ReportWire

Tag: AP Top News

  • Venture capitalists are divided on Harris or Trump

    Venture capitalists are divided on Harris or Trump

    [ad_1]

    LOS ANGELES (AP) — Being a venture capitalist carries a lot of prestige in Silicon Valley. Those who choose which startups to fund see themselves as fostering the next big waves of technology.

    So when some of the industry’s biggest names endorsed former President Donald Trump and the onetime VC he picked for a running mate, JD Vance, people took notice.

    Then hundreds of other VCs — some high profile, others lesser-known — threw their weight behind Vice President Kamala Harris, drawing battle lines over which presidential candidate will be better for tech innovation and the conditions startups need to thrive. For years, many of Silicon Valley’s political discussions took place behind closed doors. Now, those casual debates have gone public — on podcasts, social media and online manifestos.

    Venture capitalist and Harris backer Stephen DeBerry says some of his best friends support Trump. Though centered in a part of Northern California known for liberal politics, the investors who help finance the tech industry have long been a more politically divided bunch.

    “We ski together. Our families are together. We’re super tight,” said DeBerry, who runs the Bronze Venture Fund. “This is not about not being able to talk to each other. I love these guys — they’re almost all guys. They’re dear friends. We just have a difference of perspective on policy issues.”

    It remains to be seen if the more than 700 venture capitalists who’ve voiced support for a movement called “VCs for Kamala” will match the pledges of Trump’s well-heeled supporters such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. But the effort marks “the first time I’ve seen a galvanized group of folks from our industry coming together and coalescing around our shared values,” DeBerry said.

    “There are a lot of practical reasons for VCs to support Trump,” including policies that could drive corporate profits and stock market values and favor wealthy benefactors, said David Cowan, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. But Cowan said he is supporting Harris as a VC with a “long-term investment horizon” because a “Trump world reeling from rampant income inequality, raging wars and global warming is not an attractive environment” for funding healthy businesses.

    Several prominent VCs have voiced their support for Trump on Musk’s social platform X. Public records show some of them have donated to a new, pro-Trump super PAC called America PAC, whose donors include powerful tech industry conservatives with ties to SpaceX and Paypal and who run in Musk’s social circle. Also driving support is Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency and promise to end an enforcement crackdown on the industry.

    Although some Biden policies have alienated parts of the investment sector concerned about tax policy, antitrust scrutiny or overregulation, Harris’ bid for the presidency has reenergized interest from VCs who until recently sat on the sidelines. Some of that excitement is due to existing relationships with Silicon Valley that are borne out of Harris’ career in the San Francisco area and her time as California’s attorney general.

    “We buy risk, right? And we’re trying to buy the right type of risk,” Leslie Feinzaig, founder of “VCs for Kamala” said in an interview. “It’s really hard for these companies that are trying to build products and scale to do so in an unpredictable institutional environment.”

    What to know about the 2024 Election

    The schism in tech has left some firms split in their allegiances. Although venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of the firm that is their namesake, endorsed Trump, one of their firm’s general partners, John O’Farrell, pledged his support for Harris. O’Farrell declined further comment.

    Doug Leone, the former managing partner of Sequoia Capital, endorsed Trump in June, expressing concern on X “about the general direction of our country, the state of our broken immigration system, the ballooning deficit, and the foreign policy missteps, among other issues.” But Leone’s longtime business partner at Sequoia, Michael Moritz, wrote in the Financial Times that tech leaders supporting Trump “are making a big mistake.”

    Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia, posted on X that he donated $300,000 to Trump’s campaign after supporting Hilary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Federal Election Commission records show that Maguire donated $500,000 to America PAC in June; Leone donated $1 million.

    “The area where I disagree with Republicans the most is on women’s rights. And I’m sure I’ll disagree with some of Trump’s policies in the future,” Maguire wrote. “But in general I think he was surprisingly prescient.”

    Feinzaig, managing director at venture firm Graham & Walker, said that she launched “VCs for Kamala” because she felt frustrated that “the loudest voices” were starting to “sound like they were speaking for the entire industry.”

    Much of the VC discourse about elections is in response to a July podcast and manifesto in which Andreessen and Horowitz backed Trump and outlined their vision of a “Little Tech Agenda” that they said contrasted with the policies sought by Big Tech.

    They accused the U.S. government of increasing hostility toward startups and the VCs who fund them, citing Biden’s proposed higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations and regulations they said could hobble emerging industries involving blockchain and artificial intelligence.

    Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio who spent time in San Francisco working at Thiel’s investment firm, voiced a similar perspective about “little tech” more than a month before he was chosen as Trump’s running mate.

    “The donors who were really involved in Silicon Valley in a pro-Trump way, they’re not big tech, right? They’re little tech. They’re starting innovative companies. They don’t want the government to destroy their ability to innovate,” Vance said in an interview on Fox News in June.

    Days earlier, Vance had joined Trump at a San Francisco fundraiser at the home of venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks, a longtime conservative. Vance said Trump spoke to about 100 attendees that included “some of the leading innovators in AI.”

    DeBerry said he doesn’t disagree with everything Andreesen Horowitz founders espouse, particularly their wariness about powerful companies controlling the agencies that regulate them. But he objects to their “little tech” framing, especially coming from a multibillion-dollar investment firm that he says is hardly the voice of the little guy. For DeBerry, whose firm focuses on social impact, the choice is not between big and little tech but “chaos and stability,” with Harris representing stability.

    Complicating the allegiances is that a tough approach to breaking up the monopoly power of big corporations no longer falls along partisan lines. Vance has spoken favorably of Lina Khan, who Biden picked to lead the Federal Trade Commission and has taken on several tech giants. Meanwhile, some of the most influential VCs backing Harris — such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, an early investor in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — have sharply criticized Khan’s approach.

    U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat whose California district encompasses part of Silicon Valley, said Trump supporters are a vocal minority reflecting a “third or less” of the region’s tech community. But while the White House has appealed to tech entrepreneurs with its investments in clean energy, electric vehicles and semiconductors, Khanna said Democrats must do a better job of showing that they understand the appeal of digital assets.

    “I do think that the perceived lack of embrace of Bitcoin and the blockchain has hurt the Democratic Party among the young generation and among young entrepreneurs,” Khanna said.

    Naseem Sayani, a general partner at Emmeline Ventures, said Andreessen and Horowitz’s support of Trump became a lightning rod for those in tech who do not back the Republican nominee. Sayani signed onto “VCs for Kamala,” she said, because she wanted the types of businesses that she helps fund to know that the investor community is not monolithic.

    “We’re not single-profile founders anymore,” she said. “There’s women, there’s people of color, there’s all the intersections. How can they feel comfortable building businesses when the environment they’re in doesn’t actually support their existence in some ways?”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Teen vaping hits 10-year low in the US

    Teen vaping hits 10-year low in the US

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Fewer adolescents are vaping this year than at any point in the last decade, government officials reported Thursday, pointing to a shrinking number of high school students who are using Elf Bar and other fruity, unauthorized e-cigarettes.

    The latest survey numbers show the teen vaping rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% in 2023. More than 1.6 million students reported vaping in the previous month — about one-third the number in 2019, when underage vaping peaked with the use of discrete, high-nicotine e-cigarettes like Juul.

    This year’s decline was mainly driven by a half-million fewer high school students who reported using e-cigarettes in the past month, officials said. Vaping was unchanged among middle schoolers, but remains less common in that group, at 3.5% of students.

    “This is a monumental public health win,” FDA’s tobacco director Brian King told reporters. “But we can’t rest on our laurels. There’s clearly more work to do to further reduce youth use.”

    King and other officials noted that the drop in vaping didn’t coincide with a rise in other tobacco industry products, such as nicotine pouches.

    Sales of small, flavored pouches like Zyn have surged among adults. The subject of viral videos on social media platforms, the pouches come in flavors like mint and cinnamon and slowly release nicotine when placed along the gumline. This year’s U.S. survey shows 1.8% of teens are using them, largely unchanged from last year.

    “Our guard is up,” King said. “We’re aware of the reported growing sales trends and we’re closely monitoring the evolving tobacco product landscape.”

    The federal survey involved more than 29,000 students in grades 6 through 12 who filled out an online questionnaire in the spring. Health officials consider the survey to be their best measure of youth tobacco and nicotine trends. Thursday’s update focused on vaping products and nicotine pouches, but the full publication will eventually include rates of cigarette and cigar smoking, which have also hit historic lows in recent years.

    Officials from the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed the big drop in vaping to recent age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers, including Chinese vaping companies who have sold their e-cigarettes illegally in the U.S. for years.

    Use of the most popular e-cigarette among teens, Elf Bar, fell 36% in the wake of FDA warning letters to stores and distributors selling the brightly colored vapes, which come in flavors like watermelon ice and peach mango. The brand is part of a wave of cheap, disposable e-cigarettes from China that have taken over a large portion of the U.S. vaping market. The FDA has tried to block such imports, although Elf Bar and other brands have tried to find workarounds by changing their names, addresses and logos.

    Teen use of major American e-cigarettes like Vuse and Juul remained significant, with about 12% of teens who vape reporting use of those those brands.

    In 2020, FDA regulators banned fruit and candy flavors from reusable e-cigarettes like Juul, which are now only sold in menthol and tobacco. But the flavor restriction didn’t apply to disposable products, and companies like Elf Bar stepped in to fill the gap.

    Other key findings in the report:

    — Among students who current use e-cigarettes, about 26% said they vape daily.

    — Nearly 90% of the students who vape used flavored products, with fruit flavors as the overwhelming favorite.

    — Zyn is the most common nicotine pouch among teens who use the products.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Donald Trump falsely suggests Kamala Harris misled voters about her race

    Donald Trump falsely suggests Kamala Harris misled voters about her race

    [ad_1]

    CHICAGO (AP) — Donald Trump falsely suggested Kamala Harris had misled voters about her race as the former president appeared Wednesday before the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago in an interview that quickly turned hostile.

    The Republican former president wrongly claimed that Harris, the first Black woman and Asian American to serve as vice president, had in the past only promoted her Indian heritage.

    “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said while addressing the group’s annual convention.

    Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both immigrants to the U.S. As an undergraduate, Harris attended Howard University, one of the nation’s most prominent historically Black colleges and universities, where she also pledged the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. As a U.S. senator, Harris was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, supporting legislation to strengthen voting rights and to reform policing.

    AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports Donald Trump has falsely suggested Kamala Harris misled voters about her race.

    Trump has leveled a wide range of criticism at Harris since she replaced President Joe Biden atop the likely Democratic ticket last week. Throughout his political career, the former president has repeatedly questioned the backgrounds of opponents who are racial minorities.

    Michael Tyler, the communications director for Harris’ campaign, said in a statement that “the hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power.”

    “Trump lobbed personal attacks and insults at Black journalists the same way he did throughout his presidency — while he failed Black families and left the entire country digging out of the ditch he left us in,” Tyler said. “Donald Trump has already proven he cannot unite America, so he attempts to divide us.

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked during her briefing with reporters on Wednesday about Trump’s remarks and responded with disbelief, initially murmuring, “Wow.”

    Jean-Pierre, who is Black, called what Trump said “repulsive” and said, “It’s insulting and no one has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify.”

    Trump has repeatedly attacked his opponents and critics on the basis of race. He rose to prominence in Republican politics by propagating false theories that President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was not born in the United States. “Birtherism,” as it became known, was just the start of Trump’s history of questioning the credentials and qualifications of Black politicians.

    He has denied allegations of racism. And after Biden picked Harris as his running mate four years ago, a Trump campaign spokesperson then pointed to a previous Trump political donation to Harris as proof that he wasn’t racist.

    “The president, as a private businessman, donated to candidates across all aisles,” the spokesperson, Katrina Pierson, told reporters. “And I’ll note that Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he donated to her campaign, so I hope we can squash this racism argument now,” Pierson said.

    During this year’s Republican primary, he once referred to former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, as “Nimbra.”

    What to know about the 2024 Election

    Later Wednesday, Trump did not repeat his criticism of Harris’ race at a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, although he called her “phony” and said she has been trying to change her image. He also repeatedly mispronounced her first name.

    “If she becomes your president, our country is finished,” Trump charged.

    Before he took the stage, Trump’s team displayed what appeared to be years-old news headlines describing Harris as the “first Indian-American senator” on the big screen in the arena.

    Trump’s appearance Wednesday at the annual gathering of Black journalists immediately became heated, with the former president sparring with interviewer Rachel Scott of ABC News and accusing her of giving him a “very rude introduction” with a tough first question about his past criticism of Black people and Black journalists, his attack on Black prosecutors who have pursued cases against him and the dinner he had at his Florida club with a white supremacist.

    “I think it’s disgraceful,” Trump said. “I came here in good spirit. I love the Black population of this country. I’ve done so much for the Black population of this country.”

    Trump continued his attacks on Scott’s network, ABC News, which he has been arguing should not host the next presidential debate, despite his earlier agreement with the Biden campaign. He also several times described her tone and questions as “nasty,” a word he used in the past when describing women, including Hillary Clinton and Meghan the Duchess of Sussex.

    The Republican also repeated his false claim that immigrants in the country illegally are “taking Black jobs.” When pushed by Scott on what constituted a “Black job,” Trump responded by saying “a Black job is anybody that has a job,” drawing groans from the room.

    At one point, he said, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”

    The audience responded with a mix of boos and some applause.

    Scott asked Trump about his pledge to pardon people convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and specifically whether he would pardon those who assaulted police officers.

    Trump said, “Oh, absolutely I would,” and said, “If they’re innocent, I would pardon them.”

    Scott pointed out they have been convicted and therefore are not innocent.

    “Well, they were convicted by a very, very tough system,” he said.

    At one point, when he was defending his supporters who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, he said, “Nothing is perfect in life.”

    He compared the 2021 insurrection to the protests in Minneapolis and other cities in 2020 following the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and to more recent protests at the Capitol last week by demonstrators opposed to the war in Gaza. Trump falsely claimed that no one was arrested in those other demonstrations and that only his supporters were targeted.

    As Trump made the comparison, a man in the back of the room shouted out, “Sir, have you no shame?”

    The former president’s invitation to address the organization sparked an intense internal debate among NABJ that spilled online. Organizations for journalists of color typically invite presidential candidates to speak at their summer gatherings in election years.

    As he campaigns for the White House a third time, Trump has sought to appear outside his traditional strongholds of support and his campaign has touted his efforts to try to win over Black Americans, who have been Democrats’ most committed voting bloc.

    His campaign has emphasized his messages on the economy and immigration as part of his appeal, but some of his outreach has played on racial stereotypes, including the suggestion that African Americans would empathize with the criminal charges he has faced and his promotion of branded sneakers.

    Trump and NABJ also have a tense history over his treatment of Black women journalists. In 2018, NABJ condemned Trump for repeatedly using words such as “stupid,” “loser” and “nasty” to describe Black women journalists.

    The vice president is not scheduled to appear at the convention, but NABJ said in a statement posted on X that it was in conversation with her campaign to have her appear either virtually or in person for a conversation in September.

    Harris addressed Trump’s comments briefly Wednesday night while speaking at a gathering of Sigma Gamma Rho, a historically Black sorority, in Houston.

    “It was the same old show,” she said. “The divisiveness and the disrespect.”

    Harris added: “And let me just say, the American people deserve better.”

    ___

    Price reported from New York. Associated Press writers Aaron Morrison and Steve Peoples in New York, Gary Fields in Chicago and Will Weissert and Farnoush Amiri in Washington, Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Chris Megerian in Houston contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • With charges and sanctions, US takes aim at Russian disinformation ahead of November election

    With charges and sanctions, US takes aim at Russian disinformation ahead of November election

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration seized Kremlin-run websites and charged two Russian state media employees in its most sweeping effort yet to push back against what it says are Russian attempts to spread disinformation ahead of the November presidential election.

    The measures, which in addition to indictments also included sanctions and visa restrictions, represented a U.S. government effort just weeks before the November election to disrupt a persistent threat from Russia that American officials have long warned has the potential to sow discord and create confusion among voters.

    Washington has said that Moscow, which intelligence officials have said has a preference for Republican Donald Trump, remains the primary threat to elections even as the FBI continues to investigate a hack by Iran this year that targeted the presidential campaigns of both political parties.

    What to know about the 2024 Election

    “The Justice Department’s message is clear: We will have no tolerance for attempts by authoritarian regimes to exploit our democratic systems of government,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

    One criminal case disclosed by the Justice Department accuses two employees of RT, a Russian state media company, of covertly funding a Tennessee-based content creation company with nearly $10 million to publish English-language videos on social media platforms including TikTok and YouTube with messages in favor of the Russia government’s interests and agenda, including about the war in Ukraine.

    The nearly 2,000 videos posted by the company have gotten more than 16 million views on YouTube alone, prosecutors said.

    The two defendants, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They are at large. It was not immediately clear if they had lawyers.

    The Justice Department says the company did not disclose that it was funded by RT and that neither it nor its founders registered as required by law as an agent of a foreign principal.

    Though the indictment does not name the company, it describes it as a Tennessee-based content creation firm with six commentators and with a website identifying itself as “a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.”

    That description exactly matches Tenet Media, an online company that hosts videos made by well-known conservative influencers Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and others.

    Johnson and Pool both responded with posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, calling themselves “victims.” Calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “scumbag,” Pool wrote that “should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived.”

    In his post, Johnson wrote that he had been asked a year ago to provide content to a “media startup.” He said his lawyers negotiated a “standard, arms length deal, which was later terminated.”

    Tenet Media’s shows in recent months have featured high-profile conservative guests, including RNC co-chair Lara Trump, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake.

    In the other action, officials announced the seizure of 32 internet domains that were used by the Kremlin to spread Russian propaganda and weaken international support for Ukraine. The websites were designed to look like authentic news sites but were actually fake, with bogus social media personas manufactured to appear as if they belonged to American users.

    The Justice Department did not identify which candidate in particular the propaganda campaign was meant to boost. But internal strategy notes from participants in the effort released Wednesday by the Justice Department make clear that Trump was the intended beneficiary, even though the names of the candidates were blacked out.

    The proposal for one propaganda project, for instance, states that one of its objectives was to secure a victory for a candidate who is currently out of power and to increase the percentage of Americans who believe the U.S. has been doing too much to support Ukraine. President Joe Biden has strongly supported Ukraine during the invasion by Russia.

    Intelligence agencies have previously charged that Russia, which during the 2016 election launched a massive campaign of foreign influence and interference on Trump’s behalf, was using disinformation to try to meddle in this year’s election. The new steps show the depth of those concerns.

    “Today’s announcement highlights the lengths some foreign governments go to undermine American democratic institutions,” the State Department said. “But these foreign governments should also know that we will not tolerate foreign malign actors intentionally interfering and undermining free and fair elections.”

    The State Department announced it was taking action against several employees of Russian state-owned media outlets, designating them as “foreign missions,” and offering a cash reward for information provided to the U.S. government about foreign election interference.

    It also said it was adding media company Rossiya Segodnya and its subsidiaries RIA Novosti, RT, TV-Novosti, Ruptly, and Sputnik to its list of foreign missions. That will require them to register with the U.S. government and disclose their properties and personnel in the U.S.

    In a speech last month, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Russia remained the biggest threat to election integrity, accusing Putin and his proxies of “targeting specific voter demographics and swing-state voters to in an effort to manipulate presidential and congressional election outcomes.” Russia, she said was “intent on co-opting unwitting Americans on social media to push narratives advancing Russian interests.”

    She struck a similar note Thursday, saying at an Aspen Institute event that the foreign influence threat is more diverse and aggressive than in past years.

    “More diverse and aggressive because they involve more actors from more countries than we have ever seen before, operating in a more polarized world than we have ever seen before, all fueled by more technology and accelerated by technology, like AI, and that is what we have exposed in the law enforcement actions we took today,” she said.

    Much of the concern around Russia centers on cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns designed to influence the November vote.

    The tactics include using state media like RT to advance anti-U.S. messages and content, as well as networks of fake websites and social media accounts that amplify the claims and inject them into Americans’ online conversations. Typically, these networks seize on polarizing political topics such as immigration, crime or the war in Gaza.

    In many cases, Americans may have no idea that the content they see online either originated or was amplified by the Kremlin.

    Groups linked to the Kremlin are increasingly hiring marketing and communications firms within Russia to outsource some of the work of creating digital propaganda while also covering their tracks, the officials said during the briefing with reporters.

    Two such firms were the subject of new U.S. sanctions announced in March. Authorities say the two Russian companies created fake websites and social media profiles to spread Kremlin disinformation.

    The ultimate goal, however, is to get Americans to spread Russian disinformation without questioning its origin. People are far more likely to trust and repost information that they believe is coming from a domestic source, officials said. Fake websites designed to mimic U.S. news outlets and AI-generated social media profiles are just two methods.

    Messages left with the Russian Embassy were not immediately returned.

    _____

    Associated Press writers Dan Merica and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington, Ali Swenson in New York and Alan Suderman in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Hunter Biden enters surprise guilty plea to avoid tax trial months after his gun conviction

    Hunter Biden enters surprise guilty plea to avoid tax trial months after his gun conviction

    [ad_1]

    LOS ANGELES (AP) — President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, pleaded guilty Thursday to federal tax charges, a surprise move meant to spare his family another painful and embarrassing criminal trial after his gun case conviction just months ago.

    Hunter Biden’s decision to plead guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges without the benefits of a deal with prosecutors caps a long-running saga over his legal woes that have cast a shadow over his father’s political career. It came hours after jury selection was supposed to begin in the case accusing him of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes.

    The president’s son was already facing potential prison time after his June conviction on felony gun charges in a trial that aired unflattering and salacious details about his struggles with a crack cocaine addiction. The tax trial was expected to showcase more potentially lurid evidence as well as details about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which Republicans have seized on to try to paint the Biden family as corrupt.

    “I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment,” Hunter Biden said in an emailed statement after he entered his plea. “For all I have put them through over the years, I can spare them this, and so I have decided to plead guilty.”

    Although President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election muted the potential political implications of the tax case, the trial was expected to carry a heavy emotional toll for the president in the final months of his five-decade political career.

    “Hunter put his family first today, and it was a brave and loving thing for him to do,” defense attorney Abbe Lowell told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Los Angeles.

    Hunter Biden, 54, quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. He showed no emotion as he walked out the courthouse holding his wife’s hand. He ignored questions shouted at him by reporters before climbing into an SUV and driving off.

    The charges carry up to 17 years behind bars, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence. He faces up to $1.35 million in fines. Sentencing is set for Dec. 16 in front of U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, who was nominated to the bench by former President Donald Trump.

    He faces sentencing in the Delaware case on Nov. 13 — the week after the general election. Those charges are punishable by up to 25 years in prison, though he is likely to get far less time or avoid prison entirely.

    More than 100 potential jurors had been brought to the courthouse Thursday to begin the process of picking the panel to hear the case alleging a four-year scheme to avoid paying taxes while spending wildly on things like strippers, luxury hotels and exotic cars.

    Prosecutors were caught off guard when Hunter Biden’s lawyer told the judge Thursday morning that Hunter wanted to enter what’s known as an Alford plea, under which a defendant maintains their innocence but acknowledges prosecutors have enough evidence to secure a conviction.

    Special counsel David Weiss’ team objected to such a plea, telling the judge that Hunter Biden “is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him.”

    “Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty,” prosecutor Leo Wise said.

    After a break in the hearing, Hunter Biden’s lawyers said he had decided to plead guilty to all nine charges.

    Last year, it had looked like he was going to be spared prison time under a deal with prosecutors that would have allowed him to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses. Prosecutors would have recommended two years of probation and he would have escaped prosecution on a felony gun charge as long he stayed out of trouble for two years.

    But the agreement imploded after a judge questioned unusual aspects of it, and Hunter Biden was subsequently indicted in the two cases. The defense has accused special counsel Weiss of caving to political pressure to indict the president’s son after Trump and other Republicans blasted what they described as a “sweetheart deal.”

    The indictment brought last year grew out of an investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes that began in 2018 under the Trump administration. Hunter Biden confirmed the existence of the investigation in December 2020 — the month after his father won the election — saying he learned about it for the first time the previous day.

    Prosecutors alleged that Hunter Biden lived lavishly while flouting the tax law, spending his cash on things like strippers and luxury hotels — “in short, everything but his taxes.”

    The charges in both the gun and tax cases stemmed from a period in Hunter Biden’s life in which he struggled with drug and alcohol abuse before becoming sober in 2019. His lawyers had been expected to argue that his substance abuse struggles affected his decision-making and judgment, so he could not have acted “willfully,” or with intention to break the tax law.

    “As I have stated, addiction is not an excuse, but it is an explanation for some of my failures at issue in this case,” Hunter Biden said in a statement. “When I was addicted, I wasn’t thinking about my taxes, I was thinking about surviving. But the jury would never have heard that or know that I had paid every penny of my back taxes including penalties.”

    His decision to plead guilty came after the judge issued some unfavorable pre-trial rulings for the defense, including rejecting a proposed defense expert lined up to testify about addiction. Scarsi had also placed some restrictions on what jurors would be allowed to hear about the traumatic events that Hunter Biden’s family, friends and attorneys say led to his drug addiction.

    Hunter Biden’s attorneys had asked Scarsi to also limit prosecutors from highlighting details of his expenses that they say amount to a “character assassination,” including payments made to strippers or pornographic websites.

    Prosecutors had also planned to introduce evidence about Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, including his work for a Romanian businessman who prosecutors said in court papers sought to “influence U.S. government policy” while Joe Biden was vice president.

    ___

    Lauer reported from Philadelphia. AP writer Zeke Miller contributed from Washington.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • You aren’t likely to lose a job in the US but may find it harder to land one

    You aren’t likely to lose a job in the US but may find it harder to land one

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Laid off by the music streaming service Spotify last year, Joovay Arias figured he’d land another job as a software engineer fairly soon. His previous job search, in 2019, had been a breeze.

    “Back then,” he said, “I had tons of recruiters reaching out to me — to the point where I had to turn them down.”

    Arias did find another job recently, but only after an unexpected ordeal.

    “I thought it was going to be something like three months,’’ said Arias, 39. “It turned into a year and three months.’’

    As Arias and other jobseekers can attest, the American labor market, red-hot for the past few years, has cooled. The job market is now in an unusual place: Jobholders are mostly secure, with layoffs low, historically speaking. Yet the pace of hiring has slowed, and landing a job has become harder. On Friday, the government will report on whether hiring slowed sharply again in August after a much-weaker-than-expected July job gain.

    “If you have a job and you’re happy with that job and you want to hold onto that job, things are pretty good right now,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “But if you’re out of work or you have a job and you want to switch to a new one, things aren’t as rosy as they were a couple of years ago.’’

    Since peaking in March 2022 as the economy accelerated out of the pandemic recession, the number of listed job openings has dropped by more than a third, according to the government’s latest monthly report on openings and hiring.

    Temporary-help firms have reduced jobs for 26 of the past 28 months. That’s a telling sign: Economists generally regard temp jobs as a harbinger for where the job market is headed because many employers hire temps before committing to full-time hires.

    In a roundup this week of local economic conditions, the Federal Reserve’s regional banks reported signs of a decelerating job market. Staffing agencies have said that job gains have slowed “as firms are approaching hiring decisions with greater hesitancy,” the New York Fed found. “Job candidates are lingering on the market longer.”

    The Minneapolis Fed said that a staffing agency reported that “businesses are getting a lot more picky” about whom they hire. And the Atlanta Fed found that “only a few” companies planned to step up hiring.

    Job-hopping, so rampant two years ago, has slowed as workers have gradually lost confidence in their ability to find better pay or working conditions somewhere else. Just 3.3 million Americans quit their jobs in July, compared with a peak of 4.5 million in April 2022.

    “People are staying put because they’re afraid they won’t find new jobs,’’ said Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at the employment website Glassdoor.

    And the Labor Department has reported, in its annual revised estimates of employment growth, that the economy added 818,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months that ended in March than it had previously estimated.

    In one respect, it’s not at all surprising that the pace of hiring is now moderating. Job growth in 2021 and 2022, as the economy roared back from the COVID-19 recession, was the most explosive on record. Workers gained leverage they hadn’t enjoyed in decades. Companies scrambled to hire fast enough to keep up with surging sales. Many employers had to jack up pay and offer bonuses to keep employees.

    It was inevitable — and even healthy, economists say, in the long run — for hiring to slow, thereby easing pressure on wage growth and inflation pressures. Otherwise, the economy could have overheated and forced the Fed to tighten credit so aggressively as to cause a recession.

    The post-pandemic jobs boom was a marked contrast to the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Back then, it took more than six years for the economy to recover the jobs that had been lost. By contrast, the breathtaking pandemic job losses of 2020 — 22 million — were reversed in less than 2 1/2 years.

    Still, the surging economy ignited inflation, leading the Fed to raise interest rates 11 times in 2022 and 2023 to try to cool the job market and slow inflation. And for a while, the economy and the job market appeared immune from higher borrowing costs. Consumers kept spending, businesses kept expanding and the economy kept growing.

    But eventually the continued high rates began leaving their mark. Several high-profile companies, including tech giants like Spotify, announced layoffs last year in the face high interest rates. Outside of the economy’s technology sector, though, and, to a lesser extent, finance, most American companies haven’t cut jobs. The number of people filing first-time applications for unemployment benefits is barely above where it was before the pandemic struck.

    Yet the same companies that are keeping workers aren’t necessarily adding more.

    “Compared to a year or two ago, it’s a lot more difficult, particularly for entry-level folks,’’ Glassdoor’s Terrazas said. “Because of the gradual drip of layoffs in tech and finance, in professional services over the past year and a half, there have been a lot of high-skilled, experienced folks on the job market.

    “By all evidence, they are finding jobs. But they are also pushing more entry-level folks further and further down the queue… Recent grads, folks without a lot of on-the-job experience are feeling the effects of suddenly competing with people who have two, five, 10 years’ experience in the jobs market. When those big fish are in the market, the little fish naturally get squeezed out.’’

    Despite the pressure of the highest interest rates in decades, the economy remains in solid shape, having grown at a healthy 3% annual pace from April through June. Most Americans are enjoying solid job security.

    Still, given the growing difficulty of changing jobs, even some of those job holders are feeling the chill.

    “The reality is a lot of people, even when they have jobs, are feeling a lot of angst about the economy,’’ Terrazas said. “People are feeling a little bit job insecurity, a lot more pressure in the workplace than they have in a while.’’

    In an August survey, the New York Fed found that Americans as a whole are more worried about losing their jobs now than at any time since 2014, when people were just beginning to feel the full effects of the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

    Adding to the anxiety is that memories of the recent job boom are still fresh.

    “The reference point for most people is still 2021, 2022, when the job market was very strong, and what looks like for us economists as a normalization (of the job market from unsustainable levels), I think for a lot of people feels like a loss of status,’’ Terrazas said.

    Consider Abby Neff, who, since graduating from Ohio University in May 2023, has struggled to find the “old-fashioned writing job’’ that she hoped to land in journalism

    “It’s been pretty tough,” she said, “to find a permanent journalism job.”

    In the meantime, Neff, 23, has joined the government’s AmeriCorps agency, which mobilizes Americans to perform community service, in southeastern Ohio. The job doesn’t pay much. But it has given her the opportunity to write and to learn about everything from forestry to sustainable agriculture to watershed management.

    She hadn’t expected to encounter such difficulty in finding a job in her field.

    “I feel like I did all the ‘right things’ in college,’’ Neff said ruefully.

    She edited a campus magazine and made contacts in the business. She has landed some interviews, only to learn later that the job was filled without her having heard from the employer.

    “I will get ‘ghosted,’ ‘’ she said. “I almost feel like I have to hunt employers down to even get a response to an application or submission.”

    Arias, the software engineer, started looking for a job “the minute I got laid off’’ in June 2023. At first, he was casual about it. He took time off to care for his newborn daughter and drew money out of his severance package from Spotify. But when the job hunt proved difficult, he “decided to really ramp it up’’ early this year.

    Arias started driving for a ride-sharing service and getting job leads from passengers. He reached out to a company through which he had taken part in a computer coding bootcamp, seeking contacts. Eventually, the networking paid off with a new job.

    Yet the process proved much more frustrating than he had envisioned. Employers he had communicated with would vanish without explanation.

    “That’s the worst part about the experience,’’ Arias said. “You get that introductory message. Then you send your resume. And then that’s it. Communication would end there. Or you’d get an automated response. So you don’t know what happened, what you did wrong … It just feels really demoralizing, really stressful, because you don’t know what happened.”

    ___

    AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Leonard Riggio, who forged a bookselling empire at Barnes & Noble, dead at 83

    Leonard Riggio, who forged a bookselling empire at Barnes & Noble, dead at 83

    [ad_1]

    NEW YORK (AP) — Leonard Riggio, a brash, self-styled underdog who transformed the publishing industry by building Barnes & Noble into the country’s most powerful bookseller before his company was overtaken by the rise of Amazon.com, has died at age 83.

    Riggio died Tuesday “following a valiant battle with Alzheimer’s disease,” according to a statement issued by his family. He had stepped down as chairman in 2019 after the chain was sold to the hedge fund Elliott Advisors.

    “His leadership spanned decades, during which he not only grew the company but also nurtured a culture of innovation and a love for reading,” reads a statement from Barnes & Noble.

    Riggio’s near-half-century reign began in 1971 when he used a $1.2 million loan to purchase Barnes & Noble’s name and the flagship store on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He acquired hundreds of new stores over the next 20 years and, in the 1990s, launched what became a nationwide empire of “superstores” that combined a chain’s discount prices and massive capacity with the cozy appeal of couches, reading chairs and cafes.

    “Our bookstores were designed to be welcoming as opposed to intimidating,” Riggio told The New York Times in 2016. “These weren’t elitist places. You could go in, get a cup of coffee, sit down and read a book for as long as you like, use the restroom. These were innovations that we had that no one thought was possible.”

    He grew up working class in New York City, liked to say he preferred socializing with childhood pals over fellow business leaders and was informal enough among associates to be known as “Lenny.” But in his time no one in the book world was more feared. With the power to make any given book a bestseller, or a flop, to alter the market on an idle whim, Riggio could terrify publishers simply by suggesting prices were too high or that he might sign up such top sellers as Stephen King and John Grisham and publish them himself. He even tried to buy the country’s biggest book wholesaler, Ingram, in 1999, but backed off after facing government resistance.

    By the end of the 1990s, an estimated one of every eight books sold in the U.S. were purchased through the chain, where front table displays were so valuable that publishers paid thousands of dollars to have their books included. Thousands of independent sellers went out of business even as Riggio insisted that he was expanding the market by opening up in neighborhoods without an existing store. Instead, independent owners spoke of being overwhelmed by competition from both Barnes & Noble and Borders Book Group, the rival chains sometimes setting up stores in close proximity to each other and to the locally owned business.

    Barnes & Noble became so identified as an overdog that one of the 1990s’ most popular romantic comedies, “You’ve Got Mail,” starred Tom Hanks as an executive for the “Fox Books” chain and Meg Ryan as the owner of an endangered independent store in Manhattan.

    “We are going to seduce them with our square footage, and our discounts, and our deep arm chairs, and our cappuccino,” Hanks’ character confidently declares. “They’re going to hate us at the beginning, but we’ll get ’em in the end.”

    Acrimony from independent booksellers

    For a time, it seemed industry conversation was an ongoing response to Barnes & Noble. Publishers were known to change the cover or title of a book simply because a Barnes & Noble official had objected. “Angela’s Ashes” author Frank McCourt found himself condemned by the American Booksellers Association, the trade organization for independents, after agreeing to appear in a Barnes & Noble commercial. On the floor of the industry’s annual national trade show, long hosted by the ABA, independent store employees would hiss at attendees wearing Barnes & Noble badges.

    When novelist Russell Banks, addressing Barnes & Noble’s annual shareholder meeting in 1995, declared that he was both a stock holder and a happy B&N customer, some independent sellers stopped offering his books.

    “You must know that I’ll never read, buy or sell another word you write,” Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, wrote to him. “These are the kindest things I can think of to say to you.”

    Tensions led to legal action when the ABA — on the eve of the 1994 convention — announced it was suing Barnes & Noble and five leading publishers for unfair trade practices. Some of the publishers were so angered they boycotted the gathering the following year and only returned after the ABA sold the show to Reed Exhibitions. In 1998, the ABA sued Barnes & Noble and Borders for unfair business practices (both cases were settled out of court).

    The internet shifts bookselling

    Riggio began the 2000s at the height of power, with more than 700 superstores and hundreds of others outlets. But internet commerce was growing quickly and Barnes & Noble, with its roots in physical retail, lacked the imagination and flexibility of the startup from Seattle that called itself “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” Amazon.com. The online giant launched in 1995 by Jeff Bezos gained business throughout the 2000s and by the early 2010s had displaced Barnes & Noble through such innovations as the Kindle e-book reader and the Amazon Prime subscription service.

    Bezos would liken himself to David taking down Goliath, although the contrast between the leaders also had the feel of an Aesop’s fable: The muscular, mustachioed Riggio, a boxer’s son, upended by the quick and clever Bezos.

    “We’re great booksellers; we know how to do that,’’ Riggio acknowledged to the Times in 2016. “We weren’t constituted to be a technology company.”

    Barnes & Noble started its own online site in the late 1990s, but such initiatives as the Nook e-book reader and a self-publishing platform failed to stop Amazon. Not even the collapse of Borders after the 2008-2009 economic crisis mattered for Barnes & Noble, which after decades of expansion closed more than 100 stores between 2009 and 2019.

    An unlikely ally of independent booksellers

    By the time of Riggio’s retirement, independent sellers regarded the chain not as a threat, but as an ally in the fight against Amazon to keep physical stores alive. At the 2018 booksellers convention, Riggio and ABA CEO Oren Teicher, once enemies in business and in court, praised each other during a joint appearance.

    “My standing here, doing what I’m about to do (introduce Riggio) would have been impossible to imagine several years ago,” Teicher said at the time. “The simple fact is that our business is stronger and American readers benefit when there is a vibrant and healthy network of brick-and-mortar bookshops all across the country.”

    During the 2010s, Barnes & Noble seemed unleadable and unwanted. The board announced in 2010 that the company was for sale, but no one offered to buy it. Four CEOs left in five years and Barnes & Noble’s stock dropped 60% between 2015 and 2018. New rumors of a sale lasted for months before Elliott Advisors, which had previously purchased the British chain Waterstones, bought Barnes & Noble for $638 million and hired Waterstones chief executive James Daunt to lead B&N.

    “I don’t miss being a business person, I had enough of that. But I do miss the bookselling part, helping to find books to recommend to customers,” Riggio told Publishers Weekly in 2021.

    Riggio’s roots and early bookselling ventures

    Bookselling and family often overlapped for Riggio. His brother Steve Riggio served for years as vice chairman of Barnes & Noble and another brother, Vincent “Jimi” Riggio, helped run a trucking company that shipped the store’s books. After being interviewed in 1974 by the trade publication College Store Executive, Leonard Riggio met for coffee with the editor, Louise Gebbia, who seven years later became his second wife (Riggio had three children, two with his first wife, one with his second).

    Leonard S. Riggio was the eldest son of a prize fighter (who twice defeated Rocky Graziano) turned cab driver and a dress maker. Even in childhood, he advanced quickly, skipping two grades and attending one of the city’s top high schools, Brooklyn Tech. He studied metallurgical engineering at New York University’s night school before focusing on commerce, and by day absorbed the bookselling world and the rising cultural rebellion of the 1960s.

    Working as a floor manager at the campus book store, he learned enough to drop out of school and start a rival shop in 1965 — SBX (Student Book Exchange), where he allowed student activists to use the copying machine to print copies of anti-war leaflets. SBX was so successful he bought several other campus stores and was in position by 1971 to buy Barnes & Noble and its single Manhattan store. A few years later, he became the rare bookseller to run television commercials, with the catchphrase “Barnes & Noble! Of Course! Of Course!”

    Riggio and the independent community may have seemed to hold opposing values, but they shared a love of reading and the arts and a liberal political outlook. He was a generous philanthropist and a prominent supporter of Democratic politicians. He was even friendly with the consumer activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who featured Riggio, Ted Turner and Yoko Ono among others in his 2009 novel “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”, in which Nader imagines a progressive revolution from above.

    “Ever since he was a boy from Brooklyn, he’d had a visceral reaction to the way workings stiffs and the poor were treated on a day-to-day basis,” Nader wrote of Riggio, who did at times stand apart from his management peers. When some 200 business leaders were questioned by Fortune magazine in the 1990s about their political ideas, only Riggio supported the raising of worker pay.

    “Money can become a burden, like something you carry on your shoulders,” he told New York magazine in 1999. “My nature is to be a ball-buster, but my role is to help people.”

    ___

    This story has been updated to correct the names of Riggio’s second wife and one of his brothers. They are Louise Gebbia, not Louise Altavilla, and Vincent “Jimi,” not Thomas.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Sensors can read your sweat and predict overheating. Here’s why privacy advocates care

    Sensors can read your sweat and predict overheating. Here’s why privacy advocates care

    [ad_1]

    On a hot summer day in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, dozens of men removed pipes, asbestos and hazardous waste while working to decontaminate a nuclear facility and prepare it for demolition.

    Dressed in head-to-toe coveralls and fitted with respirators, the crew members toiling in a building without power had no obvious respite from the heat. Instead, they wore armbands that recorded their heart rates, movements and exertion levels for signs of heat stress.

    Stephanie Miller, a safety and health manager for a U.S. government contractor doing cleanup work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, watched a computer screen nearby. A color-coding system with little bubbles showing each worker’s physiological data alerted her if anyone was in danger of overheating.

    “Heat is one of the greatest risks that we have in this work, even though we deal with high radiation, hazardous chemicals and heavy metals,” Miller said.

    As the world experiences more record high temperatures, employers are exploring wearable technologies to keep workers safe. New devices collect biometric data to estimate core body temperature – an elevated one is a symptom of heat exhaustion – and prompt workers to take cool-down breaks.

    The devices, which were originally developed for athletes, firefighters and military personnel, are getting adopted at a time when the Atlantic Council estimates heat-induced losses in labor productivity could cost the U.S. approximately $100 billion annually.

    This article is part of AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health. Read more Be Well.

    But there are concerns about how the medical information collected on employees will be safeguarded. Some labor groups worry managers could use it to penalize people for taking needed breaks.

    “Any time you put any device on a worker, they’re very concerned about tracking, privacy, and how are you going to use this against me,” said Travis Parsons, director of occupational safety and health at the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America. “There’s a lot of exciting stuff out there, but there’s no guardrails around it.”

    VULNERABLE TO HEAT

    Wyatt Fischer, a furnace mason employee at Cardinal Glass, sits on an excavator while wearing a SlateSafety armband, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Menomonie, Wis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

    Image

    FILE – Construction worker Fernando Padilla wipes his face as he works in the heat on June 30, 2023 in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV, File)

    At the Tennessee cleanup site, the workers wearing heat stress monitors made by Atlanta company SlateSafety are employed by United Cleanup Oak Ridge. The company is a contractor of the U.S. Department of Energy, which has rules to prevent on-the-job overheating.

    But most U.S. workers lack protections from extreme heat because there are no federal regulations requiring them, and many vulnerable workers don’t speak up or seek medical attention. In July, the Biden administration proposed a rule to protect 36 million workers from heat-related illnesses.

    From 1992 to 2022, 986 workers died from heat exposure in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Experts suspect the number is higher because a coroner might not list heat as the cause of death if a sweltering roofer takes a fatal fall.

    Setting occupational safety standards can be tricky because individuals respond differently to heat. That’s where the makers of wearable devices hope to come in.

    HOW WEARABLE HEAT TECH WORKS

    Employers have observed workers for heat-related distress by checking their temperatures with thermometers, sometimes rectally. More recently, firefighters and military personnel swallowed thermometer capsules.

    “That just was not going to work in our work environment,” Rob Somers, global environment, health and safety director at consumer product company Perrigo, said.

    Instead, more than 100 employees at the company’s infant formula plants were outfitted with SlateSafety armbands. The devices estimate a wearer’s core body temperature, and a reading of 101.3 degrees triggers an alert.

    Another SlateSafety customer is a Cardinal Glass factory in Wisconsin, where four masons maintain a furnace that reaches 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.

    “They’re right up against the face of the wall. So it’s them and fire,” Jeff Bechel, the company’s safety manager, said.

    Cardinal Glass paid $5,000 for five armbands, software and air-monitoring hardware. Bechel thinks the investment will pay off; an employee’s two heat-related emergency room visits cost the company $15,000.

    Another wearable, made by Massachusetts company Epicore Biosystems, analyzes sweat to determine when workers are at risk of dehydration and overheating.

    “Until a few years ago, you just sort of wiped (sweat) off with a towel,” CEO Rooz Ghaffari said. “Turns out there’s all this information packed away that we’ve been missing.”

    Research has shown some devices successfully predict core body temperature in controlled environments, but their accuracy remains unproven in dynamic workplaces, according to experts. A 2022 research review said factors such as age, gender and ambient humidity make it challenging to reliably gauge body temperature with the technology.

    The United Cleanup Oak Ridge workers swathed in protective gear can get sweaty even before they begin demolition. Managers see dozens of sensor alerts daily.

    Laborer Xavier Allison, 33, was removing heavy pieces of ductwork during a recent heat wave when his device vibrated. Since he was working with radioactive materials and asbestos, he couldn’t walk outside to rest without going through a decontamination process, so he spent about 15 minutes in a nearby room which was just as hot.

    “You just sit by yourself and do your best to cool off,” Allison said.

    The armband notifies workers when they’ve cooled down enough to resume work.

    “Ever since we implemented it, we have seen a significant decrease in the number of people who need to get medical attention,” Miller said.

    COLLECTING PERSONAL DATA

    United Cleanup Oak Ridge uses the sensor data and an annual medical exam to determine work assignments, Miller said. After noticing patterns, the company sent a few employees to see their personal physicians, who found heart issues the employees hadn’t known about, she said.

    At Perrigo, managers analyze the data to find people with multiple alerts and speak to them to see if there’s “a reason why they’re not able to work in the environment,” Somers said. The information is organized by identification numbers, not names, when it goes into the company’s software system, he said.

    Companies keeping years of medical data raises concerns about privacy and whether bosses may use the information to kick an employee off a health plan or fire them, said Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    “The device could hurt, frankly, because you could raise your hand and say ‘I need a break,’ and the boss could say, ‘No, your heart rate is not elevated, go back to work,’” Schwartz said.

    To minimize such risks, employers should allow workers to opt in or out of wearing monitoring devices, only process strictly necessary data and delete the information within 24 hours, he said.

    Wearing such devices also may expose workers to unwanted marketing, Ikusei Misaka, a professor at Tokyo’s Musashino University, said.

    A PARTIAL SOLUTION

    The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health advises employers to institute a plan to help workers adjust to hot conditions and to train them to recognize signs of heat-related illness and to administer first aid. Wearable devices can be part of efforts to reduce heat stress, but more work needs to be done to determine their accuracy, said Doug Trout, the agency’s medical officer.

    The technology also needs to be paired with access to breaks, shade and cool water, since many workers, especially in agriculture, fear retaliation for pausing to cool off or hydrate.

    “If they don’t have water to drink, and the time to do it, it doesn’t mean much,” Juanita Constible, senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. “It’s just something extra they have to carry when they’re in the hot fields.”

    ___

    This story corrects the spelling of Natural Resources Defense Council in last paragraph.

    ___

    Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What is ketamine, the drug involved in Matthew Perry’s death?

    What is ketamine, the drug involved in Matthew Perry’s death?

    [ad_1]

    The investigation into the death of “Friends” star Matthew Perry has led to a sweeping indictment that pulled in five people who prosecutors say contributed to his ketamine overdose in October, including two doctors and a street dealer involved in providing Perry large amounts of the powerful anesthetic.

    Here’s what to know about ketamine.

    What is ketamine?

    Ketamine is a powerful anesthetic approved by U.S. health regulators for use during surgery. It can be given as an intramuscular injection or by IV.

    The drug is a chemical cousin of the recreational drug PCP. Ketamine itself has been used recreationally for its euphoric effects. It can cause hallucinations and can impact breathing and the heart.

    How was Matthew Perry using ketamine?

    Ketamine has seen a huge surge in use in recent years as a treatment for depression, anxiety and pain. While the drug isn’t approved for those conditions, doctors are free to prescribe drugs for so-called off-label uses.

    In Perry’s case, he was using it to treat depression. He was receiving ketamine infusion therapy from his physicians, but prosecutors said the actor turned to other sources when his doctors refused to give him more doses.

    Prosecutors said Thursday that Perry obtained ketamine illicitly through a network that included a pair of doctors, his assistant and a woman they dubbed the “Ketamine Queen.” Perry’s assistant, who has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death, injected the actor with ketamine — including several times on the day he died.

    “We are not talking about legitimate ketamine treatment,” U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said while announcing the charges. “We’re talking about two doctors who abused the trust they had, abused their licenses to put another person’s life at risk.”

    How else is ketamine being used?

    Ketamine also has been used by paramedics as a sedative, often while working alongside police when they believed subjects were out of control. Some states and agencies have begun to rethink the practice due to its dangers. The 2019 death in Colorado of a young Black man named Elijah McClain brought scrutiny to the practice and led to a pair of paramedics being convicted for giving McClain an overdose of ketamine.

    Overall, the practice of giving ketamine and other sedatives to people detained by police has spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • JD Vance has long been on a quest to encourage more births in the United States

    JD Vance has long been on a quest to encourage more births in the United States

    [ad_1]

    MIAMI (AP) — Five summers ago, Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance — then a 34-year-old memoirist and father of a 2-year-old boy — took the stage at a conservative conference and tackled an issue that would become a core part of his political brand: the United States’ declining fertility rate.

    “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us,” Vance told the gathering in Washington. He outlined the obvious concern that Social Security depends on younger workers’ contributions and then said, “We want babies not just because they are economically useful. We want more babies because children are good. And we believe children are good, because we are not sociopaths.”

    Vance repeatedly expressed alarm about declining birth rates as he launched his political career in 2021 with a bid for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. His criticism then of Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, and other high-profile Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who didn’t have a “direct stake” in the country have drawn particular attention since Trump picked him as his running mate.

    The rhetoric could threaten the Republican ticket’s standing with women who could help decide the November election. But it’s delighted those in the pro-natalist movement that has, until now, been limited largely to policy wonks, tech executives and venture capitalists.

    Image

    “There’s no question the discussion around family life, childbearing and pronatalism has gotten a lot more popular and gotten media attention because of JD Vance,” said Brad Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and author of “Get Married.” Vance once referred to Wilcox as “one of my favorite researchers.”

    Vance’s spokespeople did not respond to messages seeking comment.

    An aspiring politician’s war against ‘anti-child ideology’

    Vance, who wrote a bestseller about his working-class upbringing, has been clear about making family formation a policy priority. He has suggested ideas such as allowing parents to vote on behalf of their children or following the example of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán of giving low-interest loans to married couples with children and tax exemptions to women who have four children or more.

    In a May 2021 interview with The Federalist’s podcast in which he said he was exploring a Senate run, Vance described a society without babies and kids as “pretty icky and pretty gross.”

    “We owe something to our country. We owe something to our future. The best way to invest in it is to ensure the next generation actually exists,” he said. “I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country.”

    Vance has suggested people without children should pay higher taxes than people who have children. That’s the spirit of the existing child tax credit at $2,000 per qualifying child, which Vance has said he’d love to see raised to $5,000. He has also mentioned in interviews he wants to ban pornography for minors, citing it as one of the causes for why people are marrying less and having fewer children.

    His anti-abortion views, he has said, are separate from his concerns on birth rates, arguing the procedure is not really driving the decline in fertility.

    What to know about the 2024 Election

    In several interviews, he’s argued policymakers should make it easier for two-parent households to be able to live on a single wage so that one of the parents can stay home with their children.

    “The ruling class is obsessed with their jobs. Even though they hate a lot of their jobs, they are obsessed with their credentials and they want strangers to raise their kids,” he told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2021. “But middle-class Americans, whatever their station in life, they want more time with their children.”

    Vance had a chaotic childhood raised mainly by his grandparents in southwestern Ohio and a mother who battled substance abuse, and her “revolving door of father figures” as he described in his book. He is now married to a trial lawyer he met at Yale Law School. The couple has three young children, who he has said attend preschool. Usha Vance left the law firm where she worked shortly after her husband was chosen as Trump’s running mate.

    Declining births in an aging America

    The U.S. was one of only a few developed countries with a fertility rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself — about 2.1 kids per woman. But the number has been sliding since 2008 and in 2023 dropped to about 1.6, the lowest rate on record.

    Earlier this year, Vance cited fertility rates in arguing against American support for Ukraine.

    “Not a single country — even the U.S. — within the NATO alliance has birth rates at replacement level. We don’t have enough families and children to continue as a nation, and yet we’re talking about problems 6,000 miles away,” he said.

    Vance as well as researchers and experts on the pro-natalist movement also argue that immigrants can’t provide a long-term fix to the decline in birth rates. He has separately blamed immigrants for crime and creating “inter-ethnic conflict.”

    Demographers and other experts for years had predicted declining fertility rates would pose challenges for the Social Security system as fewer workers are supporting a growing aging population.

    Tech executives such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who donated millions for Vance’s primary race, have also been vocal about the decline in birth rates.

    “We as a nation, as a society, policymakers can’t be neutral on the question of family,” said Oren Cass, who founded a conservative think tank, American Compass, that is closely aligned with the senator.

    Cass, a former policy adviser for U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, said he has known Vance for a decade and partnered on several events but said he was not speaking on behalf of the vice presidential nominee. He criticized how progressives have celebrated what he described as a culture of “you do you” and “all choices are equally valid,” when he considered the work of forming a family and raising children an “indispensable foundation” for the country.

    “That’s not to say, obviously, that you mandate or criminalize the alternative, but it is to say that we shouldn’t be neutral about it,” he said.

    Vance on the defense

    Vance’s views on birth rates have contributed to his rocky rollout as Trump’s running mate. Democrats went from labeling Trump and his Republican allies as a collective “threat to democracy” to calling both men “weird,” a strategy that coincided with Vance’s comments coming to light.

    Other unlikely critics have also piled on. Trump-backing influencer Dave Portnoy said Vance “sounds like a moron.” Former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy tried unsuccessfully to force an apology out of Vance for his denigrating of childless women on his Fox News show, introducing him with a story about a pair of Catholic nuns he met at an airport.

    Actress Jennifer Aniston, who has been open about her fertility issues, weighed in by saying she hopes Vance’s daughter does not face the same problems and she “truly can’t believe that this is coming from a potential VP of the United States.” Vance responded by calling her Instagram reaction “disgusting.”

    Trump has come to his defense, accusing Democrats of spinning things and expressing empathy for people who don’t get married or have children and are “every bit as good.”

    “He likes family. I think a lot of people like family. And sometimes it doesn’t work out,” Trump said in one interview. “But you’re just as good, in many cases a lot better than a person that’s in a family situation.”

    Vance’s wife has also tried to do some damage control, saying Vance was not referring to those who struggle with fertility or can’t get pregnant for medical reasons, though the ideas he proposes don’t make that distinction.

    “The reality is he made a quip in service of making a point he wanted to make that was substantive,” Usha Vance told an interviewer on “Fox and Friends.”

    Can Vance advance this?

    Wilcox, the author of “Get Married,” said JD Vance now needs to focus on convincing a broader audience that his ideas are worth pursuing.

    “The challenge for JD Vance is taking that attention and translating it into more of a concrete policy agenda that would be compelling to ordinary Americans and articulating a clear and positive agenda around making family formation both more affordable and more appealing,” Wilcox said.

    Supporters at a recent Trump rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, shrugged off Vance’s assertion that parents should have more of a vote than childless adults and expressed complicated feelings about his views.

    Kenneth “Nemo” Niemann, 70, said Vance might be speaking figuratively about giving parents more votes. His wife, Carol, 65, disagreed, saying Vance has been crystal clear that that is exactly what he means.

    The Niemanns had children later in life — their twins are 16 — and they spent far more of their adult lives as childless adults. And while they talked about how adults with children can have more to say when it comes to policies affecting children or they can have a different worldview about the future than childless adults, they still disagreed with Vance.

    “My sister never had children, but I can’t imagine my vote means more than hers,” Carol Niemann said.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Michelle R. Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, Mike Schneider in Orlando and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as well as Associated Press researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York, contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • How horses at the Spirit Horse Ranch help Maui wildfire survivors process their grief

    How horses at the Spirit Horse Ranch help Maui wildfire survivors process their grief

    [ad_1]

    KANAIO, Hawaii (AP) — Fear. Anxiety. Anger. Depression. Overwhelmed.

    Janice Dapitan began her second counseling session by writing those words on a whiteboard, reflecting what she felt in that moment. The day fire destroyed her hometown of Lahaina — and the struggles that have followed for nearly a year — still haunted her.

    The fire killed her uncle. It burned the homes of seven family members. Her daughter narrowly escaped the blaze with her two children, but lost her house and moved to Las Vegas. The house Dapitan shares with her husband, Kalani, survived, but now it overlooks the burn zone. The view is a painful, constant reminder that the life they’d known is gone.

    “There are so many triggers,” she said on a blustery July day. Her long black braids fell over a tank top with the word “Lahaina” printed in gold. “We can be okay today, and tomorrow it could be different. Everything is uncertain. Every day is a different challenge. We want to stay joyful, but it’s a process.”

    Janice Dapitan, left, cries during an interview with husband Kalani, right, following an equine therapy session at the Spirit Horse Ranch, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in Kula, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

    One year after the Maui fires, thousands of residents share Dapitan’s struggle. They grieve the losses of loved ones and generational homes. They are haunted by their traumatic escapes and even by the guilt of surviving. They’ve endured months of instability — switching hotel rooms, schools and jobs. An estimated 1,500 families have left Maui, forced to start over thousands of miles from home.

    But lately, Dapitan has enjoyed some relief, thanks to an equine-assisted therapy program at the Spirit Horse Ranch in Maui’s rural upcountry, an hour’s drive from Lahaina.

    “The connection with the horses is different than connecting with machines or humans,” said Dapitan. “It’s almost like instant healing.”

    After large-scale disasters, restoring a community’s mental wellness is as important as rebuilding infrastructure, experts say. And just as constructing an entire town can take years, so can healing its residents.

    “We can be so focused on the bricks-and-mortar rebuild — because that’s challenging enough as it is — that we don’t create space for that healing,” said Jolie Wills, a cognitive scientist who led the mental health response for the Red Cross after the 2010 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand.

    While some survivors need professional support to overcome their trauma, a lot of recovery can happen outside of a clinic’s walls. Maui residents have leaned on programs that help them reconnect — to themselves, their community, land and culture.

    Horses to process trauma

    After writing down her words, Dapitan sat on a folding chair inside a horse corral. A few feet away, Maverick, a 22-year-old Tennessee Walker rolled in the dirt.

    Image

    Janice Dapitan brushes a horse named Maverick during a philanthropy-supported equine therapy program at the Spirit Horse Ranch, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in Kula, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

    The program’s founder, Paige DePonte, sat in front of her and began a technique called brainspotting. She moved a small wand in front of Dapitan’s eyes to stimulate certain eye movements believed to help the brain process trauma. Later, Dapitan approached Maverick. She brushed his dark mane. After leading him once around the corral, she stopped, rested her arms over his back, and began to cry.

    “He just lets you lean on him,” she said. “I can feel myself healing because somebody is at least letting me lean on them.”

    For her husband Kalani, the ranch’s quiet isolation, tucked on a hillside overlooking Maui’s south coast, gives him space to process what has happened. “Before we even met the horses, I was in tears,” he said. “The peacefulness really breaks your walls down.”

    Image

    Kalani Dapitan talks to a horse named Missy during a philanthropy-supported equine therapy session at the Spirit Horse Ranch, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in Kula, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

    Equine-assisted therapy participants don’t typically ride horses, but the animals’ presence alone can soothe people as they face their trauma. They might brush, walk and even talk to the animals, or the horses might just be nearby as facilitators take them through other methods of counseling or psychotherapy.

    “Horses are incredible healers,” said DePonte, who started the program on her family’s cattle ranch in 2021 after observing the transformational effect the animals had on her own trauma recovery. “They are in a place of coherence all the time, not thinking about tomorrow, not thinking about yesterday.”

    The program, now supported by grants from the Hawaii Community Foundation, Maui United Way, and other private donors, has provided more than 1,300 sessions for impacted residents.

    Dapitan had already begun therapy before the fire to recover from a previous trauma, but she said time at the ranch feels different. “I think I got the most out of the horses in two days versus the year that I’ve been having regular counseling.”

    Healing through connection

    Holistic programs like these have helped meet the overwhelming need for support services after the Aug. 8, 2023 fire that killed at least 102 people and displaced 12,000.

    On top of the harrowing experiences of losing homes and loved ones, survivors are stressed and exhausted from the volatility of daily life — moving hotel rooms, changing schools, losing income.

    “It’s been a pretty significant impact on people’s mental health,” said Tia Hartsock, director of Hawaii’s office of wellness and resilience. “Navigating bureaucratic systems while in a traumatic response has been very challenging.”

    Image

    Kalani Dapitan reaches to pet a horse named Missy during an equine therapy session at the Spirit Horse Ranch, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in Kula, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

    In a Hawaii Department of Health survey of affected families two months after the fire, almost three-quarters of respondents said at least one person in their household had felt nervous, anxious or depressed in the preceding two weeks. At the six-month anniversary, more than half of survivors and one-third of all Maui residents surveyed by the University of Hawaii reported feeling depressive symptoms.

    That’s expected after a disaster of such scale, said Wills, calling it “very normal reactions to a very abnormal situation.”

    Providers, nonprofits, philanthropic groups and the government collaborated to reduce barriers to mental health treatment, like paying for people’s therapy sessions and staffing shelters and FEMA events with mental health practitioners.

    But they knew residents also needed other options. “Clinical support wasn’t necessarily going to be right for everyone,” said Justina Acevedo-Cross, senior program manager at the Hawaii Community Foundation.

    Numerous public and private funders are supporting programs that re-engage residents with land and people, which Hartsock calls “unbelievably helpful in the healing.”

    Several are rooted in Native Hawaiian healing practices. Cultural practitioners with the organization Hui Ho’omalu offer lomilomi, or Hawaiian massage. Those sessions typically lead into kukakuka, or deep conversation, with Native Hawaiians trained in mental health support.

    Impacted families also maintain taro patches, restore native plants and take cultural classes on protected land stewarded by the organization Ka’ehu. Aviva Libitsky and her son Nakana, 7, volunteer there at least once a week, scooping invasive snails out of kalo pools and cleaning litter from the shoreline.

    Libitsky felt anxious for months after fleeing the Lahaina fire and losing the home she’d lived in since 2010. Working on the land calms her. “It helps you channel that frenetic energy and put it toward something useful.”

    Image

    The Spirit Horse Ranch founder Paige DePonte walks with Maverick, one of the horses at her equine-assisted trauma-informed care facility, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in Kula, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

    She and Nakana recently learned how to weave bracelets from the leaves of hala trees at one of Ka’ehu’s cultural workshops. They’ve gone to Spirit Horse Ranch, too. “We just focus on new opportunities, creating new memories.”

    A new wave of need

    As Maui enters its second year of recovery, providers are preparing for a new wave of people to seek help.

    The last families are moving out of hotels and into the interim housing meant to carry them over until Lahaina rebuilds. That sudden stillness can trigger bigger emotions, said Acevedo-Cross. “They’re able to feel a bit more.”

    Many who weren’t directly affected by the fires are now experiencing its impacts, as rents skyrocket, tourism jobs disappear, and friends and family move away.

    For some, healing won’t come until Lahaina is rebuilt and the community can return home.

    Image

    Janice Dapitan, right, wipes away tears during a session, part of a philanthropy-supported equine therapy program, with Paige DePonte as a horse named Maverick stands nearby at the Spirit Horse Ranch, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in Kula, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

    “We don’t have a hometown anymore,” said Kalani Dapitan. He misses his friends and family, and most of all his daughter. He worries constantly about what will happen to Lahaina, especially as a Native Hawaiian. “We’re unsure of our future, how our cultural aspect is going to pan out.”

    With so much still uncertain, time at Spirit Horse Ranch helps the Dapitans stay present.

    At the end of her session, Janice returned to the whiteboard to write the words that summed up her feelings. “Relaxed,” she wrote, and looked up. “That’s all.”

    _____________

    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The final image of Simone Biles at the Olympics was a symbol of joy — and where the sport is going

    The final image of Simone Biles at the Olympics was a symbol of joy — and where the sport is going

    [ad_1]

    PARIS (AP) — Simone Biles cast a knowing glance across the awards podium toward Jordan Chiles.

    The longtime friends and U.S. gymnastics teammates knew they needed to find a way to honor Brazilian star Rebeca Andrade. They just weren’t sure how.

    What they came up with after Andrade’s gold medal on floor exercise at the end of 10 days inside Bercy Arena symbolized the state of their sport at the 2024 Games.

    Where it is. And hopefully where it’s going.

    Biles, the unequivocal Greatest of All Time, and Chiles, a three-time Olympic medalist whose journey back to the Games was a testament to talent and grit, dropped down to one knee. It was a show of respect to Andrade, whose excellence is symbolic of a sport that is getting more diverse, more inclusive and perhaps more positive as it goes.

    “It was just the right thing to do,” Biles said about a moment that soon went viral, with even the Louvre itself suggesting it might be worthy enough for a spot somewhere in the vicinity of the Mona Lisa.

    Fitting for an Olympics that offered masterpieces everywhere you looked.

    Biles eagerly shares the stage

    Biles and the American women finished off their “Redemption Tour” by reclaiming gold in the team final. Biles exorcised whatever inner doubt remained from the Tokyo Games — and shut up the haters in the process — by winning a second all-around title eight years after her first.

    Andrade led Brazil to its first Olympic team medal (a bronze), then added three more in the individual competition, finishing runner-up to Biles in the all-around and vault before becoming the first woman in memory to edge Biles in a floor exercise final.

    The Italian women won their first team medal in nearly a century. Japan put together a stirring rally on high bar in the last rotation to slip by rival China for gold. The U.S. men and “Pommel Horse Guy” Stephen Nedoroscik returned to the Olympic podium for the first time in 16 years. Carlos Yulo of the Philippines tripled his country’s Summer Olympic all-time gold medal count in a mere 24 hours.

    The good vibes were everywhere, led by Biles, who seemed to make it a point to take her vibrant spotlight and redirect it toward the other women on the floor as often as possible.

    That was never more evident than what could have been the last day of her career. The 27-year-old’s voice could be heard shouting encouragement to each of the other balance beam finalists inside an eerily quiet arena. Regardless of nationality. Regardless of age. Regardless of score. Regardless of how well she might know them.

    Afterward, Biles spoke glowingly of Italians Alice D’Amato and Manila Esposito, who earned gold and bronze in beam after half the field — Biles included — fell inside an arena so still that Biles joked she could hear cell phones buzzing.

    “I’m super excited and proud of them because now they’re building bricks (for a program) for the other Italian girls,” she said.

    U.S. women’s team dismantles stereotypes

    Jordan Chiles, of the United States, and Simone Biles, of the United States, celebrate after the women’s artistic gymnastics individual floor finals in Bercy Arena at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Monday, Aug. 5, 2024, in Paris, France. Biles won the silver medal and Chiles the bronze medal. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

    Those bricks have long been in place in the U.S., yet what Biles, Chiles, six-time Olympic medalist Sunisa Lee and three-time Olympic medalist Jade Carey did in Paris is destroy the “little girls in pretty boxes” stereotype that has lingered over the sport for decades once and for all.

    The four 20-somethings — oh, and 16-year-old Hezly Rivera, too — came to France with a score to settle. Biles to put those strange days in Japan three years ago firmly in the rearview mirror. Lee to rid herself of the “imposter syndrome” that kept nagging at her following her all-around gold in Tokyo and the health issues that pushed her to the verge of quitting over and over again. Chiles and Carey to put the Americans back on top after ceding the top of the podium to Russia.

    The group checked every box. The U.S. won eight of 18 possible medals, including four for Biles to boost her Olympic total to 11, tied for the second most ever by a women’s gymnast in the history of the event.

    Yet just as important as the results was the process they took to get there. There was pressure but there was also joy in abundance for the oldest team the Americans have ever brought to the Games, a team that has dubbed itself “The Golden Girls.”

    “It’s been so much fun,” Carey said. “And I think so many have seen that, that we’re just having fun out there. And I think that’s bringing out the best gymnastics from us.”

    ‘We did it’

    A decade ago, the core four would be heading off into retirement while the next wave of prodigies came along. It says something about the rapidly shifting demographics on the floor and the rising interest in women’s gymnastics at large that not one of them — Biles included — has made any firm decisions about their future.

    Biles nudged the door toward Los Angeles 2028 open when she said over the weekend “never say never.” Lee, still just 21, is taking time before weighing her options. Carey and Chiles will join Biles on her post-Olympic tour and have college eligibility remaining.

    No one is in a hurry. Biles in particular. She chastised the media for pressing about the future so soon after the biggest moment of athletes’ lives. For a long time — for too long, in hindsight — she fixated on what’s next.

    No longer. She was intent on soaking in her third Olympics. Of enjoying it. And she did, from the first pressure-packed rotation in qualifying to that moment with Chiles and Andrade, when the last of the weight she’s been carrying for years lifted off her shoulders, perhaps for good.

    “There’s nothing left,” Biles said. “We did our job, you know what I’m saying? So yeah, it was hard, but we did it.”

    __

    AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Wesley Bell defeats ‘Squad’ member Cori Bush. A pro-Israel group spent $8.5 million to help oust her

    Wesley Bell defeats ‘Squad’ member Cori Bush. A pro-Israel group spent $8.5 million to help oust her

    [ad_1]

    ST. LOUIS (AP) — St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell has defeated U.S. Rep. Cori Bush in a Democratic primary in St. Louis, marking the second time this year that one of the party’s incumbents has been ousted in an expensive contest that reflected deep divisions over the war in Gaza.

    Bush, a member of the progressive congressional group known as the “Squad,” was seeking a third term in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, which includes St. Louis city and part of St. Louis County. Bell is heavily favored to carry this overwhelmingly Democratic district in November, when his party is aiming to retake control of the U.S. House.

    “I am committed to serving the St. Louis region in Congress with integrity, transparency, and dedication,” Bell said in a statement. “Together, we will tackle the challenges ahead and build a community where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.”

    Bush, in a fiery concession speech, said she still has work to do, even if she’ll no longer be in Congress.

    “At the end of the day, whether I’m a congresswoman or not, I’m still taking care of my people,” Bush said.

    Bell’s campaign received a big boost from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose super political action committee, United Democracy Project, spent $8.5 million to oust Bush. She was targeted after repeated criticism of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

    It was a gameplan that worked earlier this year in New York. In June, United Democracy Project spent $15 million to defeat another Squad member — U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman. Bowman lost to George Latimer, a pro-Israel centrist.

    A statement from United Democracy Project said the wins by Bell and Latimer, along with John McGuire’s defeat of U.S. Rep. Bob Good in a Republican primary last week in Virginia, “is further proof that being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics on both sides of the aisle. UDP will continue our efforts to support leaders working to strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance while countering detractors in either political party.”

    Bush, in her concession speech, said she won’t change.

    “We will keep supporting a free Palestine,” Bush said. A crowd member answered back: “Free, free Palestine.”

    In October, Bush called the Israeli retaliation an “ethnic cleansing campaign.” Soon after the Hamas attack, Bush wrote on social media that Israel’s “collective punishment against Palestinians for Hamas’s actions is a war crime.”

    What to know about the 2024 Election

    • Democracy: American democracy has overcome big stress tests since 2020. More challenges lie ahead in 2024.
    • AP’s Role: The Associated Press is the most trusted source of information on election night, with a history of accuracy dating to 1848. Learn more.
    • Stay informed. Keep your pulse on the news with breaking news email alerts. Sign up here.

    Her comments prompted backlash, even among some supporters in her district. Bell, who had been planning a Senate run against incumbent Republican Josh Hawley, instead opted to challenge Bush. He told The Associated Press last month that Bush’s comments about Israel were “wrong and offensive.”

    Bush responded by saying that the donors behind AIPAC support former President Donald Trump and other Republicans.

    “This is only the beginning,” Bush told the AP. “Because if they can unseat me, then they’re going to continue to come after more Democrats.”

    Bush and Bell both honed their leadership skills in Ferguson, Missouri, in the unrest that followed Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer in 2014. Friday marks the 10th anniversary of Brown’s death.

    Brown, a Black 18-year-old, was walking with a friend on Aug. 9, 2014, when a white officer, Darren Wilson, confronted them. Wilson said he fired in self-defense because Brown was so enraged. Some witnesses said Brown, who was unarmed, had his hands up in surrender. Wilson was cleared of wrongdoing and resigned, and Brown’s death led to months of protests.

    Bush, 48, became a protest leader. She was outspoken and critical of how police in Ferguson and other parts of the St. Louis region treated Black people. Her activism prompted an unsuccessful run against longtime incumbent 1st District Democrat William Lacy Clay in 2018, before she defeated him in 2020. She easily won reelection in 2022.

    Bell, 49, began hosting conversations about community policing after Brown’s death. The lawyer, who previously served as a municipal prosecutor and judge, ran successfully for a seat on the Ferguson City Council before defeating seven-term incumbent St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch in the August 2018 Democratic primary.

    As prosecutor, Bell reopened an examination into Brown’s death. He announced in July 2020 that while the investigation didn’t exonerate Wilson, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.

    “My heart breaks” for Brown’s parents, Bell said at the time. “I know this is not the result they were looking for and that their pain will continue forever.”

    Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., was featured in an ad for Bush.

    “He used my family for power,” Brown says of Bell in the ad. “And now he’s trying to sell out St. Louis.”

    Bush’s campaign focused on what she’s accomplished for St. Louis. She said her efforts have brought $2 billion to the 1st District and that it was her protest on the steps of the Capitol in 2021 that helped extend the federal eviction moratorium as part of the COVID-19 pandemic, aiding thousands of St. Louisans.

    Bell touted his own progressive credentials. He noted that as a prosecutor he has said he will not prosecute any abortion cases in a state that bans the procedure in most instances. He created diversion programs to point people with mental health and substance abuse problems toward treatment instead of jail. And his office has expanded efforts to examine potential cases of wrongful convictions.

    In Missouri’s 3rd District, which stretches from the western outskirts of the St. Louis region through central Missouri, the candidate with Trump’s endorsement won. Bob Onder, a physician and also a former state senator, defeated former state Sen. Kurt Schaefer.

    Trump wrote on Truth Social last month that Onder was “an incredible America First Patriot.” The former president wrote that Schaefer “is WEAK ON MAGA,” adding, “That’s all you have to know!”

    The 3rd District is heavily Republican, and Onder will be favored against Democrat Bethany Mann, a political newcomer, in November. ___

    This story has been updated to correct that Onder won in Missouri’s 3rd District, not Schaefer

    ___

    Summer Ballentine in Columbia, Missouri, contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Should you stretch before exercise? After? Never? Here’s what to know

    Should you stretch before exercise? After? Never? Here’s what to know

    [ad_1]

    For many people of a certain age, high school gym class began with reaching for their toes. Then, over the years, we were told it was better to stretch after exercise.

    It turns out, both those things can be true, but the differing advice has created some confusion.

    Stretching can help make you more flexible, improve range of motion in your joints — and feel good. David Behm, who researches human kinetics at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Canada, offers this advice on when to stretch and how to do it safely:

    Warm up first

    It’s almost always good to stretch, but it’s better if you warm up first, said Behm, author of “The Science and Physiology of Flexibility and Stretching.” He recommends a light aerobic activity such as jogging, walking or cycling for five or 10 minutes.

    Follow that with some static stretching, the traditional way of reaching and holding a position (think back to that gym class). You can then do activity-specific dynamic stretching, in which you warm up the muscles with repetitive movements like leg lifts.

    Behm says one minute is “the magic number” for how long to do static stretching per muscle group without fatigue.

    Expand your definition of ‘stretching’

    Should you always stretch before exercising? If it’s traditional stretching, not necessarily.

    This article is part of AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health. Read more Be Well.

    The better question, Behm says, is, “Should people increase their range of motion? Should people have better flexibility? And that is yes, because it helps prevent injuries. It helps with health. But you don’t have to stretch to achieve that.”

    Resistance training, for instance, can be an effective form of stretching, he said. Doing a chest press increases range of motion in your deltoids and pecs, whether with barbells, dumbbells or machines, so there is no need to stretch beforehand. Just make sure to start with a small amount of weight to warm up and then add more to train.

    “You probably don’t have to do extra stretching unless you’re a gymnast, a figure skater, or even a golfer who needs a great range of motion through that swing,” Behm said.

    Nor do you need to stretch first if you’re going for a leisurely run. Simply start with a slow jog to warm up and then increase the pace.

    Don’t do it if it hurts

    After exercise, “light stretching is OK, as long as you don’t reach a point where you’re feeling pain,” Behm said. Since your muscles will be warm by that point, overdoing it makes you more likely to injure yourself.

    Foam rollers can help with muscle recovery and have been shown to increases range of motion as well as stretching.

    Do some static stretching before sports

    If you’re playing a sport, Behm said, static stretching beforehand helps reduce muscle and tendon injury.

    “If you’re going to do an explosive movement, change of direction, agility, sprint, any of these explosive activities that involve your muscles and tendons,” he said, “you’re going to be stronger if you do static stretching.”

    People can especially get in trouble when they go back to a sport they used to play, whether it’s tennis, surfing or any sort of team activity.

    Also, stretch both sides equally. Lacking flexibility on one side also can lead to injury.

    Sounds simple. Why all the confusion?

    Different studies over the years have either encouraged or discouraged stretching before exercise. Behm says that partly because some studies didn’t reflect real-life conditions, or were designed with elite athletes in mind, not regular people.

    “If you’re Usain Bolt, it makes a difference,” said Behm. Not so much for the rest of us.

    ___

    Albert Stumm writes about food, travel and wellness. Find his work at https://www.albertstumm.com

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Here’s a look at some of the false claims made during Biden and Trump’s first debate

    Here’s a look at some of the false claims made during Biden and Trump’s first debate

    [ad_1]

    President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump traded barbs and a variety of false and misleading information as they faced off in their first debate of the 2024 election.

    Trump falsely represented the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a relatively small number of people who were ushered in by police and misstated the strength of the economy during his administration.

    The latest on the Biden-Trump debate

    • The debate was a critical moment in Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s presidential rematch to make their cases before a national television audience.
    • Take a look at the facts around false and misleading claims frequently made by the two candidates.
    • Both candidates wasted no time sparring over policy during their 90-minute faceoff. These are the takeaways.

    Biden, who tends to lean more on exaggerations and embellishments rather than outright lies, misrepresented the cost of insulin and overstated what Trump said about using disinfectant to address COVID. Here’s a look at the false and misleading claims on Thursday night by the two candidates.

    ___

    JAN. 6

    TRUMP: “They talk about a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol and in many cases were ushered in by the police.”

    THE FACTS: That’s false. The attack on the U.S. Capitol was the deadliest assault on the seat of American power in over 200 years. As thoroughly documented by video, photographs and people who were there, thousands of people descended on Capitol Hill in what became a brutal scene of hand-to-hand combat with police.

    In an internal memo on March 7, 2023, U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said that the allegation that “our officers helped the rioters and acted as ‘tour guides’” is “outrageous and false.” A Capitol Police spokesperson confirmed the memo’s authenticity to The Associated Press. More than 1,400 people have been charged with federal crimes stemming from the riot. More than 850 people have pleaded guilty to crimes, and 200 others have been convicted at trial.

    ___

    TRUMP, on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s actions on Jan. 6: “Because I offered her 10,000 soldiers or National Guard and she turned them down.”

    THE FACTS: Pelosi did not direct the National Guard. Further, as the Capitol came under attack, she and then-Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell called for military assistance, including from the National Guard.

    The Capitol Police Board makes the decision on whether to call National Guard troops to the Capitol. It is made up of the House Sergeant at Arms, the Senate Sergeant at Arms and the Architect of the Capitol. The board decided not to call the guard ahead of the insurrection but did eventually request assistance after the rioting had already begun, and the troops arrived several hours later.

    The House Sergeant at Arms reported to Pelosi and the Senate Sergeant at Arms reported to McConnell. There is no evidence that either Pelosi or McConnell directed the security officials not to call the guard beforehand. Drew Hammill, a then-spokesperson for Pelosi, said after the insurrection that Pelosi was never informed of such a request.

    ___

    TAXES AND REGULATIONS

    TRUMP, on Biden: “He wants to raise your taxes by four times.”

    THE FACTS: That’s not accurate.

    Trump has used that line at rallies, but it has no basis in fact. Biden actually wants to prevent tax increases on anyone making less than $400,000, which is the vast majority of taxpayers.

    More importantly, Biden’s budget proposal does not increase taxes as much as Trump claims, though the increases are focused on corporations and the wealthy. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for individuals are set to expire after 2025, because they were not fully funded when they became law.

    ___

    TRUMP, referring to Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of Biden’s victory: “On January 6th we had the lowest taxes ever. We had the lowest regulations ever on January 6th.”

    THE FACTS: The current federal income tax was only instituted in 1913, and tax rates have fluctuated significantly in the decades since. Rates were lower in the 1920s, just prior to the Great Depression. Trump did cut taxes during his time in the White House, but the rates weren’t the lowest in history.

    Government regulations have also ebbed and flowed in the country’s history, but there’s been an overall increase in regulations as the country modernized and its population grew. There are now many more regulations covering the environment, employment, financial transactions and other aspects of daily life. While Trump slashed some regulations, he didn’t take the country back to the less regulated days of its past.

    ___

    INSULIN

    BIDEN: “It’s $15 for an insulin shot, as opposed to $400.”

    THE FACTS: No, that’s not exactly right. Out-of-pocket insulin costs for older Americans on Medicare were capped at $35 in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that President Joe Biden signed into law. The cap took effect last year, when many drugmakers announced they would lower the price of the drug to $35 for most users on private insurance. But Biden regularly overstates that many people used to pay up to $400 monthly. People with diabetes who have Medicare or private insurance paid about $450 yearly prior to the law, a Department of Health and Human Services study released in December 2022 found.

    ___

    CLIMATE CHANGE

    TRUMP, touting his environmental record, said that “during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever” and that he supports “immaculate” air and water.

    THE FACTS: That’s far from the whole story. During his presidency, Trump rolled back some provisions of the Clean Water Act, eased regulations on coal, oil and gas companies and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. When wildfires struck California in 2020, Trump dismissed the scientific consensus that climate change had played a role. Trump also dismissed scientists’ warnings about climate change and routinely proposed deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency. Those reductions were blocked by Democratic and Republican lawmakers.

    ___

    ABORTION

    TRUMP: “The problem they have is they’re radical because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth, after birth.”

    THE FACTS: Trump inaccurately referred to abortions after birth. Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has passed a law that allows killing a baby after birth.

    Abortion rights advocates say terms like this and “late-term abortions” attempt to stigmatize abortions later in pregnancy. Abortions later in pregnancy are exceedingly rare. In 2020, less than 1% of abortions in the United States were performed at or after 21 weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Abortions later in pregnancy also are usually the result of serious complications, such as fetal anomalies, that put the life of the woman or fetus at risk, medical experts say. In most cases, these are also wanted pregnancies, experts say.

    ___

    RUSSIA

    TRUMP on Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was detained in Russia: “He should have had him out a long time ago, but Putin’s probably asking for billions and billions of dollars because this guy pays it every time.”

    THE FACTS: Trump is wrong to say that Biden pays any sort of fee “every time” to secure the release of hostages and wrongfully detained Americans. There’s also zero evidence that Putin is asking for any money in order to free Gershkovich. Just like in the Trump administration, the deals during the Biden administration that have brought home hostages and detainees involved prisoner swaps — not money transfers.

    Trump’s reference to money appeared to be about the 2023 deal in which the U.S. secured the release of five detained Americans in Iran after billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets were transferred from banks in South Korea to Qatar. The U.S. has said that that the money would be held in restricted accounts and will only be able to be used for humanitarian goods, such as medicine and food.

    ___

    COVID-19

    BIDEN: Trump told Americans to “inject bleach” into their arms to treat COVID-19.

    THE FACTS: That’s overstating it. Rather, Trump asked whether it would be possible to inject disinfectant into the lungs.

    “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute,” he said at an April 2020 press conference. “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”

    ___

    SUPER PREDATORS

    TRUMP: “What he’s done to the Black population is horrible, including the fact that for 10 years he called them ‘super predators.’ … We can’t forget that – super predators … And they’ve taken great offense at it.”

    THE FACTS: This oft-repeated claim by Trump dating back to the 2020 campaign is untrue. It was Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, who used the term “super predator” to advocate for the 1994 crime bill that Biden co-authored more than thirty years ago. Biden did warn of “predators” in a floor speech in support of his bill.

    ___

    MIGRANTS

    TRUMP, referring to Biden: “He’s the one that killed people with a bad border and flooding hundreds of thousands of people dying and also killing our citizens when they come in.”

    THE FACTS: A mass influx of migrants coming into the U.S. illegally across the southern border has led to a number of false and misleading claims by Trump. For example, he regularly claims other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions to send to the U.S. There is no evidence to support that.

    Trump has also argued the influx of immigrants is causing a crime surge in the U.S., although statistics actually show violent crime is on the way down.

    There have been recent high-profile and heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally. But FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, nor is there any evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York. Studies have found that people living in the country illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes. For more than a century, critics of immigration have sought to link new arrivals to crime. In 1931, the Wickersham Commission did not find any evidence supporting a connection between immigration and increased crime, and many studies since then have reached similar conclusions.

    Texas is the only state that tracks crimes by immigration status. A 2020 study published by the National Academy of Sciences found “considerably lower felony arrest rates” among people in the United States illegally than legal immigrants or native-born.

    Some crime is expected given the large population of immigrants. There were an estimated 10.5 million people in the country illegally in 2021, according to the latest estimate by Pew Research Center, a figure that has almost certainly risen with large influxes at the border. In 2022, the Census Bureau estimated the foreign-born population at 46.2 million, or nearly 14% of the total, with most states seeing double-digit percentage increases in the last dozen years.

    ___

    CHARLOTTESVILLE

    BIDEN, referring to Trump after the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017: “The one who said I think they’re fine people on both sides.”

    THE FACTS: Trump did use those words to describe attendees of the deadly rally, which was planned by white nationalists. But as Trump supporters have pointed out, he also said that day that he wasn’t talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists in attendance.

    “You had some very bad people in that group,” Trump said during a news conference a few days after the rally, “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

    He then added that he wasn’t talking about “the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Instead, he said, the press had been unfair in its treatment of protesters who were there to innocently and legally protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

    The gathering planned by white nationalists shocked the nation when it exploded into chaos: violent brawling in the streets, racist and antisemitic chants, smoke bombs, and finally, a car speeding into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring dozens more.

    ___

    ECONOMY

    TRUMP: We had the greatest economy in history.”

    THE FACTS: That’s not accurate. First of all, the pandemic triggered a massive recession during his presidency. The government borrowed $3.1 trillion in 2020 to stabilize the economy. Trump had the ignominy of leaving the White House with fewer jobs than when he entered.

    But even if you take out issues caused by the pandemic, economic growth averaged 2.67% during Trump’s first three years. That’s pretty solid. But it’s nowhere near the 4% averaged during Bill Clinton’s two terms from 1993 to 2001, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In fact, growth has been stronger so far under Biden than under Trump.

    Trump did have the unemployment rate get as low as 3.5% before the pandemic. But again, the labor force participation rate for people 25 to 54 — the core of the U.S. working population — was higher under Clinton. The participation rate has also been higher under Biden than Trump.

    Trump also likes to talk about how low inflation was under him. Gasoline fell as low as $1.77 a gallon. But, of course, that price dip happened during pandemic lockdowns when few people were driving. The low prices were due to a global health crisis, not Trump’s policies.

    What to know about the 2024 Election

    • Democracy: American democracy has overcome big stress tests since 2020. More challenges lie ahead in 2024.
    • AP’s Role: The Associated Press is the most trusted source of information on election night, with a history of accuracy dating to 1848. Learn more.
    • Stay informed. Keep your pulse on the news with breaking news email alerts. Sign up here.

    Similarly, average 30-year mortgage rates dipped to 2.65% during the pandemic. Those low rates were a byproduct of Federal Reserve efforts to prop up a weak economy, rather than the sign of strength that Trump now suggests it was.

    ___

    MILITARY DEATHS

    BIDEN: “The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any — this decade — any troops dying anywhere in the world like he did.”

    ”THE FACTS: At least 16 service members have been killed in hostile action since Biden took office in January 2021. On Aug. 26, 2021, 13 died during a suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, as U.S. troops withdrew from the country. An enemy drone killed three U.S. service members at a desert base in Jordan on Jan. 28 of this year.

    ___

    PRESIDENTIAL RECORD

    BIDEN: “159, or 58, don’t know an exact number, presidential historians, they’ve had meetings and they voted, who is the worst president in American history … They said he was the worst in all American history. That’s a fact. That’s not conjecture.”

    THE FACTS: That’s almost right, but not quite. The survey in question, a project from professors at the University of Houston and Coastal Carolina University, included 154 usable responses, from 525 respondents invited to participate.

    ___

    GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS

    TRUMP, on Minneapolis protests after the killing of George Floyd: “If I didn’t bring in the National Guard, that city would have been destroyed.”

    THE FACTS: Trump didn’t call the National Guard into Minneapolis during the unrest following the death of George Floyd. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz deployed the National Guard to the city.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Elliot Spagat, Eric Tucker, Ali Swenson, Christina Cassidy, Amanda Seitz, Stephen Groves, David Klepper, Melissa Goldin and Hope Yen contributed to this report.

    ___

    Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • FACT FOCUS: Trump’s misleading claims about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol

    FACT FOCUS: Trump’s misleading claims about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump said during his debate with President Joe Biden last week that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol involved a “relatively small” group of people who were “in many cases ushered in by the police.”

    But that’s not what happened. Thousands of his supporters were outside the Capitol that day and hundreds broke in, many of them beating and injuring law enforcement officers in brutal hand-to-hand combat as the officers tried to stop them from storming through windows and doors. There is ample video evidence of the violence, and more than 1,400 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the riot.

    Many of those who broke into the Capitol were echoing Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and some menacingly called out the names of lawmakers — particularly then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to try to object to Biden’s legitimate win. The rioters interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory, but lawmakers who had evacuated both chambers returned that night to finish.

    Trump, now the presumptive GOP nominee to challenge Biden, has not only continued to mislead voters about what happened that day but has also heaped praise on the rioters, calling them “hostages” and promising to pardon them if he is elected. A look at some of his false claims:

    ‘PEACEFULLY AND PATRIOTICALLY’

    CLAIM: At the debate, Trump was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper what he would say to any voters “who believe that you have violated your constitutional oath through your actions, inaction on January 6, 2021, and worry that you’ll do it again?” Trump simply replied: “Well, I didn’t say that to anybody. I said peacefully and patriotically.”

    THE FACTS: In a speech on the White House Ellipse the morning of Jan. 6 to thousands of supporters, Trump did tell the crowd to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol. But he also used far more incendiary language when speaking off the cuff in other parts of the speech, such as telling the crowd: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

    Trump did not address Tapper’s question about his inaction as his supporters broke into the building and injured police. More than three hours elapsed between the time his supporters violently breached the Capitol perimeter and Trump’s first effort to get the rioters to disperse. He released a video message at 4:17 p.m. that day in which he asked his supporters to go home but reassured them, “We love you, you’re very special.”

    Some rioters facing criminal charges have said in court they believed they had been following Trump’s instructions on Jan. 6. And evidence shown during trials illustrates that far-right extremists were galvanized by a Trump tweet inviting his supporters to a “wild” protest on Jan. 6. “He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!” wrote one Oath Keepers member who was convicted of seditious conspiracy.

    POLICE ‘LET THEM IN’

    CLAIM: Trump said at the debate: “They talk about a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol. And in many cases were ushered in by the police.” The next day, Trump said at a rally: “So many of these people were told to go in, right? The police: ‘Go in, go in, go in.’”

    THE FACTS: More than 100 Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police officers were injured, some severely, as they tried to keep the rioters from breaking into the Capitol. In some cases police retreated or stepped aside as they were overwhelmed by the violent, advancing mob, but there is no evidence that any rioter was “ushered” into the building.

    In an internal memo last year, U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said that the allegation that “our officers helped the rioters and acted as ‘tour guides’” is “outrageous and false.” Manger said police were completely overwhelmed and outnumbered, and in many cases resorted to de-escalation tactics to try to persuade rioters to leave the building.

    The Capitol Police said in a statement this week that “under extreme circumstances, our officers performed their duties to the best of their ability to protect the members of Congress. With the assistance of multiple law enforcement agencies and the National Guard, which more than doubled the number of officers on site, it took several hours to secure the U.S. Capitol. At the end of the day, because of our officers’ dedication, nobody who they were charged with protecting was hurt and the legislative process continued.”

    NATIONAL GUARD RESPONSE

    CLAIM: Trump said he offered 10,000 National Guard troops to Pelosi and “she now admits that she turned it down.” Referring to a video Pelosi’s daughter took that day, Trump claimed that Pelosi said, “I take full responsibility for January 6.”

    THE FACTS: Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he offered National Guard troops to the Capitol and that his offer was rejected. He has previously said he signed an order for 20,000 troops to go to the Capitol.

    While Trump was involved in discussions in the days prior to Jan. 6 about whether the National Guard would be called ahead of the joint session, he issued no such order or formal request before or during the rioting, and the guard’s arrival was delayed for hours as Pentagon officials deliberated over how to proceed.

    In a 2022 interview with the Democratic-led House committee that investigated the attack, Christopher Miller, the acting Defense secretary at that time, confirmed that there was no order from the president.

    The Capitol Police Board makes the decision on whether to call National Guard troops to the Capitol, and two members of that board — the House Sergeant at Arms and the Senate Sergeant at Arms — decided through informal discussions not to call the guard ahead of the joint session that was eventually interrupted by Trump’s supporters, despite a request from the Capitol Police. The House Sergeant at Arms reports to the Speaker of the House, who was then Pelosi, and the Senate Sergeant at Arms reported to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. But Pelosi’s office has said she was never informed of the request.

    The board eventually requested the guard’s assistance after the rioting was underway, and Pelosi and McConnell called the Pentagon and begged for military assistance. Pence, who was in a secure location inside the building, also called the Pentagon to demand reinforcements.

    In a video recently released by House Republicans, Pelosi is seen in the back of a car on Jan. 6 and talking to an aide. In the raw video recorded by her daughter, Pelosi is angrily asking her aide why the National Guard wasn’t at the Capitol when the rioting started. “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” she asks.

    “We did not have any accountability for what was going on there and we should have, this is ridiculous,” Pelosi says, while her aide responds that security officials thought they had sufficient resources. “They clearly didn’t know and I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more,” Pelosi says in the video.

    There is no mention of a request from Trump, and Pelosi never said that she took “full responsibility for Jan. 6.”

    In a statement, Pelosi spokesman Ian Krager said Trump’s repeated comments about Pelosi are revisionist history.

    “Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed again and again that Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination on January 6th,” Krager said. “The Speaker of the House is not in charge of the security of the Capitol Complex — on January 6th or any other day of the week.”

    ‘INNOCENT’ RIOTERS

    CLAIM: Trump said to Biden during the debate, “What they’ve done to some people that are so innocent, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, what you have done, how you’ve destroyed the lives of so many people.”

    THE FACTS: Echoing Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, rioters at the Capitol engaged in hand-to-hand combat with police and a slew of rioters were carrying weapons, including firearms, knives, brass knuckle gloves, a pitchfork, a hatchet, a sledgehammer and a bow. They also used makeshift weapons, including flagpoles, a table leg, hockey stick and crutch, to attack officers. Police officers were bruised and bloodied, some dragged into the crowd and beaten. One officer was crushed in a doorframe and another suffered a heart attack after a rioter pressed a stun gun against his neck and repeatedly shocked him. One rioter has been charged with climbing scaffolding and firing a gun in the air during the melee.

    The rioters broke through windows and doors, ransacking the Capitol and briefly occupying the Senate chamber. Senators had evacuated minutes earlier. They also tried to break into the House chamber, breaking glass windows and beating on the doors. But police held them off with guns drawn.

    About 900 of the rioters have been sentenced, with roughly two-thirds of them receiving a term of imprisonment ranging from a few days to 22 years. Hundreds of people who went into the Capitol but did not attack police or damage the building were charged only with misdemeanors.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Barbara Whitaker, Alanna Durkin Richer, Melissa Goldin and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

    ___

    Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Wood pellets production boomed to feed EU demand. It’s come at a cost for Black people in the South

    Wood pellets production boomed to feed EU demand. It’s come at a cost for Black people in the South

    [ad_1]

    GLOSTER, Miss. (AP) — This southern Mississippi town’s expansive wood pellet plant was so close to Shelia Mae Dobbins’ home that she sometimes heard company loudspeakers. She says industrial residues coated her truck and she no longer enjoys spending time in the air outdoors.

    Dobbins feels her life — and health — were better before 2016, when United Kingdom energy giant Drax opened a facility able to compress 450,000 tons of wood chips annually in the majority Black town of Gloster, Mississippi. To her, it’s no coincidence federal regulators find residents are exposed to unwanted air particles and they experience asthma more than most of the country.

    Her asthma and diabetes were once under control, but since a 2017 diagnosis of heart and lung disease, Dobbins has frequently lived at the end of a breathing tube connected to an oxygen cannister.

    “Something is going on. And it’s all around the plant,” said the 59-year-old widow who raised two children here. “Nobody asked us could they bring that plant there.”

    Shelia Mae Dobbins holds part of her oxygen tube inside her home in Gloster, Miss., Wednesday, May 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Image

    Shelia Mae Dobbins walks with her oxygen tube inside her home in Gloster, Miss., Wednesday, May 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Wood pellet production skyrocketed across the U.S. South. It helped feed demand in the European Union for renewable energy, as those coutries sought to replace fossil fuels such as coal. But many residents near plants — often African Americans in poor, rural swaths — find the process left their air dustier and people sicker.

    Billions of dollars are available for these projects under President Joe Biden’s signature law combating climate change. The administration is weighing whether to open up tax credits for companies to burn wood pellets for energy.

    Image

    Shelia Mae Dobbins cries as she talks about her health inside her home in Gloster, Miss., Wednesday, May 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    As producers expand west, environmentalists want the government to stop incentivizing what they call a misguided attempt to curb carbon emissions that pollute communities of color while presently warming the atmosphere.

    Despite hefty pollution fines against industry players and one major producer’s recent bankruptcy, supporters say the multibillion-dollar market is experiencing growing pains. In wood pellets, they see an innovative long-term solution to the climate crisis that brings revenue necessary for forest owners to maintain plantations.

    Image

    Birds fly past a pile of wood used to make pellets during a tour of a Drax facility in Gloster, Miss., Monday, May 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Biomass boom

    After the European Union classified biomass as renewable energy in 2009, the Southeast’s annual wood pellet capacity increased from about 300,000 tons to more than 7.3 million tons by 2017, according to research led by a University of Missouri team.

    Federal energy statistics show about three dozen southern wood pellet manufacturing facilities account for nearly 80% of annual U.S. capacity. Most pellets are used for commercial-scale energy overseas.

    The market brought hope for revitalization to small, disadvantaged communities. But interviews with residents of towns with large Black populations, from Gaston, North Carolina, to Uniontown, Alabama, surfaced complaints of truck traffic, air pollution and noise from pellet plants.

    Image

    Dan Caston, an employee of Drax leads a tour of their plant in Gloster, Miss., Monday, May 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Image

    Dan Caston, an employee of Drax, shows some of the wood pellets their plant produces in Gloster, Miss., Monday, May 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Gloster has become the poster child for such tensions. In 2020, Mississippi’s environmental agency fined Drax $2.5 million for violating air emissions limits. Gloster is exposed to more particulate matter than much of the U.S. and adults have higher asthma rates than 80% of the country, according to an Environmental Protection Agency mapping tool. Median household income is about $22,000; the poverty rate is triple the national level.

    Spokesperson Michelli Martin said Drax in 2021 installed pollution controls, including incinerators to decrease carbon emissions. An environmental consulting firm found “no adverse effects to human health” and that “no modeled pollutant from the facility exceeded” acceptable levels, Martin said.

    The company recently committed to annual town halls and announced a $250,000 Gloster Community Fund to “improve quality of life.”

    But critics aren’t swayed by showings of corporate goodwill they say don’t account for poor air. Krystal Martin, of the Greater Greener Gloster Project, returned to her hometown after her 75-year-old mother was diagnosed with lung and heart problems.

    “You don’t really know you’re dealing with air pollution until most people have breathed and inhaled it for so long that they end up sick,” she said.

    Image

    Krystal Martin, a Gloster native, shows pamphlets to residents Myrtis Woodard and Shelia Mae Dobbins, right, during a community meeting she organized regarding health complaints against the Drax facility in Gloster, Miss., Thursday, May 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Image

    Krystal Martin, a Gloster native, shows pamphlets during a community meeting she organized regarding health complaints against the Drax facility in Gloster, Miss., Thursday, May 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Brown University assistant epidemiology professor Erica Walker is studying health impacts of industrial pollutants on Gloster residents. Walker said fine particulate matter can travel deep into lungs and reach the bloodstream.

    “It can also circulate to other parts of our body, leading to body-wide inflammation,” she said.

    Image

    A man crosses the street in downtown Gloster, Miss., Thursday, May 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Subsidies for an upstart industry

    Environmentalists are calling on Biden to stop aiding an industry they believe runs counter to his green energy goals. At the annual United Nations climate conference, The Dogwood Alliance urged attendees to phase out wood pellets.

    Enviva — the world’s largest wood pellet producer — had already received subsidies through the 2018 farm bill signed by former President Donald Trump, according to Sheila Korth, a former policy analyst with nonpartisan watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.

    But Korth said the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act made tax credits available to companies that create pellets for countries in Europe and Asia.

    Elizabeth Woodworth, interim executive director of the US Industrial Pellet Association, said the money is a small part of lRA allocations and noted emerging technologies require government subsidies. The industry argues that replanting of trees will eventually absorb carbon produced by burning pellets.

    “We need every single technology we can get our hands on to mitigate climate change,” Woodworth said. “Bioenergy is a part of that.”

    Scientific studies have found firing wood pellets puts more carbon immediately into the atmosphere than coal. Pollution from biomass-based facilities is nearly three times higher than that of other energy sectors, according to a 2023 paper in the journal Renewable Energy.

    In a 2018 letter, hundreds of scientists warned the EU that the “additional carbon load” from burning wood pellets means “permanent damages” including glacial melting.

    Image

    A resident crosses the street for a community meeting regarding health complaints against Drax in Gloster, Miss., Thursday, May 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Expansion plans and more burning?

    Drax — with plants operating in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi — is heading west.

    The corporation signed an agreement in February with Golden State Natural Resources to identify biomass from California’s forests. The public-private venture hopes to build two plants by year’s end and produce up to 1 million tons of wood pellets annually. Another Drax project in Washington would produce 500,000 tons a year.

    The Natural Resources Defense Council’s Rita Frost, who fought plants in the South, said the deal will endanger California’s low-income Latino communities much like she says the industry threatened Black southern towns.

    “It’s an environmental justice problem that should not be repeated in California,” Frost said.

    Image

    An employee walks toward a pile of lumber to be used during a tour of a Drax facility in Gloster, Miss., Monday, May 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

    Biomass, including wood pellets, accounted for less than 5% of U.S. primary energy consumption in 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

    But a key federal decision could draw more companies into pellet combustion — not just production.

    The White House is looking into whether biomass facilities should receive tax credits meant for zero-emission electricity generators. The Treasury Department is weighing whether biomass’ potential long-term carbon neutrality is sufficient even if its production increases emissions in the short term.

    Spokesperson Michael Martinez said they are “carefully considering public comments” and “working to issue final rules that will increase energy security and clean energy supply as effectively as possible.”

    Some environmentalists doubt the energy alternative is ultimately carbon neutral. The Southern Environmental Law Center fears the credits could be the incentive needed for the U.S. to join Europe in scaling up the burning of pellets.

    “The threat here is really the growth of biomass energy production in the U.S. itself,” said senior attorney Heather Hillaker. “Which obviously will add to the total carbon and climate harms of this industry globally.”

    ___

    Pollard reported from Columbia, South Carolina. Watson reported from San Diego. Contributing were video journalist Terry Chea from San Francisco and reporter Matthew Daly from Washington, D.C.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • In beachy Galveston, locals buckle down without power after Beryl’s blow during peak tourist season

    In beachy Galveston, locals buckle down without power after Beryl’s blow during peak tourist season

    [ad_1]

    GALVESTON, Texas (AP) — Vacuums sucked the water out of the seaside inn run by Nick Gaido’s family in Galveston since 1911 as power was still spotty nearly one week after a resurgent Hurricane Beryl swept into Texas. Blue tarp covered much of the torn off roof. Gaido scheduled cleanup shifts for the hotel and restaurant staff who couldn’t afford to lose shifts to the enduring outages.

    The July Fourth weekend was supposed to kickstart a lucrative tourism season for this popular getaway’s hospitality industry. But just dozens dotted the typically crowded beaches a week later. Gaido felt an urgent need to send the message that Galveston, Texas, is back open.

    “We’ve dealt with storms in late August or in September,” Gaido said. “But when you have a storm that hits in the beginning of July, that’s different.”

    Galveston, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Houston, has certainly weathered its share of natural disasters. Etched into its collective memory is the fury of a 1900 hurricane that killed thousands back when the island was emerging as a crown jewel for the state. More recently, Hurricane Ike’s 2008 wrath flooded its historic downtown with storm surge as high as 20 feet (6 meters) and caused more than $29 billion in damage.

    Yet even Greater Houston’s storm-seasoned neighbors got taken off guard by Beryl’s sudden arrival. Crashing unusually early in the calendar, the Category 1 hurricane brought the island’s tourism-based economy to a halt during a time when local restaurants rely on an influx of beachgoers to lift revenues. Despite the widespread power outage, businesses and residents are buckling down.

    In the harder-hit west side of Jamaica Beach, Way West Grill and Pizzeria was still without electricity on Saturday afternoon. Owner Jake Vincent felt stuck in limbo: he had heard power would return by July 19 but had hope that it might come sooner.

    The loss ruined his entire inventory. He said enough mozzarella cheese to fill the back of his truck had gone to waste. Also spoiled was an 8-foot chest full of fries and an estimated 300 pounds (130 kg) of pepperoni.

    Vincent no longer expects much from a year he had anticipated would finally bring “daylight” for his family-run restaurant founded in 2018. He said most of their annual sales come during the three summer months and that “this tourism season is probably done for.”

    “It complicates things,” he said. “You bank all your summer money to get through the winter.”

    Downed cables and orange construction cones could be found along the road linking the touristy strand’s seafood shacks to the west end’s colorful short-term rentals. Crews from Houston-area utility CenterPoint stood atop lifts, sweating as they restored line after line.

    Still without power Saturday morning, Greg Alexander raked debris to the edge of the street in his Jamaica Beach neighborhood. Despite sleeping in a balcony-level room in a house already raised high off the ground, he said water poured into the windows. Beryl’s horizontal winds blew rain right onto his bed.

    It’s just a part of life here for Alexander. His family moved full-time to Galveston in 2017 after he said Hurricane Harvey dumped 38 inches (nearly 1 meter) of water into their Lake City home. Without power, he said they’ve been “appreciating our car’s air conditioning more than ever.”

    He doesn’t plan to leave. He said trials only strengthen the community.

    “People on the west end aren’t like everybody else,” he said.

    Steve Broom and Debra Pease still lacked power on Saturday but had been beating the heat elsewhere. Broom said they’d already booked a hotel in Houston this week so his daughter could use the Galveston beach house where they’ve lived full-time for about five years. They spent only the first night in Galveston and opted to sleep the rest of the week in their nonrefundable room.

    Broom, 72, said he had never seen a hurricane come as early or increase as quickly as Beryl. Still, he joked that just one factor could force him to move off the island where he grew up.

    “If they wipe out all these houses, then we’ll be front row and our property value will probably double or triple,” he said, before clarifying: “No, I hope that doesn’t happen.”

    Anne Beem and her husband come every July from San Antonio to celebrate their birthdays. For her, the aftermath has been far worse than the hurricane itself.

    They enjoyed a nice breeze with the windows open after the storm passed Monday. But she said Tuesday night brought “mosquitogeddon.” Hundreds of bugs filled the house so they slept in their car with the air conditioning blasting.

    She said they also bought a kiddie pool to cool off before the power came back Thursday night.

    “We just tried to look at it as an adventure,” she said. “Each day was some fresh hell.”

    ___

    This story has been updated to correct the estimated amount of spoiled pepperoni at Way West Grill and Pizzeria to 300 pounds, not 3,000 pounds.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Trump’s escape from disaster by mere inches reveals a tiny margin with seismic impact

    Trump’s escape from disaster by mere inches reveals a tiny margin with seismic impact

    [ad_1]

    NEW YORK (AP) — Jarring, chaotic and sudden, the bullet whizzed toward the stage where former President Donald Trump stood behind a podium speaking. In its wake: the potential for a horrifying and tragic chapter in American history.

    But the Republican presidential candidate had a narrow escape — mere inches, possibly less — in Saturday’s assassination attempt. The projectile from the shooter on a nearby rooftop left Trump with just a bloodied right ear, initially shaken but otherwise unharmed as he dropped down and Secret Service swarmed, his campaign continuing as the Republican National Convention got underway.

    A tiny margin for survival, with a potentially seismic impact. And an unforgettable example of something many were talking about Monday — a hard truth about the events that shape us, our daily lives, and our society:

    Sometimes, it’s all about chance, about circumstances falling in one direction and not another, about interventions in the nick of time or missteps that allow for disruption.

    Sometimes history can come down to inches.

    Near misses and the hinge of history

    It’s a truth that often gets obscured as we look over dates, places, people and events with the perspective of hindsight and blanket media coverage. The past gets covered with a patina of inevitability — as if it could have only occurred the way it did.

    But “what just happened to us is a kind of humbling lesson about how contingent all of this is,” says Susan Schulten, a history professor at the University of Denver. “And nothing’s foreordained.”

    No matter what, of course, there will be fallout and an impact from the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday at a Pennsylvania rally, where an attendee was killed and two others wounded, and law enforcement killed the shooter. But what it will be, in this election year and in the years to come, will unfold differently than it would have in an America where events had gone differently.

    History is filled with examples of chance, randomness or luck playing a part in how things turn out, says Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us.”

    In his book, he recounts an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when a submarine from what was then the Soviet Union came close to firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at U.S. forces out of a belief it was being attacked. But a circumstantial delay in getting the order carried out allowed enough time for another officer to recognize that wasn’t the case.

    There are plenty of other moments where there can be endless “what-if” discussions, from assassinations of figures like Abraham Lincoln and John and Robert Kennedy to other attempted killings such as the attack on President Ronald Reagan in 1981, two months after he assumed the presidency.

    Police snipers return fire after shots were fired while Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

    It’s also events like the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Rank points out, when there were ordinary people who “missed their subway connection or were late or were early and just missed being killed in that disaster, whereas other folks were not as lucky.”

    Trying to find meaning

    Often, people respond to events like these by trying to make sense of them through a belief in coherence — to summon some kind of universal meaning, or divine plan.

    That’s because people want a sense of control, says Daryl Van Tongeren, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan. It’s too unnerving, he says, to admit that life is random and chance-filled. “It’s safer for us to think that we can just control everything that happens.”

    Image

    A campaign rally site for Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is empty and littered with debris Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

    Image

    Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is covered by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

    And in the United States of America, where part of the national mythology is the idea that we are masters of our own destinies — that we can pull ourselves up by our own efforts — the idea of randomness can land as particularly unnerving, Rank says.

    “In the United States, we’re really steeped in the idea of rugged individualism and self-reliance and meritocracy and you do it on your own, and you’re in control, and you have agency,” he says. “And to some extent, we are in control. We do make decisions. But another aspect of life is that … there are things that happen to you that you have no control over.

    “That’s kind of unsettling,” he says. “But that’s the way life plays out. That’s the world.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Amazon Prime Day is a big event for scammers, experts warn

    Amazon Prime Day is a big event for scammers, experts warn

    [ad_1]

    NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon Prime Day is here, and experts are reminding consumers to be wary of scams.

    Deceptions such as phony emails from people impersonating online retailers like Amazon are nothing new. But phishing attempts increase amid the heavy spending seen during significant sales events, whether it’s Black Friday or Prime Day, according to the Better Business Bureau.

    “This is a huge moment on the retail calendar,” Josh Planos, vice president of communications and public relations at the Better Business Bureau, previously told The Associated Press. “And because of that, it represents an enormous opportunity for a scammer, con artist or even just an unethical business or organization to capitalize on the moment and separate folks from their hard-earned money.”

    Prime Day, a two-day discount event for Amazon Prime members, kicks off on Tuesday and runs through Wednesday. In updated guidance published last week, the Better Business Bureau reminded consumers to watch out for lookalike websites, too-good-to-be-true social media ads, and unsolicited emails or calls during sales events this month.

    Consumers might need to be more vigilant this year than ever before. In June, the Better Business Bureau published a report that said it received a record number of phishing reports in 2023. Reports are also trending up so far this year, the organization said.

    Meanwhile, in a report released this month, the Israel-founded cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies said more than 1,230 new websites that associated themselves with Amazon popped up in June. The vast majority of them were malicious or appeared suspicious, according to Check Point.

    Scott Knapp, director of worldwide buyer risk prevention at Amazon, identifies two areas that the company has seen hoaxes around come Prime Day in recent years: Prime membership and order confirmations.

    Last year, for example, more than two-third of scams reported by Amazon customers claimed to be related to order or account issues, Knapp wrote in an emailed statement. People reported getting unsolicited calls or emails saying there was something wrong with their Prime membership and seeking bank account or other payment information to reinstate the accounts, Knapp explained.

    Urging consumers to confirm an order they didn’t place is also a common tactic at this time of year, he added. Scammers might pick something expensive, like a smartphone, to get attention — and again ask for payment information or send a malicious link. They might also try to lure in consumers with promises of a giveaway, or by using language that creates a false sense of urgency.

    Amazon is attempting “to ensure scammers are not using our brand to take advantage of people who trust us,” Knapp wrote, adding that customers can confirm their purchases and verify messages from the company on its app or website.

    Additional scams are probably out there, but it’s hard to know what form they might take before this year’s Prime Day begins. Still, experts note that the same shopping scams tend to resurface year after year.

    “Typically, the bones remain the same,” Planos said, pointing to fake delivery scams, email phishing and other repeated methods. “It’s always a ploy to separate consumers from (their) personal and payment information.”

    But online hoaxes are also constantly evolving to become more sophisticated, Planos and others warn. That means images might look more legitimate, text messages may sound more convincing and fake websites that look very similar to real shopping destinations.

    Amazon’s Knapp has said that with artificial intelligence “starting to leak in,” the scams targeting e-commerce shoppers follow the same approach but with a machine populating an email or text instead of a person.

    According to data from the Federal Trade Commission, consumers reported losing about $10 billion to fraud in 2023, a 14% jump from 2022. Online shopping scams were the second most-reported form of fraud, following impostor scams, the FTC said.

    Both the FTC and Better Business Bureau provide consumers with tips to avoid scams year-round. Guidance includes blocking unwanted messages, not giving financial information to unsolicited callers and checking links before clicking — secure websites, for example, will have “HTTPS” in the URL, Planos notes, never “HTTP.”

    Scammers will often pressure you to act immediately, experts say. It’s important to pause and trust your gut. Experts also urge consumers to report scams to regulators.

    Beyond scams that impersonate companies or retailers, it’s also important to be cautious of counterfeit products and fake reviews on the sites of trusted retailers. Just because you’re shopping on Amazon, for example, doesn’t mean you’re buying from Amazon. The online shopping giant, like eBay, Walmart and others, has vast third-party marketplaces.

    The quality and look of counterfeit products has significantly increased over recent years, Planos notes, making the activity difficult to police. A good rule of thumb is looking at the price tag — if the product is being sold for less than 75% of its year-round market rate, “that’s a pretty big red flag,” he says.

    Sketchy sellers can show up on different platforms, including sites like Amazon, “all the time” Planos said, urging consumers to check out companies on the Better Business Bureau’s website. Like other scams, counterfeit products may increase around high spending periods.

    Amid increasing pressure to tackle counterfeit products, Amazon has reported getting rid of millions of phony products in recent years. The company said it also blocked billions of bad listings from making it on to its site. In 2023, Amazon said more than 7 million counterfeit items were “identified, seized and appropriately disposed of.” The online retailer has also filed multiple lawsuits against fake review brokers.

    Amazon notes customers can also report fake reviews and other scams on its website. If a shopper purchases a counterfeit item detected by the company, Amazon has said it will “proactively contact” the customer and provide a refund.

    [ad_2]

    Source link