles, began collecting data from over 3,000 people from all income and education levels who work or have worked in all types of jobs. What they discovered about how we work may help inform policymakers looking to grow the economy and employers looking to retain the best workers.
This kind of data, examining workplace conditions in the U.S., has not been collected for decades. "We have excellent data on wages, on training ... but we don't know much about the conditions of work," says Nicole Maestas, an economist and associate health care policy professor at Harvard Medical School who is the lead researcher on this study.
What the researchers found was that more than 1 in 4 Americans surveyed say they don't have enough time to do their jobs, with about half of Americans reporting that they do some work in their free time. This was most prevalent among white-collar workers. Two-thirds of all workers say they frequently work under tight deadlines or at high speed.
In addition, 1 in 5 reported experiencing verbal abuse, threats, humiliating behavior or unwanted sexual attention at work in the past month; or they experienced bullying, harassment or sexual harassment in the past year.
"One thing that really struck me was the high prevalence of hostile social interactions at work," says Maestas. Her survey found that while such interactions were seen across the board, verbal abuse was much more common in customer service jobs and experienced at the highest rates among men who did not graduate from college. Younger women and women of "prime age," defined in the survey as ages 35-49, experienced the most unwanted sexual attention.
But people who have "good" bosses — or bosses who respect them, praise them, work with them and give feedback — were less likely to have workers who reported verbal or physical threats, Maestra notes.
"Maybe bad bosses are part of the problem," she says, when it comes to a hostile work environment.
American workers feel, by and large, that they have a reasonable amount of autonomy on the job and are confident in their skills. Still, many workers, particularly those in service jobs and without a college degree, have little control over their work schedules. Some experience schedule changes the day of work or the day before.
New York and San Francisco have passed laws requiring employers to make schedules more predictable, and Oregon may become the first state to require at least a week's notice of duty hours for certain service jobs so employees can plan doctors' appointments and child care and get to their second jobs.
Despite multiple studies showing the benefits of telecommuting, it is still a rare option for many workers. The RAND survey found that 78 percent of employees are required to show up at their workplaces during regular business hours.
No matter where we work, friendships play an important role in how we perceive our jobs. Sixty-one percent of women agree with the statement "I have very good friends at work," while 53 percent of men agreed.
While the emotional support helps, many jobs are simply tough on the body. Seventy-five percent of people surveyed report intense or repetitive physical exertion on the job at least 25 percent of the time. While workers who don't have a college education report greater physical challenges on the job — think health care aides and construction workers — college-educated and older workers face significant physical challenges as well, particularly in the medical and sales fields where they are lifting heavy items and on their feet most of the day.
The physical exertion of their jobs may be why some older Americans retire early. It's also a prime consideration for many seniors who say they would consider going back to work for the "right" job, Maestas says.
"We've got more people retiring than ever, and there just aren't enough younger workers to both release retirees and grow the economy," she says, so employers should take notice of workplace conditions if they want to retain older, experienced workers.
Additionally, 55 percent of workers report they are exposed to physical risks like smoke, fumes, infectious materials, extreme temperatures and vibrations from hand tools about 25 percent of the time. "That was strikingly high," Maestas says.
Saba Waheed, the research director at UCLA's Labor Center who was not involved in the study, says she was also surprised by the extent of the health and safety challenges revealed in the survey.
"We have a lot of great laws, but we need better enforcement," she says.
While she largely praises the survey's comprehensiveness, Waheed says she would have like to see how workers fared along hourly versus non-hourly lines, as well as the experiences reported by part-time versus full-time workers. "I would really love to see race in here," she says, as well.
Maestas says that the survey did not break down workers by race because doing so would have resulted in numbers too small to be statistically significant.
The American Working Conditions Survey is based on a European workplace survey conducted every five years. Maestas and her team plan to compare the U.S. data with European data in 2018.
The survey was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Social Security Administration. |