U.S. News

Springfield, Ohio became suddenly famous nationally when Trump claimed that an influx of Haitian migrants were devouring residents' pets. I went looking to see what the town is experiencing from the perspective of local news, and it looks surprising nuanced.

It appears that the town saw a rapid influx of migrants fleeing violence in Haiti. The town has since experienced a strain in its ability to function in notable ways because of the population shock. The issues include a sudden reduction in the housing supply and an increase in traffic and inexperienced drivers. One particularly bad traffic accident killed a child during a school bus crash.

The city government has seemed to largely avoid blaming new arrivals themselves. However they've expressed a sense of betrayal towards Biden and the federal government for granting thousands of people entry into the country without appearing to recognize any responsibility for helping them resettle or aiding their destination cities in accommodating them. Additionally, they've begun investigating local businesses which they suspect used the expansion of visas for Haitians seeking asylum as an opportunity to seek out low-cost workers while concealing their role in creating a population shock for which the city was unprepared.

I must say that I think the city government makes a reasonable point: those of use who want to offer foreign visitors safety and dignity in American must also demand that our government takes responsibility for helping them relocate to a town in which is expecting their arrival and has been aided in making that arrival successful.

DENVER -- A teenager scouting out a spot near a Colorado lake to take picturesque homecoming photos this weekend was shot in the face when the boyfriend of the property owner fired his weapon and yelled, “Oh sh__, my gun went off,” court records show.

The 17-year-old boy survived the shooting and told investigators he didn't believe the man intentionally shot him. But the man who shot him, Brent Metz, a councilman in a tiny town in the Denver metro area, was arrested on suspicion of charges that include first degree assault.

DENVER (AP) — A Colorado paramedic convicted in the death of Elijah McClain, a Black man whose name became part of the rallying cries for social justice that swept the U.S. in 2020, is being released from prison after a judge reduced his sentence to four years of probation Friday.

Judge Mark Warner said during his ruling that Peter Cichuniec had to make quick decision the night of the arrest as the highest-ranking paramedic at the scene, the Denver Post reported. He also noted a background of no previous criminal history and good character for Cichuniec, who had an 18-year-career as a firefighter and paramedic before he was convicted.

Warner held that the case had “unusual and extenuating circumstances,” in reference to a part of Colorado’s mandatory sentencing law, which allows a court to modify a sentence after a defendant has served least 119 days in prison if the judge finds such circumstances. McClain was walking down the street in a Denver suburb in 2019 when police responding to a suspicious person report forcibly restrained him and put him in a neck hold. His final words — “I can’t breathe” — foreshadowed those of George Floyd a year later in Minneapolis.

Cichuniec and a fellow paramedic were convicted in December of criminally negligent homicide for injecting McClain with ketamine, a powerful sedative blamed for killing the 23-year-old massage therapist. Cichuniec also was convicted on a more serious charge of second-degree assault for giving a drug without consent or a legitimate medical purpose. The other paramedic avoided prison time, sentenced instead to 14 months in jail with work release and probation.

The incident occurred approximately one block from the stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., as traffic started to build ahead of a 1 p.m. start to the game.

"How things escalated into the situation that they were in handcuffs and being held on the ground with police is mind boggling to me," Rosenhaus told ESPN.

See also:

• https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/sports/nfl/dolphins-tyreek-hill-arrested-detained-police-will-play-week-1/3411748/
• https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/tyreek-hills-agent-reacts-to-dolphins-star-being-detained-near-hard-rock-stadium-ahead-of-week-1-game/3411787/

To explain how it was going, students shared their experiences through the Rooted Cash Podcast

Across the nation, there’s been an increase in programs looking at ways to help lift up young people – and move them from poverty into more secure futures.

[...]

Teachers have long known that students with economically stable lives are better able to learn, without the distraction of scrambling to find money for school uniforms, sports gear, food, clothing, books, transportation, and WiFi services. Poverty’s effects on academics become even more clear in high school. The number of low-income students who drop out of high school is nearly four times higher than higher-income households.

Those students might do better if they felt more economically stable, Rooted School administrators concluded a few years ago. In response, they launched a guaranteed-income program, which they called The $50 Study, since that’s how much each participant received each week.

[...]

“We are still navigating a lot of the remnants of the pandemic: chronic absenteeism, performance slippage,” said Rooted School Foundation CEO Jonathan Johnson, who believes that school administrators must innovate, in ways that help children. “We still very much believe that there are interventions out there that are often underexplored that could be leveraged to move the needle for young people in a way that hasn’t been done before.”

Research shows that, when compared with previous generations, today’s young adults feel instability that goes far beyond the pandemic, which is why an increasing number of guaranteed-income programs are focused on youth.

[....]

Results published earlier this month show that Rooted’s $50 Study seems to have moved the needle for participating students, who demonstrated improved attendance and higher reading-level growth than their peers, among other strides forward. The study tracked academic outcomes like attendance and grades, financial literacy and each student’s sense of self and future outlook.

[...]

Students who received the $50 each week missed two fewer days of school in a semester compared to those in the control group. This is important for students’ learning — and particularly significant in Louisiana, because state law stipulates that students who miss more than 10 days of school can automatically fail a grade level, putting them at risk of not graduating.

Students who received the $50 stipends also showed a half year of reading growth — twice as much as students who did not receive the money.

[...]

Lena Cornish, [the mom of Layla who received the weekly stipend] saw growth in her daughter that was “life-changing,” she said, noting that Layla had, over time, learned to save money instead of spending it immediately like many children do. “Kids, they get money and they automatically think they need to spend,” she said.

Layla’s experience, and growth, was shared by other students. As staff watched, students used their stipends to help their families and save for important things, which provided a feeling of security, said Talia Livneh, senior director of programs at Rooted.

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Some of the results of the Rooted School study echo larger, household findings from The Center for Law and Social Policy, which found families reported more stability after the introduction of two pandemic-era programs, the Child Tax Credit and economic impact payments, through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

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But lawmakers have also targeted young people for additional support. The Young Adult Tax Credit Act would provide a universal $500 monthly payment to all 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States. “Our social safety net rightfully has programs for childhood and seniors, but it fails to address the prevalence of young adult poverty,” said Rep. Morgan McGarvey of Kentucky, a co-sponsor of the Young Adult Tax Credit.

[...]

Since the early 1970s, poverty has increased for young adults, who are now among the most likely age group to live below the federal poverty line. They are juggling education, work and household responsibilities in a world with heightened instability, lower social mobility, and greater economic inequality.

[...]

Banking data showed that most students spent their money on basic needs – nearly half on groceries, Livneh said. The second most frequent purchases were retail services, then transportation, which made up for about 12% of money spent. That may be because school bus routes can feel lengthy, especially for teens who might have opted to sleep a little later, then use their money to take an Uber to school, “to get there faster,” Livneh said.

Students also saved, in a way that administrators hadn’t anticipated. “What blew me away is 46% of the money that we transferred to students was still sitting in bank accounts at the end of the study,” Livneh said.

[...]

Archived version

For more than a decade, connected cars have won over new car buyers with their streamlined, smartphone-like software updates and convenience features. But this convenience comes at a price: What happens when connected cars become disconnected cars? Like that scene at the end of The Phantom Menace, they’re losing function en masse as the Chinese auto industry consolidates, leaving many connected cars unsupported. And if we’re not careful, the same thing could easily happen to American car owners, too.

The phenomenon was chronicled in Rest of World, which spoke to multiple owners of EVs produced by financially troubled Chinese automakers. China kickstarted its EV industry with aggressive subsidies that lured dozens, if not hundreds of companies to produce cars. When those subsidies ceased, an automotive extinction event unfolded, with a reported 20-plus brands calling it quits. As you can imagine, that poses an enormous problem for people who bought connected cars from said brands.

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WM Motor [...] reportedly sold around 100,000 cars between 2019 and 2022. It filed for bankruptcy in October 2023, and in doing so ceased offering software support for customers’ cars. With company servers offline, widespread failures were reported, affecting cars’ stereos, charging status indicators, odometers, and app-controlled remote functions such as air conditioning and locking.

[...]

Its app also remains unavailable on smartphone app stores, locking potential buyers of used WM Motors vehicles out of some features. It

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In the United States, we’ve seen similar situations unfold like with Tesla’s 2021 outage, which locked some owners out of their cars and disabled charging. More recently, the bankruptcy of Fisker left owners of its Ocean SUV with abundant software issues and no certainty that they’d be fixed. It’s a far larger problem in China, where tech is a major selling point for cars, and where there are more brands at risk. But it’s better we heed this warning than kick the can down the road—an ounce of preventative versus a pound of cure, and all that jazz.

Archived version

The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seeks to overturn a regulation that was finalized in April. In the suit filed Wednesday in Lubbock, Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton accused the federal government of attempting to “undermine” the state’s law enforcement capabilities. It appears to be the first legal challenge from a state with an abortion ban that took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the nationwide right to abortion.

The rule essentially prohibits state or local officials from gathering medical records related to reproductive health care for a civil, criminal or administrative investigation from providers or health insurers in a state where abortion remains legal. It is intended to protect women who live in states where abortion is illegal.

In a statement, HHS declined comment on the lawsuit but said the rule “stands on its own.”

Georgia Tech is ending its research and educational partnerships in the Chinese cities of Tianjin and Shenzhen, the US university said on Friday (Sep 6), following scrutiny from Congress over its collaboration with entities allegedly linked to China's military.

In May, the House of Representatives' select committee on China wrote a letter to Georgia Tech asking for details on its research with China's northeastern Tianjin University on cutting-edge semiconductor technologies.

The Chinese school and its affiliates were added in 2020 to the US Commerce Department's export restrictions list for actions contrary to US national security, including trade secret theft and research collaboration to advance China's military.

Spokesperson Abbigail Tumpey told Reuters in an email that Georgia Tech has been assessing its posture in China since Tianjin University was added to the entity list.

"Tianjin University has had ample time to correct the situation. To date, Tianjin University remains on the Entity List, making Georgia Tech's participation with Tianjin University, and subsequently Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute (GTSI), no longer tenable," Tumpey said.

[...]

US agencies and Congress have stepped up scrutiny of China's state-sponsored influence and technology transfers at American colleges and universities, concerned that Beijing uses open and federally funded research environments in the US to circumvent export controls and other national security laws.

The US Justice Department under President Joe Biden's administration ended a programme from former president Donald Trump's administration called the China Initiative intended to combat Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft. Critics had said that the programme spurred racial profiling against Asian Americans and chilled scientific research.

Emily Gedeon, a spokesperson for Denver's climate office, said there's no foul play at work here — just enormous demand. About 17,000 people tried to get a voucher on Tuesday, she told us, more than 77 times the amount available [220 vouchers]

The shooter who opened fire inside Apalachee High school is believed to be a 14-year-old boy, a law enforcement source tells CNN.

The source said it is not yet known whether the teen attended that school.

We cannot continue to accept this as normal,” the president said in a statement.

At least four people are believed to have been killed and approximately 30 more were injured in the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, although it’s unclear how many of the injuries are from gunshot wounds, according to law enforcement sources.

Apalachee High School is located in the city of Winder, Georgia, which is a community about an hour outside of Atlanta.

Archived version

A former deputy chief of staff to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was charged Tuesday with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors revealed in a sprawling indictment.

Linda Sun, who held numerous posts in New York state government before rising to the rank of deputy chief of staff for Hochul, was arrested Tuesday morning along with her husband, Chris Hu, at their $3.5 million home on Long Island.

Sun and Hu, are expected to make an initial court appearance Tuesday afternoon, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn said.

Prosecutors said Sun, at the request of Chinese officials, blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to high-level officials in New York state, altered state governmental messaging on issues related to the Chinese government and attempted to facilitate a trip to China for a high-level politician in New York, among other things. Hu is charged with money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and misuse of means of identification.

The Klamath River is free of four huge dams for the first time in generations. But for the Yurok tribe, the river's restoration is only just beginning – starting with 18 billion seeds.

Brook Thompson has been fishing on the Klamath River ever since she could stand up in a boat. To Thompson and her family, who are part of the Karuk and Yurok tribes from northern California, fishing is second nature. "The river was our grocery store," the 28-year-old explains. That was until a catastrophic fish die off happened in 2002.

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The dams have long been a point of contention for the tribe, who have been campaigning for their removal since the 1990s. The river is the lifeblood for the Yuroks, and the salmon are family. "The death of salmon means the death of our entire way," Thompson says. "Everyone is connected. Taking these dams down is a life-or-death situation for us."

Finally, at the end of August 2024, after years of negotiating, and decades of activism, the last dam fell, reopening more than 400 miles (644km) of river, in what is the largest dam removal project in US history.

[...]

Removing the dams is one thing, restoring the land is quite another," says Thompson, a civil engineer and part of the crew working on the restoration project – which is being managed by Resource Environmental Solutions, an ecological restoration company.

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Between 2018 and 2021 seed collection crews – many of whom are tribal elders – were hired to harvest native seeds, by hand, in preparation for the dam removal. They collected 98 species and around 2,000lbs (900kg) of seeds. The seeds were then dispatched to specialised nurseries, which propagated them en masse, and sent the seedlings to storage facilities where they were kept until the time came for them to be planted.

A total of 18 billion native seeds were propagated – more than 66,000lbs (30,000kg) worth – each species selected for a purpose: to retain sediment, to prepare the soil for other plants, for cultural uses, or to be a food source. Wheatgrass, yarrow, lupine and oak trees – an important cultural species for the Yuroks and a keystone species – to name a few.

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Seeds from trees and shrubs were also collected, which was a challenge during 2021 and 2022, particularly hot and dry years that exacerbated widespread wildfires.

[...]

But Thompson isn't hoping to return to the past – she's looking firmly to the future.

"There's almost a bit of a fallacy in thinking like it will be returned to what it used to be," Thompson says. "But I think with traditional ecological knowledge, tribal-led initiatives and current academic understanding of the landscape so you can almost make it better."

Archived version

A retired Aurora police sergeant faces criminal charges for raping his daughter and continually sexually assaulting her and his two adopted daughters, but he remains free from custody while his ex-wife is in jail for objecting to court-ordered reunification therapy meant to repair his relationship with two of his sons.

The mother, Rachel Pickrel-Hawkins, said the reunification therapy by Christine Bassett, a licensed marriage and family therapist, has been harmful, abusive and counterproductive. For now, the mother has custody of the couple’s minor children, and they are living in a domestic violence shelter. She said that she has arranged for family members to care for her children when she goes to jail.

The mother said Bassett has supported the efforts by her ex-husband, Michael Hawkins, to gain sole custody of their two youngest sons, now 10 and 13, and has psychologically tortured the children along the way.

“The very last visit with her, I told her, ‘This man now has formal criminal charges for sex assault on children and child abuse, and you need to know this,’” Pickrel-Hawkins said of one encounter with Bassett before a reunification session with the children that the father attended. “She went into the room, and the very first thing that my boy said that she told them was, ‘We need to make progress, and today you need to tell your father that you forgive him.’”

Here is the Court ruling (pdf)

In a major decision, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”

The court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw.

"The Electronc Frontier Foundation (EFF) applauds this decision because it is essential that every person feels like they can simply take their cell phone out into the world without the fear that they might end up a criminal suspect because their location data was swept up in open-ended digital dragnet," the EFF says.

The new Fifth Circuit case, United States v. Smith, involved an armed robbery and assault of a US Postal Service worker at a post office in Mississippi in 2018. After several months of investigation, police had no identifiable suspects, so they obtained a geofence warrant covering a large geographic area around the post office for the hour surrounding the crime. Google responded to the warrant with information on several devices, ultimately leading police to the two defendants.

The purveyors of claims that COVID’s danger was overstated and could be met by exposing the maximum number of people to the deadly virus in quest of “herd immunity” have been offered a platform to air their widely debunked and refuted views at a forum sponsored by Stanford University.

The event is a symposium on the topic “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past,” scheduled to take place on campus Oct. 4.

[...]

Most of its participants have been associated with discredited approaches to the COVID pandemic, including minimizing its severity and calling for widespread infection to achieve herd immunity. Some have been sources of rank misinformation or disinformation. Advocates of scientifically validated policies are all but absent.

The event is shaping up as a major embarrassment for an institution that prides itself on its academic standards. It comes with Stanford’s official imprimatur; the opening remarks will be delivered by its freshly appointed president, Jonathan Levin, an economist who took office Aug. 1.

Interestingly, also the only thing consultants won't try.

Kroger Co. hiked prices on milk and eggs more than needed to account for inflation, the company's top pricing executive testified during a court hearing on the US government's bid to block the grocery chain's purchase of rival Albertsons Cos.

In a March email to his bosses, Andy Groff, Kroger's senior director for pricing, acknowledged that the company had raised its prices more than required to adjust for higher costs.

"On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation," Groff wrote.

Archived version

Lidia Martinez, a retired educator who lives in San Antonio, was shocked last week when officers came to her house at 6 a.m. and informed her that they were searching her residence because she had filed a complaint about residents in her area getting their mail-in ballots.

Martinez says she's spent decades volunteering with the League of United Latin American Citizens to help seniors in the Latino community register themselves to vote.

The officers at her house asked to see the voter registration cards that she had collected. After informing them that she didn't have them at her house, they proceeded to search the property and left with her laptop, her phone and some documents.

Texas Attorney General defended the raid as part of an election integrity investigation.