During Guatemala’s violent, decades-long civil war, an estimated 200,000 people were killed. Among them was Brenda Lemus’s father, Bernardo Lemus Mendoza, a prominent academic and intellectual who spoke out against the government.
“There were many people who were fighting for their rights, who were being repressed,” Brenda Lemus said. “My father (fought for) … their right to an education and access to work. He was persecuted, he was exiled from the country many times, and he was ultimately assassinated.”
Lemus’s father grew up in poverty in the small rural town of Purulhá, several hours outside of Guatemala City. Despite the odds, she said he managed to graduate school and eventually become the financial director at the San Carlos de Guatemala University.
During the peace process, the Guatemalan government wanted to dignify the memory of those killed by the state. To commemorate Bernardo and his love of literature, the government donated 180 books to his family to start a library in his hometown. In 2011, the Bernardo Lemus Mendoza Library opened in Purulhá.
Lemus relocated her family there and dedicated herself to getting the library off the ground. Today, it serves as a beacon of hope and a center of learning for young people living in extreme poverty.
From the start, Lemus saw how the community was struggling in many ways.
“The community’s youth had a lot of needs, especially in education,” Lemus said. “But all the books that were given to us … were about the armed conflict. None of them were for kids or young people, and there were no schoolbooks at all.”
Children would arrive at the library looking for books so they could attend school and do their homework. Many families couldn’t afford school supplies. So, Lemus got schools to agree to donate books, and she started giving them to children in the community.
She also saw that students needed notebooks for class. Some were writing on crumpled, old, torn pieces of paper.
“It made me think about when I was younger, going to school and hiding my notebooks because I didn’t want to do my homework. I had everything. And yet here were a bunch of kids who had nothing, holding on to a rotten piece of paper to be able to take notes,” Lemus said. “That filled me with compassion for these kids. I wanted to help them as much as I could.”
Realizing that young people in Purulhá were growing up under similar conditions as her father had, Lemus wanted not only to address their needs but to help them break the cycle of intergenerational poverty.
In 2012, she co-founded Yo’o Guatemala, a nonprofit whose name means “together we go.”
She began providing after-school programming and noticed many students had trouble focusing.
“I had to repeat the subjects often until one of the kids said to me, ‘Please, don’t repeat it to me again. I just can’t concentrate because I’m so hungry,’” Lemus said. “We realized that many of our kids were malnourished, some chronically, and it was impossible for them to focus on anything else.”
Her organization started a nutrition program for more than 40 families suffering from chronic malnutrition and has since expanded, providing extensive literacy, health, and community building programs.
“My goal with all of this is to make sure the kids in this community get a proper education, eat well, and get ahead with the same opportunities as if they were my own kids or yours,” Lemus said. “We are dignifying the memory of my father, and we are dignifying the lives of the children of Purulha.”
CNN spoke with Lemus about her efforts. Below is an edited and translated version of their conversation.
CNN: The assistance you provide is constantly evolving, depending on the community’s needs. How are you helping girls to access education?
Brenda Lemus: In Purulhá, girls stop studying very early, get pregnant, get married, and the cycle repeats itself. It’s a cycle of poverty that seems endless; it’s like a spiral that takes them to the bottom. We want to break (that) through education.
Parents usually reject sending their daughters to school because they help mom at home. The girls don’t perform the same as boys in school because it’s different: The boy goes to school, and when he leaves, he goes to play soccer. The girl goes to school, and comes home to cook, take care of siblings, wash clothes. And so she drops out of school because she doesn’t do her homework. Of course she doesn’t do her homework because she has too much of a burden at home. The girls have the entire burden, and it isn’t easy.
We currently have 10 girls in our residency. The girls come on Mondays, leaving on Fridays. They spend weekends at home. We are in charge of everything with respect to them during that time. And we give the opportunity to the girls who are much more vulnerable when it comes to dropping out of school. I’m convinced that by giving the girls an integral educational opportunity, with quality, we can break the cycle of poverty.
CNN: What is your focus with the “Mi Nino Bonito” program?
Lemus: We began a daycare program for children. We receive them very early because most of their mothers work in the local market. We give them a warm breakfast. We give them all the stimulation that they should have according to their age, but we teach the children to be independent.
They are usually the youngest in their house and the last in the food chain, so they have to fight for a piece of bread. We teach them to wash their dishes, to clean up if they spilled. We give them pediatric check-ups with vitamins, taking care that they don’t get sick. They become very independent children who then excel.
CNN: How does your eco-brick program work and what’s its significance?
Lemus: The eco-brick program has a special magic because it is the education of the children, by the children, through garbage. Children whose parents are unable to buy them school supplies have the opportunity to recycle materials such as non-recyclable aluminum or single-use plastics, encapsulating them in PET bottles forever.
The children collect garbage, clean the environment, recycle, and they receive school supplies as the tradeoff – for 10 eco-bricks, they have their full list of school supplies. If they deliver five more bricks, they get to take a brand-new backpack. With (the eco-bricks), schools are built in other parts of Guatemala by volunteers who come from the United States.
The value and dignity of the hard work they do is instilled in all the children. They provide their community with cleanliness and sanitation through recycling; this gives them dignity. The children come here in hopes of being able to finish their studies without dropping out. But they earn it with pure, hard work. This has allowed youth to have better opportunities for more dignified paid jobs.
US European Command released footage of the Tuesday encounter between a US surveillance drone and the Russian fighter jets as it played out over the Black Sea.
The newly declassified video depicts critical moments in the mid-air encounter, which the Pentagon said lasted between 30 and 40 minutes.
The video shows the camera of the MQ-9 Reaper drone pointed backward toward its tail and the drone’s propeller, which is mounted on the rear, spinning. Then, a Russian Sukhoi SU-27 fighter jet is shown approaching. As it draws closer, the Russian fighter jet dumps fuel as it intercepts the US drone.
In another portion of the footage, the Russian jet makes another pass. As it approaches, it again dumps fuel. The video from the drone is then disrupted as the Russian fighter jet collides with the MQ-9 Reaper, damaging the propeller and ultimately forcing the US to bring down the drone in the Black Sea. Russia has denied that a collision occurred.
When the camera comes back online in the footage, the view is again pointed backward, and the propeller is shown damaged from the collision. With the propeller damaged, the drone operators effectively flew the aircraft as a glider as it descended over the Black Sea, bringing it down in international waters southwest of Crimea. On its way down, two US officials told CNN the operators remotely wiped the drone’s sensitive software, mitigating the risk of secret materials falling into enemy hands before it crashed into the water.
The downing of the drone marked the first time Russian and US military aircraft have come into direct physical contact since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine.
Despite the release of the dramatic footage, and the back-and-forth over who is to blame, the Biden administration has not said it will take action against Russia over the downing of the drone, perhaps indicating a desire to not further escalate tensions after the Kremlin said Wednesday that relations between Moscow and Washington are at their “lowest point.”
A senior Biden administration official said the footage “absolutely confirms” that there was a physical collision and dumping of fuel, but it does not confirm the pilot’s intent.
On Wednesday two US officials familiar with the intelligence told CNN that senior officials at the Russian Ministry of Defense gave the order for the Russian fighter jets to harass a US drone over the Black Sea this week.
The high-level military officials’ connection to the incident suggests that the fighter jet pilots were not taking rogue action when they interfered with the US drone.
But, at this time there is no indication that the highest of political leaders in Russia – particularly those in the Kremlin, including President Vladimir Putin – knew about the planned aggression in advance, one of the US officials said.
National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby said on “CNN This Morning” Wednesday that the drone had not been recovered and that he was “not sure” the US would be able to recover it.
Moscow had made clear it would attempt to retrieve the wreckage of the drone and the US believes Russia has recovered some debris, a US official familiar with the matter told CNN. The official described the recovered wreckage as pieces of fiberglass or small bits of the drone.
The Kremlin has said a decision on whether to retrieve the drone will come from Russia’s Ministry of Defense.
“This is the prerogative of the military. If they believe that it is necessary for our interests and our security in the Black Sea, they will do it,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call Thursday.
Peskov said he did not know what the ministry has decided.
Moscow and Washington have been in contact through military and diplomatic channels.
The US is conducting an assessment of its drone operations in the Black Sea area following the incident, four US officials tell CNN.
It has not stopped the flights entirely amid the assessment – the military sent the same model of drone, an MQ-9 Reaper, on a mission in approximately the same area over the Black Sea shortly after the collision occurred, US officials told CNN, in an effort to survey the crash site and monitor Russian efforts to look for the debris.
But the US military is “taking a close look” at the drone’s routes and assessing how to better deconflict with Russian forces, the officials said, who have been regularly flying their fighter jets in and out of Crimea. The Pentagon has asked European Command to justify surveillance flights in the area going forward in part to assess risk, a senior US military official said.
The US is considering conducting another drone flight over the Black Sea in the coming days, the officials said. That is generally consistent with the drones’ typical operating schedule, which can fluctuate, they added.
Officials also plan to analyze the overall costs and benefits of flying these missions, comparing the potential intelligence value of a particular route versus the risk of escalation with Russia.
Officials also plan to analyze the overall costs and benefits of flying these missions, comparing the potential intelligence value of a particular route versus the risk of escalation with Russia.
Russia accused the US of violating airspace they said they created for their “special military operation” in Ukraine – a designation the US does not accept and the officials told CNN that Russia has not communicated any such airspace restriction.
Asked on Thursday whether the US had flown any drone missions over the Black Sea since the collision on Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to comment on “specific missions, routes, and timelines of operations.”
“I think Secretary Austin was pretty clear that we’re going to continue to fly and operate in international airspace where international law allows and that includes the Black Sea region,” Ryder said.
The first official noted there is concern among some in the US military that limiting routes will impact intelligence gathering related to the Ukraine war. But the US also has other intelligence-gathering methods it utilizes when it is not conducting drone flights in the area, such as spy satellites.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Effie Schnacky was wheezy and lethargic instead of being her normal, rambunctious self one February afternoon. When her parents checked her blood oxygen level, it was hovering around 80% – dangerously low for the 7-year-old.
Her mother, Jaimie, rushed Effie, who has asthma, to a local emergency room in Hudson, Wisconsin. She was quickly diagnosed with pneumonia. After a couple of hours on oxygen, steroids and nebulizer treatments with little improvement, a physician told Schnacky that her daughter needed to be transferred to a children’s hospital to receive a higher level of care.
The physical and mental burnout that occurred during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic has not gone away for overworked health care workers. Shortages of doctors and technicians are growing, experts say, but especially in skilled nursing. That, plus a shortage of people to train new nurses and the rising costs of hiring are leaving hospitals with unstaffed pediatric beds.
But a host of reasons building since well before the pandemic are also contributing. Children may be the future, but we aren’t investing in their health care in that way. With Medicaid reimbursing doctors at a lower rate for children, hospitals in tough situations sometimes put adults in those pediatric beds for financial reasons. And since 2019, children with mental health crises are increasingly staying in emergency departments for sometimes weeks to months, filling beds that children with other illnesses may need.
“There might or might not be a bed open right when you need one. I so naively just thought there was plenty,” Schnacky told CNN.
The number of pediatric beds decreasing has been an issue for at least a decade, said Dr. Daniel Rauch, chair of the Committee on Hospital Care for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
By 2018, almost a quarter of children in America had to travel farther for pediatric beds as compared to 2009, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Pediatrics by lead author Dr. Anna Cushing, co-authored by Rauch.
“This was predictable,” said Rauch, who has studied the issue for more than 10 years. “This isn’t shocking to people who’ve been looking at the data of the loss in bed capacity.”
The number of children needing care was shrinking before the Covid-19 pandemic – a credit to improvements in pediatric care. There were about 200,000 fewer pediatric discharges in 2019 than there were in 2017, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“In pediatrics, we have been improving the ability we have to take care of kids with chronic conditions, like sickle cell and cystic fibrosis, and we’ve also been preventing previously very common problems like pneumonia and meningitis with vaccination programs,” said Dr. Matthew Davis, the pediatrics department chair at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Pediatrics is also seasonal, with a typical drop in patients in the summer and a sharp uptick in the winter during respiratory virus season. When the pandemic hit, schools and day cares closed, which slowed the transmission of Covid and other infectious diseases in children, Davis said. Less demand meant there was less need for beds. Hospitals overwhelmed with Covid cases in adults switched pediatric beds to beds for grownups.
Only 37% of hospitals in the US nowoffer pediatric services, down from 42% about a decade ago, according to the American Hospital Association.
While pediatric hospital beds exist at local facilities, the only pediatric emergency department in Baltimore County is Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, according to Dr. Theresa Nguyen, the center’s chair of pediatrics. All the others in the county, which has almost 850,000 residents, closed in recent years, she said.
The nearby MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center consolidated its pediatric ER with the main ER in 2018, citing a 40% drop in pediatric ER visits in five years, MedStar Health told CNN affiliate WBAL.
In the six months leading up to Franklin Square’s pediatric ER closing, GBMC admitted an average of 889 pediatric emergency department patients each month. By the next year, that monthly average jumped by 21 additional patients.
“Now we’re seeing the majority of any pediatric ED patients that would normally go to one of the surrounding community hospitals,” Nguyen said.
In other cases, it’s the hospitals that have only 10 or so pediatric beds that started asking the tough questions, Davis said.
“Those hospitals have said, ‘You know what? We have an average of one patient a day or two patients a day. This doesn’t make sense anymore. We can’t sustain that nursing staff with specialized pediatric training for that. We’re going to close it down,’” Davis said.
Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise closed its pediatric inpatient unit in July because of financial reasons, the center told CNN affiliate KBOI. That closure means patients are now overwhelming nearby St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital, which is the only children’s hospital in the state of Idaho, administrator for St. Luke’s Children’s Katie Schimmelpfennig told CNN. Idaho ranks last for the number of pediatricians per 100,000 children, according to the American Board of Pediatrics in 2023.
The Saint Alphonsus closure came just months before the fall, when RSV, influenza and a cadre of respiratory viruses caused a surge of pediatric patients needing hospital care, with the season starting earlier than normal.
The changing tide of demand engulfed the already dwindling supply of pediatric beds, leaving fewer beds available for children coming in for all the common reasons, like asthma, pneumonia and other ailments. Additional challenges have made it particularly tough to recover.
Another factor chipping away at bed capacity over time: Caring for children pays less than caring for adults. Lower insurance reimbursement rates mean some hospitals can’t afford to keep these beds – especially when care for adults is in demand.
Medicaid, which provides health care coverage to people with limited income, is a big part of the story, according to Joshua Gottlieb, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.
“Medicaid is an extremely important payer for pediatrics, and it is the least generous payer,” he said. “Medicaid is responsible for insuring a large share of pediatric patients. And then on top of its low payment rates, it is often very cumbersome to deal with.”
Medicaid reimburses children’s hospitals an average of 80% of the cost of the care, including supplemental payments, according to the Children’s Hospital Association, a national organization which represents 220 children’s hospitals. The rate is far below what private insurers reimburse.
More than 41 million children are enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data from October. That’s more than half the children in the US, according to Census data.
At Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, about 55% of patients use Medicaid, according to Dr. David Wessel, the hospital’s executive vice president.
“Children’s National is higher Medicaid than most other children’s hospitals, but that’s because there’s no safety net hospital other than Children’s National in this town,” said Wessel, who is also the chief medical officer and physician-in-chief.
And it just costs more to care for a child than an adult, Wessel said. Specialty equipment sized for smaller people is often necessary. And a routine test or exam for an adult is approached differently for a child. An adult can lie still for a CT scan or an MRI, but a child may need to be sedated for the same thing. A child life specialist is often there to explain what’s going on and calm the child.
“There’s a whole cadre of services that come into play, most of which are not reimbursed,” he said. “There’s no child life expert that ever sent a bill for seeing a patient.”
“When insurance pays more, people build more health care facilities, hire more workers and treat more patients,” Gottlieb said.
“Everyone might be squeezed, but it’s not surprising that pediatric hospitals, which face [a]lower, more difficult payment environment in general, are going to find it especially hard.”
Dr. Benson Hsu is a pediatric critical care provider who has served rural South Dakota for more than 10 years. Rural communities face distinct challenges in health care, something he has seen firsthand.
A lot of rural communities don’t have pediatricians, according to the American Board of Pediatrics. It’s family practice doctors who treat children in their own communities, with the goal of keeping them out of the hospital, Hsu said. Getting hospital care often means traveling outside the community.
Hsu’s patients come from parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota, as well as across South Dakota, he said. It’s a predominantly rural patient base, which also covers those on Native American reservations.
“These kids are traveling 100, 200 miles within their own state to see a subspecialist,” Hsu said, referring to patients coming to hospitals in Sioux Falls. “If we are transferring them out, which we do, they’re looking at travels of 200 to 400 miles to hit Omaha, Minneapolis, Denver.”
Inpatient pediatric beds in rural areas decreased by 26% between 2008 and 2018, while the number of rural pediatric units decreased by 24% during the same time, according to the 2021 paper in Pediatrics.
“It’s bad, and it’s getting worse. Those safety net hospitals are the ones that are most at risk for closure,” Rauch said.
In major cities, the idea is that a critically ill child would get the care they need within an hour, something clinicians call the golden hour, said Hsu, who is the critical care section chair at the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“That golden hour doesn’t exist in the rural population,” he said. “It’s the golden five hours because I have to dispatch a plane to land, to drive, to pick up, stabilize, to drive back, to fly back.”
When his patients come from far away, it uproots the whole family, he said. He described families who camp out at a child’s bedside for weeks at a time. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles from home, unlike when a patient is in their own community and parents can take turns at the hospital.
“I have farmers who miss harvest season and that as you can imagine is devastating,” Hsu said. “These aren’t office workers who are taking their computer with them. … These are individuals who have to live and work in their communities.”
Back at GBMC in Maryland, an adolescent patient with depression, suicidal ideation and an eating disorder was in the pediatric emergency department for 79 days, according to Nguyen. For months, no facility had a pediatric psychiatric bed or said it could take someone who needed that level of care, as the patient had a feeding tube.
“My team of physicians, social workers and nurses spend a significant amount of time every day trying to reach out across the state of Maryland, as well as across the country now to find placements for this adolescent,” Nguyen said before the patient was transferred in mid-March. “I need help.”
Nguyen’s patient is just one of the many examples of children and teens with mental health issues who are stayingin emergency rooms and sometimes inpatient beds across the country because they need help, but there isn’t immediately a psychiatric bed or a facility that can care for them.
It’s a problem that began before 2020 and grew worse during the pandemic, when the rate of children coming to emergency rooms with mental health issues soared, studies show.
Now, a nationwide shortage of beds exists for children who need mental health help. A 2020 federal survey revealed that the number of residential treatment facilities for children fell 30% from 2012.
“There are children on average waiting for two weeks for placement, sometimes longer,” Nguyen said of the patients at GBMC. The pediatric emergency department there had an average of 42 behavioral health patients each month from July 2021 through December 2022, up 13.5% from the same period in 2017 to 2018, before the pandemic, according to hospital data.
When there are mental health patients staying in the emergency department, that can back up the beds in other parts of the hospital, creating a downstream effect, Hsu said.
“For example, if a child can’t be transferred from a general pediatric bed to a specialized mental health center, this prevents a pediatric ICU patient from transferring to the general bed, which prevents an [emergency department] from admitting a child to the ICU. Health care is often interconnected in this fashion,” Hsu said.
“If we don’t address the surging pediatric mental health crisis, it will directly impact how we can care for other pediatric illnesses in the community.”
Funding for children’s hospitals is already tight, Rauch said, and more money is needed not only to make up for low insurance reimbursement rates but to competitively hire and train new staff and to keep hospitals running.
“People are going to have to decide it’s worth investing in kids,” Rauch said. “We’re going to have to pay so that hospitals don’t lose money on it and we’re going to have to pay to have staff.”
Virtual visits, used in the right situations, could ease some of the problems straining the pediatric system, Rauch said. Extending the reach of providers would prevent transferring a child outside of their community when there isn’t the provider with the right expertise locally.
Increased access to children’s mental health services
With the ongoing mental health crisis, there’s more work to be done upstream, said Amy Wimpey Knight, the president of CHA.
“How do we work with our school partners in the community to make sure that we’re not creating this crisis and that we’re heading it off up there?” she said.
There’s also a greater need for services within children’s hospitals, which are seeing an increase in children being admitted with behavioral health needs.
“If you take a look at the reasons why kids are hospitalized, meaning infections, diabetes, seizures and mental health concerns, over the last decade or so, only one of those categories has been increasing – and that is mental health,” Davis said. “At the same time, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of mental health hospital resources dedicated to children and adolescents in a way that meets the increasing need.”
Most experts CNN spoke to agreed: Seek care for your child early.
“Whoever is in your community is doing everything possible to get the care that your child needs,” Hsu said. “Reach out to us. We will figure out a way around the constraints around the system. Our number one concern is taking care of your kids, and we will do everything possible.”
Nguyen from GBMC and Schimmelpfennig from St. Luke’s agreed with contacting your primary care doctor and trying to keep your child out of the emergency room.
“Anything they can do to stay out of the hospital or the emergency room is both financially better for them and better for their family,” Schimmelpfennig said.
Knowing which emergency room or urgent care center is staffed by pediatricians is also imperative, Rauch said. Most children visit a non-pediatric ER due to availability.
“A parent with a child should know where they’re going to take their kid in an emergency. That’s not something you decide when your child has the emergency,” he said.
After Effie’s first ambulance ride and hospitalization last month, the Schnacky family received an asthma action plan from the pulmonologist in the ER.
It breaks down the symptoms into green, yellow and red zones with ways Effie can describe how she’s feeling and the next steps for adults. The family added more supplies to their toolkit, like a daily steroid inhaler and a rescue inhaler.
“We have everything an ER can give her, besides for an oxygen tank, at home,” Schnacky said. “The hope is that we are preventing even needing medical care.”
President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday seeking to increase the number of background checks for gun purchasers. The measure does something else that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: It would promote the secure storage of firearms.
I’m a city girl whose family didn’t own guns but as a teenager, I got to see what secure gun storage looks like. I lived with my cousin’s family in Brooklyn during my senior year of high school. My uncle, a retired New York City police detective, enjoyed deer hunting upstate and would take his sons with him on many of those outings.
I remember seeing trophy photos in their house, but never the rifles. Those were secured out of sight and reach from young hands. Kids were only allowed to safely handle them while he was supervising. It’s the way many responsible parents teach their children to respect the power of firearms and protect their families from harm.
Many, but unfortunately, not all.
There were news reports this week of what has become a spate of incidents in which young children get their hands on unsecured firearms, with tragic consequences.
A 3-year-old girl fatally shot her 4-year-old sister in Houston, Texas over the weekend in an incident authorities called “tragic” but “very preventable.” Law enforcement officials said the child got hold of a loaded semi automatic pistol in the home.
And in January, a six-year-old Virginia boy allegedly shot a teacher with his mother’s handgun. While the state prohibits anyone from leaving a loaded gun in a place or manner to endanger a child younger than 14, or providing a firearm to a child younger than 12, it does not require that guns be locked away.
This meant that a schoolboy was able to swipe his parent’s firearm and smuggle it to school in his backpack, a teen could use it to commit suicide, a person with dementia or other mental illness could harm a loved one, or someone could just take your gun from your home and use it to commit other crimes.
Broadly speaking, gun owners are doing a better job of securing their weapons. According to a 2021 survey by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Network), the percent of firearm owners with children who were more likely to safely store their weapons increased to 44.1% from 29% six years earlier.
But that still leaves more than half of gun-owning parents ignoring this vitally important safety measure. In 2020, (the most recent year in which data was available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), firearms were the number one cause of death for children ages 1-19 in the United States, claiming the lives of 4,357 children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. This drives home the importance of safely securing one’s guns in the home, especially for parents and guardians of the estimated 30 million children who lived in households with these weapons as of April 2021, according to JAMA.
A growing number of states have secure storage laws to keep guns away from minors. And while Americans are deeply divided on guns, one policy with broad bipartisan support, (87%, according to Pew Research), is keeping them away from people with mental issues. Secure storage is one of the ways to do that in shared households with people of all ages and household members whose diagnoses suggest that they shouldn’t have access to firearms.
Research has shown that personal protection tops the list of reasons why gun owners say they keep a firearm. It’s certainly understandable that people want to protect themselves and their families. I know that feeling as a survivor of violent crime myself.
Women often feel more vulnerable – with some justification. (The first fact on Harvard’s School of Public Health page about firearms research blares, “Across states, more guns = more female violent deaths.”)
So having a firearm close at hand adds a measure of security and comfort when something goes bump in the night. If she shares her home with others, though, that weapon can become a safety risk to her or her housemates.
How do you balance safety and risk with firearms at home? And how does this fit into my professional focus as a wellness design consultant? The answer to both is that secure gun storage contributes to safer home environments.
Safety and security is a key facet of wellness design, the practice of creating spaces that support the well-being of their occupants.
Since I concentrate on spaces where people live, and four in 10 American adults say they live in a home where someone owns a gun, that becomes a wellness design concern. What can be done to make their living spaces safer, respecting both well-being and rights?
For the person who wants a firearm within reach while sleeping, there are gun safes designed to fit inside nightstands, and even nightstands with built-in gun safes. The latter is a better option, as it doesn’t allow someone to easily walk off with a small, portable lockbox.
You also want your safe to have either biometric access, so you’re not fumbling for a key in the dark and only your fingerprint can open it, or a keypad if you have no problem remembering obscure numbers, even when your adrenaline is pumping.
If you own a shotgun or rifle, or a collection of firearms, they’re not going to fit into a bedside safe. Then you have other secure storage options and considerations, including the best (and worst) locations in your home, access, weight (vis-à-vis floor joists), flooring type, fire and theft. Gun safes are not simple purchases, and some larger solutions benefit from professional insight and installation.
You’ll quickly realize that the elegant closet system you chose probably isn’t going to suffice to secure your firearms either. As one luxury designer shared in a message, “Secure? I can put a lock on anything, but it’s not a safe. We can build around and hide safes or secret hiding places where you need a code to get in. But with TFL, [thermally-fused laminate, formerly called melamine], if you put enough force, it can be broken.” That set-up might keep your kids or their friends out of your closet-housed gun storage, but not necessarily an angry ex or serious thief.
You need a firearms storage expert to help secure your weapons, especially if you own more than one. (Since there are about 120 guns for every 100 Americans, according to one survey, it’s not a small number of owners who are in need of larger safe storage.)
There are numerous online guides to choosing and buying gun safes. Many are published by the safe companies themselves, sources that aren’t owned or tied to a manufacturer or seller are going to be your best bet for unbiased advice.
The 79-year-old publication Gun Digest published a buying guide on its site. The Gun Safe Reviews Guy posted a four-minute Gun Safe FAQ on his site, along with extensive buying and installation guides. His self-described background as an engineer with residential construction experience comes through in his site’s advice.
The dealer who sold you your guns can possibly recommend a secure storage dealer. Or once you’ve chosen a make and model after reviewing the advice sites, the company’s website can likely refer a local professional to sell and install it – an improperly-installed safe may not work as it should.
Will secure gun storage prevent every gun injury or death? No, but it can help reduce the number of accidents, suicides and access to firearms by those who shouldn’t have them – including under your roof.
A Russian fighter jet forced down a US Air Force drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday after damaging the propeller of the American MQ-9 Reaper drone, according to the US military.
The Reaper drone and two Russian Su-27 aircraft were flying over international waters over the Black Sea on Tuesday when one of the Russian jets intentionally flew in front of and dumped fuel on the unmanned drone several times, a statement from US European Command said.
The aircraft then hit the propeller of the drone, prompting US forces to bring the MQ-9 drone down in international waters. Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder added Tuesday that the Russian aircraft flew “in the vicinity” of the drone for 30 to 40 minutes before colliding just after 7 a.m. Central European Time.
“Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” Air Force Gen. James B. Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, said in the statement. “In fact, this unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash.”
The incident marks the first time Russian and US military aircraft have come into direct physical contact since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine just over a year ago and is likely to increase tensions between the two nations, with US calling Russia’s actions “reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional.”
Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov said that Russia does not want “confrontation” between his country and the US after he was summoned to the State Department following the downing of the drone.
“We prefer not to create a situation where we can face unintended clashes or unintended incidents between the Russian Federation and the United States,” Antonov said.
Antonov, who was inside the State Department for a little over half an hour, said Assistant Secretary Karen Donfried conveyed the US’ concerns about the incident and that they “exchanged our remarks on this issue because we have some differences.”
“It seems to me that it was a constructive conversation on this issue. I have heard her remarks, I hope that she has understood what I have mentioned,” Antonov said in response to a question from CNN.
He also claimed that Russia “had informed about this space that was identified as a zone for special military operation.”
“We have warned not to enter, not to penetrate,” he said, asking how the US would react if a Russian drone came close to New York or San Francisco.
Antonov reiterated a denial issued by the Russian Ministry of Defense on the incident. They denied the Russian jet had come into contact with the drone in a statement earlier on Tuesday, saying the fighter jets “scrambled to identify the intruder” after detecting it over the Black Sea, adding that the drone “went into an unguided flight with a loss of altitude.”
“The drone flew with its transponders off, violating the boundaries of the temporary airspace regime established for the special military operation, communicated to all users of international airspace, and published in accordance with international standards,” the ministry said.
President Joe Biden was briefed on the incident by national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Tuesday morning, according to National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby. Defense Department officials “have not spoken specifically to Russian authorities” on the incident, Ryder said.
Price said separately that the US has “engaged at high levels with our allies and partners” to brief them on the incident. He added that the US was “not in a position to speak to what the Russians intended to do” with the maneuvers, but that ultimately the intent mattered less than “what actually transpired.”
Kirby said it was “not uncommon” for Russian aircraft to intercept US aircraft over the Black Sea, and said there had been other intercepts in recent weeks.
But he said the episode Tuesday was unique in how “unsafe, unprofessional and reckless” the Russian actions were.
The US Defense Department is currently working to declassify imagery from the incident, Ryder said Tuesday. He also said that Russia has not recovered the downed drone.
Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead” on Tuesday, Kirby said the US has “taken steps to protect our equities with respect to that particular drone.”
“We obviously don’t want to see anybody getting their hands on it beyond us,” Kirby said. He added that the US rejects Russia’s denial of responsibility, saying that people “should take everything that the Russians say about what they’re doing in and around Ukraine with a huge grain of salt.”
Russian and US aircraft have operated over the Black Sea during the course of the Ukraine war, but this is the first known such interaction, a potentially dangerous escalation at a critical time in the fighting.
The US has been operating Reaper drones over the Black Sea since before the beginning of the war, using the spy drones to monitor the area. Reaper drones can fly as high as 50,000 feet, according to the Air Force, and they have sensors and capabilities to gather intelligence and perform reconnaissance for extended periods of time, making it an ideal platform to track movements on the battlefield and in the Black Sea.
This story has been updated with additional details.
President Joe Biden called efforts to restrict transgender rights in Florida “close to sinful” in an interview released Monday, suggesting federal laws should be passed to protect those rights in all states.
“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. It’s just terrible what they’re doing,” Biden said during an interview with Kal Penn for “The Daily Show.”
Biden’s comments came as an unprecedented number of measures are introduced in state legislatures this year that are seeking to restrict LGBTQ rights. The proposed bills cover a wide range of policies, including some that seek to restrict transgender people from competing on sports teams or using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
Youth and medical care is a growing legislative focus. Florida will soon enact a measure banning gender-affirming medical care for youth, including barring doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries for patients under 18. Tennessee passed a law this month banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
Biden didn’t specify which rules he found offensive, but said that efforts to restrict the rights of trans individuals were “cruel.”
“It’s not like a kid wakes up one morning and says, You know, I decided I wanted to become a man or want to become a woman or I want to change. I mean, what are they thinking about here? They’re human beings. They love, they have feelings, they have inclinations,” he said.
“It just, to me, is, I dunno, it’s cruel,” he went on.
“And the way we do it is make sure we pass legislation like we passed on same-sex marriage. You mess with that, you’re breaking the law, and you’re going to be held accountable,” he said.
At least 385 bills targeting LGBTQ rights and queer life have been introduced around the country through March 7, according to data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union. The number of bills has already surpassed last year’s total of 306, according to ACLU data shared with CNN.
In the interview, Biden also affirmed his support for same-sex marriage, describing an epiphany when he was young after seeing two “well-dressed men” kissing outside an office building in Delaware.
“I’ll never forget – I turned and looked at my dad. He said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other,’” he said.
Despite the early view into same-sex relationships, Biden still voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 when he was a senator, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
His views on the issue evolved, and in 2012, when he was serving a vice president, Biden delivered an unexpected endorsement of same-sex marriage in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
At the end of last year, Biden signed into law landmark new federal protections for same-sex and interracial couples, capping both a personal and national evolution on an issue that’s enjoyed growing acceptance over the past decade.
In the interview, Biden lightly ribbed Penn – an actor who also worked in the Obama White House – for putting off marriage after getting engaged to his partner five years ago.
“Listen to your auntie and your uncle: get married. Do it now. Don’t wait,” he said.
Jim Stewart was getting ready to sell his home in East Palestine, Ohio, and retire. Then came the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train on February 3, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and nearby water, and he fears crashing the value of his home.
He and his wife hoped to put their three-bedroom home on the market this spring, as prices were still high and inventory was low. Alternatively, they talked about his son’s family buying a house that was on the market down the street from Stewart.
But even though state officials are saying the water is safe to drink, convincing potential homebuyers otherwise is an uphill battle.
“Since the derailment, I lost all those options,” he said. “Who is going to buy contaminated land? The older people are willing to stay and live it out. The younger bunch, they are smarter. They’re thinking of their families. I wouldn’t want my grandchildren here. We don’t know if the ground is going to be good enough to grow grass. There are too many unknowns.”
Stewart, 65, recently voiced his fury and sadness about what he lost to Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw on a February 22 Town Hall about the derailment on CNN.
“You burned me,” he told Shaw. “We were going to sell our house. Our value went phoom,” pointing his hands down.
Shaw was asked point blank by another resident if Norfolk Southern was ready to buy Stewart’s house, he replied only, “we’re going to do what’s right for this community.” That wasn’t satisfactory for Stewart or many of the other participants at the Town Hall.
“I lost everything now,” Stewart says he told Shaw.
Stewart works as a manager at a commercial baking company.
“I worked hard. I’m still working,” he says he told Shaw. “I’m in the 44th year at my job. I wanted to get out. Now I’m just stuck.”
Stewart fears he lost a tremendous amount of the value of his home, which he bought in 2016 for $85,000.
The property was worth about $135,000 a month ago, according to an estimate from Zillow. Lack of transactions since then make a current estimate difficult.
“I’ll never get that. I’ll be lucky to get what I paid for it, if that,” he said of the estimate. In addition, Stewart believes it would cost a lot to do the repairs and tests to ensure the home is safe.
“At whose expense? That’s the biggest issue right now,” said Stewart. “At whose expense are we going to do things to make sure it’s okay?”
Stewart isn’t the only one that was angry with Shaw and Norfolk Southern for the railroad’s refusal to offer to compensate the community for the property value that has been destroyed by the derailment.
At Thursday’s Senate hearing on the crash, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked Shaw four different times to commit to compensating homeowners, only to hear Shaw repeatedly reply, “Senator, I’m committed to do what’s right.”
Markey said that wasn’t an acceptable answer.
“Will you commit to insuring that these families, these innocent families do no lose their life savings in their homes and small businesses? The right thing to do is to say, ‘Yes we will.’” Markey told Shaw. “These families want to know long term are they just going to be left behind. Once the cameras move on, once the national attention dies down, where will these families be? I think they’re going to be in the crosshairs of the accountants of Norfolk Southern saying ‘We’re not going to pay full compensation.’”
Paying the homeowners and businesses wouldn’t necessarily be difficult for Norfolk Southern.
With a population of about 5,000 people, there are roughly 2,600 residential properties in East Palestine according to Attom, a property data provider. The average value of a property there in January of this year, prior to the derailment, was $146,000, according to Attom.
Taken together, the value of all residential real estate in the town adds up to about $380 million, including single family homes and multi-family properties.
Those values are only a fraction of the money that Norfolk Southern earns. Last year it reported a record operating income of $4.8 billion, and a net income of $3.3 billion, up about 9% from a year earlier. It had $456 million in cash on hand on its books as of December 31.
It’s been returning much of that profit to shareholders, repurchasing $3.1 billion in shares last year and spending $1.2 billion on dividends. And it announced a 9% increase in dividends just days before the accident.
A year ago its board approved a $10 billion share repurchase plan, and it had the authority to buy $7.5 billion of that remaining on the plan as of December 31.
Asked by Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, at Thursday’s hearing, “Will you pledge to no more stock buybacks until a raft of safety measures have been completed to reduce the risk of derailments and crashes in the future,” Shaw again dodged the question by answering only with, “I will commit to continuing to invest in safety.”
And the company also invests a great deal of money in lobbying, spending $1.8 billion on lobbying in 2022, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks lobbying and political contributions expenditures.
Those lobbying expenses also came under attack by senators at the hearing, especially since Shaw would not commit to supporting the bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate since the derailment to improve railroad safety. Asked if he would support or oppose the legislation, Shaw wouldn’t endorse all of the provisions of the bill, but he responded “we are committed to the legislative intent to make rail safer.”
A big payout probably isn’t what many in East Palestine are looking for, said Jim Warren, manager and co-owner of Kelly Warren and Associates Real Estate Solutions, in Boardman, which is about 15 miles away from East Palestine. They just want a home that’s safe to live in and to be made whole on its value, he said.
“The people around here don’t want a lot,” he said. “We don’t chase the flashy items like other places in the world. We want to grow up, raise our kids, make a living, and have a nice place to live, that’s all we want.”
This area, like the rest of the country, saw the real estate market heat up over the past few years with multiple offers on homes and properties selling over the asking price. But, Warren said, unlike other parts of the country the market stays fairly steady in this part of Ohio.
“Our area doesn’t move up as much and it doesn’t move down as much,” he said. “We don’t have the big swings.”
Warren’s firm currently has two listings in the town.
“That’s no more nor less than usual,” he said. There are only ever about ten properties on the market there, he said.
But, he added, “if your property is contaminated, that is a concern for yourself and for any buyer.”
As with any real estate purchase, an appraisal and tests for safety would need to be done for homes in East Palestine. But like Stewart, Warren said it is not yet clear who will pay for the additional tests on water and ground contamination for that peace of mind.
“For all we know, the county might cover it, or the EPA or Ohio state government. That remains to be seen,” he said.
Overall, Warren said, he expects homes to continue to be bought and sold in East Palestine.
“We don’t foresee the market tanking, we foresee steady growth,” he said. “After all the hype is gone, we are still living here. We’re going to have to figure it out because this is our home.”
In their federal trial that followed, all three were found guilty of interference of rights, a federal hate crime, and attempted kidnapping, while the McMichaels were also each convicted on a weapons charge. The father and son were sentenced to life in prison and Bryan was sentenced to 35 years, to be served at the same time as his state sentence.
In their appeals, the elder McMichael and Bryan both challenge whether prosecutors proved the men acted the way they did “because of” Arbery’s race and color. Travis McMichael’s appeal instead focused on more technical matters to do his convictions of attempted kidnapping and weapons use charges.
“The evidence against Bryan did not present a man who saw the world through a prism of racism. He was not obsessed with African Americans such as his codefendant Travis McMichael,” Defense attorney J. Pete Theodocion, who filed an appeal on behalf of Bryan, wrote in the filing.
“There is simply not sufficient evidence in the record to suggest Bryan would have acted any differently on the day in question had Arbery been white, Hispanic, Asian or other,” the attorney wrote. “Every crime committed against an African American is not a hate crime. Every crime committed against an African American by a man who has used racist language in the past is not a hate crime.”
See the moment judge holds moment of silence for Ahmaud Arbury
Arbery was shot dead on February 23, 2020, while he was out on a jog – something he was known to do, according to his loved ones – in the Satilla Shores neighborhood, outside the city of Brunswick in south Georgia.
The federal trial of the three men featured testimony from witnesses who spoke about racist messages the men used.
The remarks witnesses shared in court, which had been made privately and publicly, revealed the men talked about Black people in derogatory terms and used racial slurs in conversations with others – key evidence prosecutors used to prove they acted out of racial animus.
Defense attorneys during the trial acknowledged their clients used racist language but denied that’s what motivated their actions.
Jennifer McClellan, a former Virginia state senator, was sworn in on Tuesday, becoming the first Black woman to represent the commonwealth in Congress.
Her ascent to the House of Representatives is a milestone for Virginia, a state that was once home to the capital of the Confederacy and is a former slave-trading center. McClellan joins a divided Congress, in which Republicans control the House of Representatives, making the possibility of passing Democratic-backed priorities slim.
In an emotional speech on the House floor following her swearing in, McClellan recounted her rise in politics as the “daughter and granddaughter of men who paid poll taxes and the great granddaughter of a man who took a literacy test and had to find three White men to vouch for him to be able to vote.”
“I stand on the shoulders of my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, recognizing that in a lot of ways I am fighting the same fights that they did,” she said. “And I stand here to ensure that my children and yours don’t have to fight those same fights.”
McClellan’s election also adds to what is already a record number of women and women of color in Congress, and sets a new record for the number of Black women, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
In February, McClellan won Virginia’s special election to succeed the late Democratic Rep. Donald McEachin, who died in November. She defeated Republican Leon Benjamin, a pastor and Navy veteran, in the heavily Democratic 4th Congressional District that had been held by McEachin since 2017.
In her remarks Tuesday, McClellan said that while she is succeeding McEachin, she can never replace the lawmaker “who was a friend, mentor and colleague whom I served with in the Virginia House of Delegates and succeeded in the Senate of Virginia.”
She told CNN on the campaign trail that in becoming the first Black woman to represent the commonwealth, “it’s a tremendous honor but it’s also a tremendous responsibility because I need to make sure I’m not the last.”
“I have a responsibility to be a mentor and help pave the way for other Black women, whether it’s, you know, running for federal office or running at local or state and to just help as many as I can to succeed,” McClellan said after casting her ballot in February.
While in the Virginia General Assembly, McClellan pushed legislation on gun control, abortion rights and education. She previously told CNN that she plans to continue her work on these issues, including voting rights and reaffirmed her plans on Tuesday.
“I learned in the general assembly here in Virginia, I was in the minority for 14 years, and I learned just be persistent,” McClellan told Don Lemon on “CNN This Morning” while touting her work on the Voting Rights Act of Virginia. She spearheaded the measure, which was signed into law in 2021 and aimed to eliminate voter suppression and intimidation in the commonwealth.
Raised in Petersburg, Virginia, McClellan was elected to the House of Delegates in 2005 and won a 2017 special election for state Senate after McEachin was elected to Congress in 2016. In 2020, she launched a bid for governor, eventually coming in third in the 2021 Democratic primary.
This story has been updated with remarks from McClellan.
The Australian conservationist Bindi Irwin revealed Wednesday she has undergone surgery for endometriosis after a decade-long battle with the condition that affects the uterus.
“For 10 years I’ve struggled with insurmountable fatigue, pain and nausea,” Irwin shared in posts on social media alongside an image of her in a hospital bed.
“A doctor told me it was simply something you deal with as a woman and I gave up entirely, trying to function through the pain.”
Irwin’s posts coincided with both International Women’s Day and Endometriosis Awareness Month.
Endometriosis is “a condition in which the tissue that normally lines the uterus grows outside the uterus,” according to the United States’ National Institutes of Health.
Symptoms can include pelvic pain, heavy bleeding during periods and fertility issues.
Irwin, 24, said doctors had found 37 lesions, some of which were “very deep and difficult to remove,” but she was now “on the road to recovery.”
“I’m sharing my story for anyone who reads this and is quietly dealing with pain and no answers. Let this be your validation that your pain is real and you deserve help,” she added.
Anyone with a uterus who is of reproductive age can suffer from the disease but it’s most common among women in their 30s and 40s. Approximately one in 10 people born with a uterus has endometriosis, according to the World Health Organization. The disease affects around 190 million women and girls globally.
Irwin is a celebrity conservationist who has starred in “Crikey! It’s the Irwins,” a reality TV show that chronicles her family’s work at the Australia Zoo in Queensland, which her mother owns.
She won “Dancing With the Stars” in 2015 and comes from a family of conservationists that includes her father Steve, the late ‘Crocodile Hunter’ who was killed by a stingray while filming in the Gerat Barrier Reef in 2006.
She gave birth to a daughter, Grace, in March 2021.
“Please be gentle and pause before asking me (or any woman) when we’ll be having more children,” Irwin wrote in her post Wednesday. “After all that my body has gone through, I feel tremendously grateful that we have our gorgeous daughter. She feels like our family’s miracle.”
Soon after her posts, her family took to social media to share their support.
Her husband Chandler Powell said, “Seeing how you pushed through the pain to take care of our family and continue our conservation work while being absolutely riddled with endometriosis is something that will inspire me forever.”
Irwin’s brother Robert added on Instagram that, “You never know who’s suffering in silence, let’s make this a topic that we all freely talk about.”
Irwin is the latest in a series of celebrities to have opened up about their struggles with endometriosis.
In a Paramount Plus docuseries released last year, comedian Amy Schumer discussed her decades-long battle with what she called a “lonely disease.” Schumer had her uterus removed in 2021 and shared video on her Instagram following the surgery.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is underway in Maryland. And the members of Congress, former government officials and conservative personalities who spoke at the conference on Thursday and Friday made false claims about a variety of topics.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio uttered two false claims about President Joe Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia repeated a debunked claim about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama used two inaccurate statistics as he lamented the state of the country. Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon repeated his regular lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from Trump, this time baselesly blaming Fox for Trump’s defeat.
Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida incorrectly said a former Obama administration official had encouraged people to harass Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina inaccurately claimed Biden had laughed at a grieving mother and inaccurately insinuated that the FBI tipped off the media to its search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence. Two other speakers, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, inflated the number of deaths from fentanyl.
And that’s not all. Here is a fact check of 13 false claims from the conference, which continues on Saturday.
Marjorie Taylor Greene said the Republican Party has a duty to protect children. Listing supposed threats to children, she said, “Now whether it’s like Zelensky saying he wants our sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine…” Later in her speech, she said, “I will look at a camera and directly tell Zelensky: you’d better leave your hands off of our sons and daughters, because they’re not dying over there.”
Facts First: Greene’s claim is false. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t say he wants American sons and daughters to fight or die for Ukraine. The false claim, which was debunked by CNN and others earlier in the week, is based on a viral video that clipped Zelensky’s comments out of context.
19-second video of Zelensky goes viral. See what was edited out
In reality, Zelensky predicted at a press conference in late February that if Ukraine loses the war against Russia because it does not receive sufficient support from elsewhere, Russia will proceed to enter North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries in the Baltics (a region made up of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) that the US will be obligated to send troops to defend. Under the treaty that governs NATO, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. Ukraine is not a NATO member, and Zelensky didn’t say Americans should fight there.
Greene is one of the people who shared the out-of-context video on Twitter this week. You can read a full fact-check, with Zelensky’s complete quote, here.
Right-wing commentator and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon criticized right-wing cable channel Fox at length for, he argued, being insufficiently supportive of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Among other things, Bannon claimed that, on the night of the election in November 2020, “Fox News illegitimately called it for the opposition and not Donald J. Trump, of which our nation has never recovered.” Later, he said Trump is running again after “having it stolen, in broad daylight, of which they [Fox] participate in.”
Facts First: This is nonsense. On election night in 2020, Fox accurately projected that Biden had won the state of Arizona. This projection did not change the outcome of the election; all of the votes are counted regardless of what media outlets have projected, and the counting showed that Biden won Arizona, and the election, fair and square. The 2020 election was not “stolen” from Trump.
Bannon has a harsh message for Fox News at CPAC
Fox, like other major media outlets, did not project that Biden had won the presidency until four days later. Fox personalities went on to repeatedly promote lies that the election was stolen from Trump – even as they privately dismissed and mocked these false claims, according to court filings from a voting technology company that is suing Fox for defamation.
Rep. Jim Jordan claimed that Biden, “on day one,” made “three key changes” to immigration policy. Jordan said one of those changes was this: “We’re not going to deport anyone who come.” He proceeded to argue that people knowing “we’re not going to get deported” was a reason they decided to migrate to the US under Biden.
Facts First:Jordan inaccurately described the 100-day deportation pause that Biden attempted to impose immediately after he took office on January 20, 2021. The policy did not say the US wouldn’t deport “anyone who comes.” It explicitly did not apply to anyone who arrived in the country after the end of October 2020, meaning people who arrived under the Biden administration or in the last months of the Trump administration could still be deported.
Biden did say during the 2020 Democratic primary that “no one, no one will be deported at all” in his first 100 days as president. But Jordan claimed that this was the policy Biden actually implemented on his first day in office; Biden’s actual first-day policy was considerably narrower.
Biden’s attempted 100-day pause also did not apply to people who engaged in or were suspected of terrorism or espionage, were seen to pose a national security risk, had waived their right to remain in the US, or whom the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined the law required to be removed.
The pause was supposed to be in effect while the Department of Homeland Security conducted a review of immigration enforcement practices, but it was blocked by a federal judge shortly after it was announced.
Rep. Ralph Norman strongly suggested the FBI had tipped off the media to its August search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort in Florida for government documents in the former president’s possession – while concealing its subsequent document searches of properties connected to Biden.
Norman said: “When I saw the raid at Mar-a-Lago – you know, the cameras, the FBI – and compare that to when they found Biden’s, all of the documents he had, where was the media, where was the FBI? They kept it quiet early on, didn’t let it out. The job of the next president is going to be getting rid of the insiders that are undermining this government, and you’ve gotta clean house.”
Facts First: Norman’s narrative is false. The FBI did not tip off the media to its search of Mar-a-Lago; CNN reported the next day that the search “happened so quietly, so secretly, that it wasn’t caught on camera at all.” Rather, media outlets belatedly sent cameras to Mar-a-Lago because Peter Schorsch, publisher of the website Florida Politics, learned of the search from non-FBI sources and tweeted about it either after it was over or as it was just concluding, and because Trump himself made a public statement less than 20 minutes later confirming that a search had occurred. Schorsch told CNN on Thursday: “I can, unequivocally, state that the FBI was not one of my two sources which alerted me to the raid.”
Brian Stelter, then CNN’s chief media correspondent, wrote in his article the day after the search: “By the time local TV news cameras showed up outside the club, there was almost nothing to see. Websites used file photos of the Florida resort since there were no dramatic shots of the search.”
It’s true that the public didn’t find out until late January about the FBI’s November search of Biden’s former think tank office in Washington, which was conducted with the consent of Biden’s legal team. But the belated presence of journalists at Mar-a-Lago on the day of the Trump search in August is not evidence of a double standard.
And it’s worth noting that media cameras were on the scene when Biden’s beach home in Delaware was searched by the FBI in February. News outlets had set up a media “pool” to make sure any search there was recorded.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a former college and high school football coach, said, “Going into thousands of kids’ homes and talking to parents every year recruiting, half the kids in this country – I’m not talking about race, I’m just talking about – half the kids in this country have one or no parent. And it’s because of the attack on faith. People are losing faith because, for some reason, because the attack [on] God.”
Facts First: Tuberville’s claim that half of American children don’t have two parents is incorrect. Official figures from the Census Bureau show that, in 2021, about 70% of US children under the age of 18 lived with two parents and about 65% lived with two married parents.
About 22% of children lived with only a mother, about 5% with only a father, and about 3% with no parent. But the Census Bureau has explained that even children who are listed as living with only one parent may have a second parent; children are listed as living with only one parent if, for example, one parent is deployed overseas with the military or if their divorced parents share custody of them.
It is true that the percentage of US children living in households with two parents has been declining for decades. Still, Tuberville’s statistic significantly exaggerated the current situation. His spokesperson told CNN on Thursday that the senator was speaking “anecdotally” from his personal experience meeting with families as a football coach.
Tuberville claimed that today’s children are being “indoctrinated” in schools by “woke” ideology and critical race theory. He then said, “We don’t teach reading, writing and arithmetic anymore. You know, half the kids in this country, when they graduate – think about this: half the kids in this country, when they graduate, can’t read their diploma.”
Facts First: This is false. While many Americans do struggle with reading, there is no basis for the claim that “half” of high school graduates can’t read a basic document like a diploma. “Mr. Tuberville does not know what he’s talking about at all,” said Patricia Edwards, a Michigan State University professor of language and literacy who is a past president of the International Literacy Association and the Literacy Research Association. Edwards said there is “no evidence” to support Tuberville’s claim. She also said that people who can’t read at all are highly unlikely to finish high school and that “sometimes politicians embellish information.”
Tuberville could have accurately said that a significant number of American teenagers and adults have reading trouble, though there is no apparent basis for connecting these struggles with supposed “woke” indoctrination. The organization ProLiteracy pointed CNN to 2017 data that found 23% of Americans age 16 to 65 have “low” literacy skills in English. That’s not “half,” as ProLiteracy pointed out, and it includes people who didn’t graduate from high school and people who are able to read basic text but struggle with more complex literacy tasks.
The Tuberville spokesperson said the senator was speaking informally after having been briefed on other statistics about Americans’ struggles with reading, like a report that half of adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.
Rep. Jim Jordan claimed of Biden: “The president of the United States stood in front of Independence Hall, called half the country fascists.”
Facts First: This is not true. Biden did not denounce even close to “half the country” in this 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He made clear that he was speaking about a minority of Republicans.
In the speech, in which he never used the word “fascists,” Biden warned that “MAGA Republicans” like Trump are “extreme,” “do not respect the Constitution” and “do not believe in the rule of law.” But he also emphasized that “not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.” In other words, he made clear that he was talking about far less than half of Americans.
Trump earned fewer than 75 million votes in 2020 in a country of more than 258 million adults, so even a hypothetical criticism of every single Trump voter would not amount to criticism of “half the country.”
Rep. Scott Perry claimed that “average citizens need to just at some point be willing to acknowledge and accept that every single facet of the federal government is weaponized against every single one of us.” Perry said moments later, “The government doesn’t have the right to tell you that you can’t buy a gas stove but that you must buy an electric vehicle.”
Facts First: This is nonsense. The federal government has not told people that they can’t buy a gas stove or must buy an electric vehicle.
The Biden administration has tried to encourage and incentivize the adoption of electric vehicles, but it has not tried to forbid the manufacture or purchase of traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines. Biden has set a goal of electric vehicles making up half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030.
There was a January controversy about a Biden appointee to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., saying that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and that “any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the commission as a whole has not shown support for a ban, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a January press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”
Rep. Ralph Norman claimed that Biden had just laughed at a mother who lost two sons to fentanyl.
“I don’t know whether y’all saw, I just saw it this morning: Biden laughing at the mother who had two sons – to die, and he’s basically laughing and saying the fentanyl came from the previous administration. Who cares where it came from? The fact is it’s here,” Norman said.
Kiessling has demanded an apology from Biden. She is entitled to her criticism of Biden’s remarks and his chuckle – but the video clearly shows Norman was wrong when he claimed Biden was “laughing at the mother.”
Rep. Kat Cammack told a story about the first hearing of the new Republican-led House select subcommittee on the supposed “weaponization” of the federal government. Cammack claimed she had asked a Democratic witness at this February hearing about his “incredibly vitriolic” Twitter feed in which, she claimed, he not only repeatedly criticized Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh but even went “so far as to encourage people to harass this Supreme Court justice.”
Facts First: This story is false. The witness Cammack questioned in this February exchange at the subcommittee, former Obama administration deputy assistant attorney general Elliot Williams, did not encourage people to harass Kavanaugh. In fact, it’s not even true that Cammack accused him at the February hearing of having encouraged people to harass Kavanaugh. Rather, at the hearing, she merely claimed that Williams had tweeted numerous critical tweets about Kavanaugh but had been “unusually quiet” on Twitter after an alleged assassination attempt against the justice. Clearly, not tweeting about the incident is not the same thing as encouraging harassment.
Williams, now a CNN legal analyst (he appeared at the subcommittee hearing in his personal capacity), said in a Thursday email that he had “no idea” what Cammack was looking at on his innocuous Twitter feed. He said: “I used to prosecute violent crimes, and clerked for two federal judges. Any suggestion that I’ve ever encouraged harassment of anyone – and particularly any official of the United States – is insulting and not based in reality.”
Cammack’s spokesperson responded helpfully on Thursday to CNN’s initial queries about the story Cammack told at CPAC, explaining that she was referring to her February exchange with Williams. But the spokesperson stopped responding after CNN asked if Cammack was accurately describing this exchange with Williams and if they had any evidence of Williams actually having encouraged the harassment of Kavanaugh.
Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana boasted about the state of the country “when Republicans were in charge.” Among other claims about Trump’s tenure, he said that “in four years,” Republicans “delivered 3.5% unemployment” and “created 8 million new jobs.”
Facts First: This is inaccurate in two ways. First, the economic numbers for the full “four years” of Trump’s tenure are much worse than these numbers Kennedy cited; Kennedy was actually referring to Trump’s first three years while ignoring the fourth, which was marred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Second, there weren’t “8 million new jobs” created even in Trump’s first three years.
Kennedy could have correctly said there was a 3.5% unemployment rate after three years of the Trump administration, but not after four. The unemployment rate skyrocketed early in Trump’s fourth year, on account of the pandemic, before coming down again, and it was 6.3% when Trump left office in early 2021. (It fell to 3.4% this January under Biden, better than in any month under Trump.)
And while the economy added about 6.7 million jobs under Trump before the pandemic-related crash of March and April 2020, that’s not the “8 million jobs” Kennedy claimed – and the economy ended up shedding millions of jobs in Trump’s fourth year. Over the full four years of Trump’s tenure, the economy netted a loss of about 2.7 million jobs.
Lara Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and an adviser to his 2020 campaign, claimed that the last time a CPAC crowd was gathered at this venue in Maryland, in February 2020, “We had the lowest unemployment in American history.” After making other boasts about Donald Trump’s presidency, she said, “But how quickly it all changed.” She added, “Under Joe Biden, America is crumbling.”
Facts First: Lara Trump’s claim about February 2020 having “the lowest unemployment in American history” is false. The unemployment rate was 3.5% at the time – tied for the lowest since 1969, but not the all-time lowest on record, which was 2.5% in 1953. And while Lara Trump didn’t make an explicit claim about unemployment under Biden, it’s not true that things are worse today on this measure; again, the most recent unemployment rate, 3.4% for January 2023, is better than the rate at the time of CPAC’s 2020 conference or at any other time during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Multiple speakers at CPAC decried the high number of fentanyl overdose deaths. But some of the speakers inflated that number while attacking Biden’s immigration policy.
Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, claimed that “in the last 12 months in America, deaths by fentanyl poisoning totaled 110,000 Americans.” He blamed “Biden’s open border” for these deaths.
Rep. Scott Perry claimed: “Meanwhile over on this side of the border, where there isn’t anybody, they’re running this fentanyl in; it’s killing 100,000 Americans – over 100,000 Americans – a year.”
Facts First: It’s not true that there are more than 100,000 fentanyl deaths per year. That is the total number of deaths from all drug overdoses in the US; there were 106,699 such deaths in 2021. But the number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, primarily fentanyl, is smaller – 70,601 in 2021.
Fentanyl-related overdoses are clearly a major problem for the country and by far the biggest single contributor to the broader overdose problem. Nonetheless, claims of “110,000” and “over 100,000” fentanyl deaths per year are significant exaggerations. And while the number of overdose deaths and fentanyl-related deaths increased under Biden in 2021, it was also troubling under Trump in 2020 – 91,799 total overdose deaths and 56,516 for synthetic opioids other than methadone.
It’s also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled in by US citizens through legal ports of entry rather than by migrants sneaking past other parts of the border. Contrary to frequent Republican claims, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized thousands of pounds of fentanyl under Biden.
Editor’s Note: Are you ready to break up with your phone? The Chasing Life podcast with Dr. Sanjay Gupta dives into the science behind how technology is impacting our brains. Listen now.
CNN
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TikTok announced Wednesday that every user under 18 will soon have their accounts default to a one-hour daily screen time limit, in one of the most aggressive moves yet by a social media company to prevent teens from endlessly scrolling.
Teenage TikTok users will be able to turn off this new default setting, which will roll out in the coming weeks. But the feature change could bolster the digital well-being of younger users by requiring them to opt out of stricter screen time limits rather than clearing the higher bar of opting in to them.
If the 60-minute limit is reached, users will be prompted to enter a passcode — requiring them to make an active decision to extend their time spent swiping through videos on the app.
The move comes after TikTok and other social media platforms have faced years of scrutiny over their impact on young users, including their potential to lead teens down harmful rabbit holes. TikTok is also facing mounting pressure from Washington over security concerns from its ties to China through parent company Bytedance, including renewed discussion of a possible US ban of the short-form video app.
Cormac Keenan, TikTok’s head of trust and safety, said the company consulted researchers and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital when deciding the time limits to set for teen users.
“While there’s no collectively-endorsed position on how much screen time is ‘too much’, or even the impact of screen time more broadly, we recognize that teens typically require extra support as they start to explore the online world independently,” Keenan wrote in a blog post.
Keenan added that if a teen decides to turn off this new default limit and spends more than 100 minutes on TikTok a day, they will be prompted to set a daily screen time limit for themselves. “In our first month of testing, this approach increased the use of our screen time management tools by 234%,” Keenan wrote.
Keenan also announced some updates to the app’s Family Pairing feature, which allows a parent or caregiver to link their TikTok account to their teen’s and set controls. Parents will be able to filter videos with words or hashtags they don’t want to appear in their teen’s feed, set a custom daily screen time limit for their teen, and set a custom schedule to mute TikTok notifications sent to their teen.
Other platforms including Instagram and Snapchat have similarly rolled out additional parental controls and features that encourage teens to take a break and set boundaries.
Foreign ministers from the world’s biggest economies convened in New Delhi Thursday in what was seen as a grand test for Indian diplomacy, which ultimately didn’t succeed in reaching a consensus because of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
In the second high-level ministerial meeting under India’s Group of 20 (G20) presidency this year, foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, methis American, Chinese and Russian counterparts, hoping to find enough common ground to deliver a joint statement at the end of the summit.
But amid festering divisions over Moscow’s war, New Delhi was unable to convince the leaders to put their differences aside, with Jaishankar admitting the conflict had struggled to unite the group.
India, the world’s largest democracy with a population of more than 1.3 billion, has been keen to position itself as a leader of emerging and developing nations – often referred to as the Global South – at a time when soaring food and energy prices as a result of the war are hammering consumers already grappling with rising costs and inflation.
Those sentiments were front and center during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s opening remarks earlier Thursday, when he spoke of multiples crises the world faces, with less wealthy nations hit especially hard.
“The experience of the last few years, the financial crisis, climate change, the pandemic, terrorism and wars clearly shows that global governance has failed,” Modi said.
“We must also admit that the tragic consequences of this failure are being faced most over by the developing countries,” who he says are most affected by global warming “caused by richer countries”.
Eluding to the war in Ukraine, Modi acknowledged the conflict was causing “deep global divisions.” But he encouraged the foreign ministers to put differences aside during their meeting Thursday.
“We should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to come in the way of those we can,” he said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the summit, according to a State Department official traveling with Blinken.
Blinken and Lavrov spoke for roughly 10 minutes, the same official said.
Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed to CNN that the meeting took place but played down its significance.
“Blinken asked for contact with Lavrov. On the go, as part of the second session of the twenty, Sergey Viktorovich (Lavrov) talked. There were no negotiations, meetings, etc,” she said.
Deep disagreements over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine played out in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru last month as well, when G20 finance chiefs failed to agree on a statement after their meeting.
Both Russia and China declined to sign the joint statement, which criticized Moscow’s invasion. That left India to issue a “chair’s summary and outcome document” in which it summed up the two days of talks and acknowledged disagreements.
Analysts say that throughout the war New Delhi has deftly balanced its ties to Russia and the West, with Modi emerging as a leader who has been courted by all sides.
But as the war enters its second year, and tensions continue to rise, pressure could mount on countries, including India, to take a firmer stand against Russia – putting Modi’s statecraft to the test.
Arguably India’s most celebrated event of the year, the G20 summit has been heavily promoted domestically, with sprawling billboards featuring Modi’s face plastered across the country. Roads have been cleaned and buildings freshly painted ahead of the dignitaries’ visit.
Taking place in the “mother of democracies” under Modi’s leadership, his political allies have been keen to push his international credentials, portraying him as a key player in the global order.
Last year’s G20 leaders’ summit in Bali, Indonesia, issued a joint declaration that echoed what Modi had told Russian President Vladimir Putin weeks earlier on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan.
“Today’s era must not be of war,” it said, prompting media and officials in India to claim India had played a vital role in bridging differences between an isolated Russia and the United States and its allies.
India, analysts say, prides itself on its ability to balance relations. The country, like China, has refused to condemn Moscow’s brutal assault on Ukraine in various United Nations resolutions. Rather than cutting economic ties with the Kremlin, India has undermined Western sanctions by increasing its purchases of Russian oil, coal and fertilizer.
But unlike China, India has grown closer to the West – particularly the US – despite ties with Russia.
New Delhi’s ties with Moscow date back to the Cold War, and the country remains heavily reliant on the Kremlin for military equipment – a vital link given India’s ongoing tensions with China at its shared Himalayan border.
The US and India have taken steps in recent months to strengthen their defense partnership, as the two sides attempt to counter the rise of an increasingly assertive China.
Daniel Markey, senior adviser, South Asia, for the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), said while India’s leaders “would like to facilitate an end to this conflict that preserves New Delhi’s relations with both Washington and Moscow and ends the disruption of the global economy,” India did not have “any particular leverage” with Russia or Ukraine that would make a settlement likely.
“I believe that other world leaders are equally interested in playing a peace-making diplomatic role. So when and if Putin wishes to come to the table to negotiate, he will have no shortage of diplomats hoping to help,” he said.
Still, as Putin’s aggression continues to throw the global economy into chaos, India has signaled an intention to raise the many concerns faced by the global South, including climate challenges and food and energy security, according to Modi’s opening speech earlier Thursday.
“The world looks upon the G20 to ease the challenges of growth, development, economic resilience, disaster resilience, financial stability, transnational crime, corruption, terrorism, and food and energy security,” Modi said.
While Modi’s government appears keen to prioritize domestic challenges, experts say these issues could be sidelined by the tensions between the US, Russia and China, which have increased recently over concerns from Washington that Beijing is considering sending lethal aid to the Kremlin’s struggling war effort.
Speaking to reporters last week, Ramin Toloui, the US assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, said while Secretary of State Antony Blinken would highlight its efforts to address food and energy security issues, he would also “underscore the damage that Russia’s war of aggression has caused.”
Blinken will “encourage all G20 partners to redouble their calls for a just, peaceful, and lasting end to the Kremlin’s war consistent with UN Charter principles,” Toloui said.
At the same time, Russia in a statement Wednesday accused the US and the European Union of “terrorism,” stating it was “set to clearly state Russia’s assessments” of the current food and energy crisis.
“We will draw attention to the destructive barriers that the West is multiplying exponentially to block the export of goods that are of critical importance to the global economy, including energy sources and agricultural products,” Russia said, hinting at the difficulties New Delhi might face during the meeting.
India has “worked very hard not to be boxed into one side or the other,” Markey said. The country could not “afford to alienate Russia or the US and Modi doesn’t want discussion of the war to force any difficult decisions or to distract from other issues, like green, sustainable economic development,” he added.
But with plummeting ties between Washington and Beijing after the US military shot down what it says was a Chinese spy balloon that flew over American territory, New Delhi will have to carefully drive difficult negotiations between conflicting viewpoints.
China maintains the balloon, which US forces downed in February, was a civilian research aircraft accidentally blown off course, and the fallout led Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing.
As differences played out during the ministerial meeting Thursday, analysts say while India will be disappointed at the outcome, they were in a very difficult position to begin with.
“It will be a disappointment for Modi, but not one that cannot be managed,” Markey said. “Nor would it be India’s fault, as it would primarily be a reflection of the underlying differences over which Modi has very little control.”
One of China’s richest women has fully taken over Country Garden, a top real estate developer, after her father resigned, which added to a string of prominent entrepreneurs retreating from their posts during a historic downturn in the property market.
Yang Huiyan succeeded her father Yang Guoqiang as chairman of the company that he founded, according to a Wednesday filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange, which said the appointment took effect the same day.
Yang, 68, also known as Yeung Kwok Keung in Cantonese, had tendered his resignation from the position of chairman “due to age,” the statement said.
The elder Yang was a farmer and construction worker before he founded Country Garden in 1992. In little more than a decade, he grew the firm into one of the largest real estate developers in the country.
The company boasted a record-setting $1.7 billion IPO in Hong Kong in 2007. Last year, Country Garden was China’s No 1 developer by sales, which reached $67 billion.
The younger Yang has served as a co-chairman of the company since 2018 and jointly managed the day-to-day operations with her father.
Yang, 41, had a net worth of $9.2 billion as of Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That placed her as China’s second richest woman, behind only Wu Yajun, the 59-year-old founder of Longfor Properties, who has a fortune of $9.7 billion.
Yang Huiyan’s wealth comes mainly from her majority stake in Country Garden, which was largely transferred to her by her father in 2005, two years before the company’s IPO.
Yang’s father resigned at a time when China’s property market is mired in a historic downturn.
The real estate sector has been lurching from one crisis to another since 2020, when Beijing started cracking down on excessive borrowing by developers to rein in their high debt. A debt crisis hit the industry after Evergrande, the second largest property developer in China, suffered a severe cash crunch and defaulted on its debt in late 2021.
Since then, a number of cash-strapped developers have sought protection from creditors.
Country Garden’s stock price has lost more than half of its value in the past year.
Home sales have plummeted alongside buyer confidence. Sentiment cooled even further last year after thousands of home buyers refused to continue paying mortgages on unfinished properties. The crash in the real estate market has dealt a blow to the finances of local governments, which rely heavily on land sales revenue.
Authorities have shifted policy to rescue the industry, including easing restrictions on borrowing for developers and rolling out loans. But the recovery seems to be slow.
Yang Guoqiang’s resignation is the latest in a string of departures by prominent property entrepreneurs.
In November, Zhang Lei, founder and chairman of Modern Land, resigned from his positions at the company. Modern Land is a major developer based in Beijing building energy-saving homes throughout the country.
In October, Wu Yajun, founder and chairwoman of Longfor Properties, stepped down due to health and age reasons, the company said.
In September, Pan Shiyi and his wife Zhang Xin quit their roles as chairman and CEO of Soho China, a Beijing-based developer.
Authorities say an hourslong standoff at a Missouri home that followed the shooting of three officers is over and a woman found in the house was taken into custody.
A deceased man was also found in the home, according to state authorities.
The three Kansas City, Missouri, police officers were hospitalized after being shot while executing a search warrant Tuesday night, Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said.
Authorities have not said who fired the shots that injured the officers.
The officers’ injuries were not life-threatening and they were able to talk from their hospital beds, Graves said.
“That’s the best situation under these circumstances that I could hope for,” the chief said. “That our officers are alert, they’re awake and they’re talking.”
The officers were part of a tactical response team executing the warrant at a home shortly after 9:30 p.m. local time, Graves said. Graves did not provide details about the investigation or the warrant.
Police knocked and identified themselves and were met with gunfire when they tried to breach the door, she said.
Officers returned fire, but it is unclear how many shots they fired or if they hit the gunman or anyone else in the home, the chief said.
What followed was a standoff around the home that lasted for hours and involved the help of at least one other Missouri police department as well as the state’s highway patrol.
SWAT members from the Missouri State Highway Patrol arrived on scene early Wednesday morning, the agency said on Twitter.
The highway patrol’s SWAT team, with help from FBI SWAT members, secured the house Wednesday evening, it said.
“A male was found deceased & a female was located alive with no injuries. She is in police custody,” the highway patrol said.
Authorities have not said how the man died and it was unclear as of Wednesday night who fired at the three Kansas City officers.
Investigators were continuing to process the scene Wednesday night and the probe is ongoing.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a tweet late Tuesday night he was praying for the officers injured.
“We’ve been reminded too much lately in Kansas City how dangerous police work can be,” he said. “I am praying for a full recovery for our three officers injured this evening and that everyone on duty gets home to their families safely.”
In 2022, US women on average earned about 82 cents for every dollar a man earned, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers.
That’s a big leap from the 65 cents that women were earning in 1982. But it has barely moved from the 80 cents they were earning in 2002.
“Higher education, a shift to higher-paying occupations and more labor market experience have helped women narrow the gender pay gap since 1982,” the Pew analysis noted. “But even as women have continued to outpace men in educational attainment, the pay gap has been stuck in a holding pattern since 2002, ranging from 80 to 85 cents to the dollar.”
Before getting to potential reasons why the pay gap hasn’t narrowed for two decades — let alone disappeared — it’s worth noting that the top-line average doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s been going on for women in different cohorts.
Take age: Women between the ages of 25 and 34 are much closer to achieving pay parity with men than they are likely to be when they get older.
Since 2007, younger women have been earning about 90 cents on the dollar, according to Pew: “But even as pay parity might appear in reach for women at the start of their careers, the wage gap tends to increase as they age.”
Having children is a factor, Pew found. For example, parenthood leads some women to put their careers on hold, or put in a shorter workweek. For employed fathers between the ages 35 and 44, having children at home is a time that often coincides with receiving higher pay even though the pay of employed mothers that same age is unaffected.
“In 2022, mothers ages 25 to 34 earned 85% as much as fathers that age, but women without children at home earned 97% as much as fathers. In contrast, employed women ages 35 to 44 — with or without children — both earned about 80% as much as fathers,” the report said.
Or take race and ethnicity: Pew found that Black women last year earned just 70% as much as White men. Hispanic women earned 65% as much. For White women, the gap was less, at 83%. Asian women were closest to parity, at 93%.
“To some extent, the gender wage gap varies by race and ethnicity because of differences in education, experience, occupation and other factors that drive the gender wage gap for women overall,” the Pew analysis noted.
“But researchers have uncovered new evidence of hiring discrimination against various racial and ethnic groups, along with discrimination against other groups, such as LGBTQ and disabled workers,” the report continued. “Discrimination in hiring may feed into differences in earnings by shutting out workers from opportunities,”
Lastly, consider occupation: Women are still overrepresented in lower-paying occupations such as personal care and service jobs; and underrepresented in higher-paying ones, like managerial and STEM jobs.
Regardless, the gender pay gap is typically narrowest when you pick any single occupation and control for measurable factors between men and women like education, tenure and hours worked.
“But it never goes away,” said Rakesh Kochhar, a Pew senior researcher.
The persistence of a gap over the past 20 years, even when comparing apples to apples, suggests there are other factors at play.
These can include potential discrimination. When Pew asked Americans in October what factors they believed played a role in the gender wage gap, half indicated a major reason is that employers treat women differently. Women were much more likely than men (61% vs 37%) to cite this as a major reason.
Another factor that may help explain the stickiness of the pay gap is that the wage premium for those with college degrees has grown smaller. So while more employed women (48%) now have at least a bachelor’s degree than men (41%), it is worth less.
Individual choices such as taking periods away from the workforce to care for children also continue to play a role. Those choices may be borne of cultural norms, societal issues such as a lack of affordable child care, or personal preference.
Narrowing the gender pay gap from here may be tough sledding.
“More sustained progress in closing the pay gap may depend on deeper changes in societal and cultural norms and in workplace flexibility that affect how men and women balance their careers and family lives,” Pew researchers suggested.
And even then, progress may be slower than desired, since, as they noted, “even in countries that have taken the lead in implementing family-friendly policies, such as Denmark, parenthood continues to drive a significant wedge in the earnings of men and women.”
Tracie Yorke grew concerned about the quality of education her son was receiving after his school moved to remote learning during the pandemic in 2020.
Yorke, of Hyattsville, Maryland, described her fourth grader’s Zoom classes as chaotic – it looked as if teachers had not been trained in virtual instruction, she said.
That summer, the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a national racial reckoning. With only one Black teacher at the school and none past the fourth grade, Yorke said her son Tyce, who is now 13 years old, had no one he could relate to.
“There was a lot of mayhem,” said Yorke. “I really realized, ‘I don’t think this environment is healthy for my child.’”
Yorke decided to homeschool Tyce, and has done so for the last three years. She has put together a curriculum that meets his specific needs and can teach him about race and African American history without the risk of politicians intervening.
While homeschooling isn’t new, advocates say a growing number of Black parents are educating their children at home so they can exercise more control over what they are taught and how they are treated. Many made the switch to homeschooling during the pandemic, but interest is growing as national debates over teaching systemic racism and Black history in the classroom continue, advocates say.
In the last few years, lawmakers, mostly Republicans, have called on schools to remove critical race theory – a concept that legal scholars say acknowledges that racism is both systemic and institutional in American society – from their curriculums. (Educators argue that critical race theory itself is generally not included in the grade school curriculum.) There have also been widespread efforts by lawmakers, parents and school boards to ban books about race, gender and sexuality. And most recently, Florida’s Department of Education rejected an Advanced Placement African American studies course.
According to census data, the number of Black households homeschooling their children jumped from 3.3.% at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to 16.1% by the fall of that year. That jump was the largest of any racial group. Meanwhile, the proportion of homeschooled children in the US overall nearly doubled from 2.8% before the pandemic to 5.4% in the 2020-21 school year, according to the US Department of Education. The data may not present a complete count of families because every state regulates and tracks homeschooling differently.
Fields-Smith said while these issues are often researched in isolation, many Black families are having to face them all at the same time. So they are developing learning routines that fit their children’s needs and forming homeschooling co-op groups with other families to teach their children together and socialize them, Fields-Smith said.
“I conceptualize it as a form of resistance,” Fields-Smith told CNN. “Instead of accepting the status quo, families are resisting what’s happening in their schools.”
Some families say they chose to homeschool because they were living in majority White school districts and wanted to teach their children to have confidence in their Black identity. Others expressed a desire to shield their children from the nation’s polarizing racial climate.
Sherri Mehta, of Laurel, Maryland, said she first turned to homeschooling in 2020 to help her young son who wasn’t doing well with remote learning as a kindergartner.
Mehta said she was also becoming concerned about her two children facing a “cultural gap” or racism because they were not around teachers who looked like them in their school district. And she saw few Black children included in the school’s gifted program.
With homeschooling, Mehta said she and her husband can split the responsibilities of teaching different subjects, teaching the truth about Black history and slavery, and can rely on co-op groups for hands-on learning, such as woodworking.
Mehta said she doesn’t want her children to experience the same racial trauma she experienced in public school. She recalled growing up in Richmond, Virginia, and competing against sports teams with names such as the Rebels and the Confederates.
“There is a sort of innocence lost and I just think my kids are deserving of something different,” Mehta said. “They’ll face racism. It’s not going away. But having the experience they have now of being surrounded by this nurturing of their entire being, I think what they have now will help them face challenges as they get older.”
Carlos Birdsong, of Charlotte, North Carolina, said he wanted his two daughters to have “a greater sense of cultural identity” amid the political divisiveness in the country.
“We moved here from South Carolina to this area because these public schools were supposedly good,” Birdsong said. “The charter schools in our area are mostly White. The private schools are White. They are very good schools, but they may not be the best fit because they’re majority White,” he said.
Some families who homeschool are driven by their own experiences with traditional schooling or because they want to emphasize religious training in their instruction.
Aurora Bean, a mother of three from Matawan, New Jersey, began homeschooling her children four years ago because she was uncomfortable with schools discussing gender identity issues at a young age and wanted to be able to teach her children about their faith. She was also opposed to the Covid-19 vaccine requirements many schools introduced during the pandemic.
She supplements her children’s learning with coursework provided through Acellus Academy, an online K-12 private school that offers classes in Spanish, history and other subjects. Bean said she has embraced the freedom homeschooling provides, including the ability for her family to spend several months traveling the world as part of a Christian discipleship training program later this year.
“It’s so important for my kids to see beyond our nice neighborhood,” Bean said. “It’s important for them to see the other side of things, more of the world, less of the privilege.”
Many families have leaned on support groups and virtual education providers such as Outschool – which Yorke uses – to help them navigate teaching their children at home.
Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman and Fields-Smith created the group Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars in 2020 to help families who want to homeschool but don’t know where to start. Ali-Coleman, now the organization’s sole owner and managing director, said she had homeschooled her daughter, Khari, off and on for years. And Khari was later able to attend the University of San Francisco on a full scholarship, she said.
Families who homeschool come from all socioeconomic backgrounds, Ali-Coleman and Fields-Smith say.
“When I homeschooled, I was not upper-middle-class, married – although I live with my partner who is my daughter’s father – Christian or politically conservative,” Ali-Coleman told CNN.
She advises parents who want to homeschool to start with a mission statement spelling out their goals, and she holds virtual teach-ins to help families navigate challenges. Ali-Coleman said some families turn to homeschooling because institutional schoolwork isn’t challenging enough. “We’re now seeing the way people are speaking out loud about how they have a problem with the way we’re teaching history,” Ali-Coleman said.
Ali-Coleman also said homeschooling requires parents to adjust their thinking and potentially change what they do to earn money. While homeschooling, she worked jobs that offered her flexibility, she said.
“This gig economy that is now more formalized is something homeschooling parents have been doing for ages,” she said. “You have to think ‘what are the unique needs of your family and what are the support systems you need to create?’ I never want to give the impression that it’s easy. It’s always based on what the unique needs of the family are. Adjustments are definitely required and that’s something that you need to go in knowing.”
Back in Maryland, the Yorkes explore Black history all year as part of Tyce’s curriculum. Last year, he studied Amharic, an Ethiopian language not offered in most schools and took a course on “Blacks in Comics” through a local Black homeschool co-op. This year, he took a class on astronomy that highlighted African and Black contributions to the field.
“I’ve always had concerns about educating a young Black boy, with the perceptions and stereotypes and coming off of George Floyd,” Yorke said. “I want to be able to discuss race in the classroom.”
Elon Musk has reclaimed the title of the richest person in the world, per Bloomberg’s tally.
The Tesla CEO was unseated from the top spot by Bernard Arnault, CEO of French luxury brand LVMH
(LVMHF), in December of last year, making Musk No. 2 on the list for more than two months. As of Monday, however, Bloomberg reports that a rally in Tesla stock has lifted Musk back to the top of its real-time Billionaires Index.
Musk’s net worth was some $187.1 billion as of Monday after markets closed, according to Bloomberg, just topping the $185.3 billion fortune of Arnault.
While Tesla
(TSLA) stock declined steeply last year amid Musk’s problem-plagued acquisition of Twitter and a broader market downturn in tech, shares for the electric vehicle maker have since surged in 2023.
Musk might hold the current title of the richest person in the world, but he also holds a record for the biggest fortune ever lost by anyone in history. Late last year, Musk became the first person ever to lose $200 billion in wealth — after his net worth slid from some $340 billion in Nov. 2021 to $137 billion in Dec. 2022.
Editor’s Note: Onnie Willis Rogers is a former collegiate gymnastics champion at UCLA and a professor of psychology at Northwestern University whose research focuses on human development, diversity and equity and education. The opinions expressed here are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.
CNN
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I’m one of just five Black women in history to win the NCAA individual all-around title in gymnastics. It was a tremendous accomplishment which, when I won it two decades ago, left me elated.
But it was a particular kind of joy, tinged with the frustration often felt by the Black athlete who excels in a sport where they are one of only a very few.
I grew up in the sport in the 1980s. I took my first gymnastics class at the age of 3 and finished my final competition at the age of 22. Throughout all of my years training in the sport, I was often the lone brown face in a gym filled with tumbling, somersaulting, hand-standing kids.
Before accepting a full ride sports scholarship to UCLA, I was an elite gymnast, a member of the National Team for USA Gymnastics (USAG). As a Black gymnast growing up, being one of few was normal. And as I progressed up the ranks, the sport seemed only to get whiter.
Even during my four years at UCLA, an urban school with a sizable Black population, I was the only Black female gymnast on my team. In 2001, the year I won my NCAA title, I could probably count the other Black women gymnasts at top-ranked schools we competed against on one hand.
But I’ve noticed something different about gymnasts today, and perhaps you have, as well. There are more Black and brown athletes in the sport than ever before. And they are turning out to be a force to be reckoned with.
This year marks 20 years since my last gymnastics competition, and a lot has changed in the sport — but perhaps nothing so much as the dramatic increase in racial and ethnic diversity. The change has been nothing short of astonishing — especially at last summer’s stunning National Championships, when African American women swept the podium.
I’d been involved in gymnastics my entire life, and I never saw it coming. The diversity — and the excellence — exhibited by the top-performing women of color in the sport has been something to behold.
There’s Simone Biles who, of course, needs no introduction. She’s a global icon who has earned seven Olympic medals and 25 world championship medals — more than anyone else in gymnastics — and is regarded as the GOAT in our sport. Some have even argued that she is the greatest athlete of all time, period. Before Biles, there was Gabby Douglas, who was crowned the 2012 Olympic all-around champion, becoming the first Black gymnast to capture that title.
To be honest, it’s hard to name all the women of color who have made it to the top ranks of the sport since I stopped competing. Laurie Hernandez, who is Puerto Rican, was the youngest gymnast to earn gold in Rio 2016. Jordan Chiles helped Team USA secure the gold at last year’s world championships. And there’s Sunisa Lee, a Hmong American who became the first Asian American to win the Olympic all-around title. The list goes on and on.
The standouts of color at the collegiate level have been no less impressive. Florida Gator Trinity Thomas holds a breathtaking record of perfection. UCLA’s Chae Campbell, Chiles and freshman standout Selena Harris continue to grab headlines in our sport, as does Jordan Rucker of the University of Utah and Haleigh Bryant of Louisiana State University — and, astonishingly, too many others to name.
These women of color are setting new records and breaking the internet with performances of exceptional style and athleticism. I can’t think of another major sport that has seen its ranks change so dramatically. Swimming? Golf? Tennis? No, not really. These predominantly White sports have seen a relative few breakthrough athletes of color, but overall the complexion of the sports haven’t changed much.
Over the years, structural racism has powerfully shaped access, opportunity and identity — all of which help explain why gymnastics was so White in the first place. The long arm of economic inequality touches every facet of life, including sport.
Sports where Black people have been represented have traditionally been those accessible through schools, such as football, basketball and track and field. Gymnastics is a very expensive sport, costing thousands of dollars and requiring long, intense training hours. High-quality instruction is only accessible in private clubs and at elite training facilities that are few and far between. Growing up, my family fundraised furiously, did extra jobs at my gymnastics club, and housed visiting gymnasts to offset the unreachable high cost of tuition.
There is no magic that has “created” gymnasts of color in the past decade. There have always been strong, talented Black and brown girls capable of excelling in the sport. Many of the first Black women in the sport, like Diane Dunham and Wendy Hilliard, simply were not acknowledged because our society has for so long refused to value or validate Black women. Instead, the sport favored a Nadia Comaneci-style waif, thin and childlike. That doubtless kept a lot of women who looked like me on the sidelines. Elite gymnastics did not always see them or make space for them.
Luckily for me, there were always exceptions, and these women became my inspirations. Betty Okino and Dominique Dawes were the trailblazers in my day. I watched them represent Team USA with their brown bodies and Black girl hair and I knew it was a little more possible for me.
I vividly remember being 16 years old laying belly down on the green shag carpet in my living room in Tacoma, Washington, captivated as UCLA — and even more significantly for me, Stella Umeh — clinched its first-ever NCAA Title.
On the floor, Umeh was Black, full-bodied and fierce; her hair was a close shave; the music for her floor routine was rhythmic and pulsating. She was unlike any gymnast I had ever seen. I attended UCLA after Umeh had graduated, but walked confidently and fully in her footsteps, not simply because she too was a Black woman, but because she remade the mold.
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the NCAA Metroplex Challenge gymnastics competition with my 11-year-old daughter and her gymnastics team. There were multiple Black gymnasts competing for every school on the floor.
As a developmental psychologist who studies youth identity development, I couldn’t ignore the significance of the moment. I couldn’t fail to register the awe in their eyes as they watched their possible future selves from their front row seats, a real image of who they may become. In short, identity and representation matter. How many Black girls even enter the sport in the future will be influenced by what they see as attainable or impossible.
Meanwhile, the breakthroughs in gymnastics just keep coming: This year, Fisk University is the first HBCU to have an NCAA gymnastics team — an entire team of Black and brown girls doing gymnastics. It’s radical. It’s transformative. And as Black History Month draws to a close, it’s a reminder of what is possible.
Meta is taking steps to crack down on the spread of intimate images of teenagers on Facebook and Instagram.
A new tool, called Take It Down, takes aim at a practice commonly referred to as “revenge porn,” where someone posts an explicit picture of an individual without their consent to publicly embarrass or cause them distress. The practice has skyrocketed in the last few years on social media, particularly among young boys.
Take It Down, which is operated and run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, will allow minors for the first time to anonymously attach a hash – or digital fingerprint – to intimate images or videos directly from their own devices, without having to upload them to the new platform. To create a hash of an explicit image, a teen can visit the website TakeItDown.NCMEC.org to install software onto their device. The anonymized number, not the image, will then be stored in a database linked to Meta so that if the photo is ever posted to Facebook or Instagram, it will be matched against the original, reviewed and potentially removed.
“This issue has been incredibly important to Meta for a very, very long time because the damage done is quite severe in the context of teens or adults,” said Antigone Davis, Meta’s global safety director. “It can do damage to their reputation and familial relationships, and puts them in a very vulnerable position. It’s important that we find tools like this to help them regain control of what can be a very difficult and devastating situation.”
The tool works for any image shared across Facebook and Instagram, including Messenger and direct messages, as long as the pictures are unencrypted.
People under 18 years old can use Take It Down, and parents or trusted adults can also use the platform on behalf of a young person. The effort is fully funded by Meta and builds off a similar platform it launched in 2021 alongside more than 70 NGOs, called StopNCII, to prevent revenge porn among adults.
Since 2016, NCMEC’s cyber tip line has received more than 250,000 reports of online enticement, including sextortion, and the number of those reports more than doubled between 2019 and 2019. In the last year, 79% of the offenders were seeking money to keep photos offline, according to the nonprofit. Many of these cases played out on social media.
Meta’s efforts come nearly a year and a half after Davis was grilled by Senators about the impact its apps have on younger users, after an explosive report indicated the company was aware that Facebook-owned Instagram could have a “toxic” effect on teen girls. Although the company has rolled out a handful of new tools and protections since then, some experts say it has taken too long and more needs to be done.
Meanwhile, President Biden demanded in his latest State of the Union address more transparency about tech companies’ algorithms and how they impacttheir young users’ mental health.
In response, Davis told CNN that Meta “welcomes efforts to introduce standards for the industry on how to ensure that children can safely navigate and enjoy all that online services have to offer.”
In the meantime, she said the company continues to double down on efforts to help protect its young users, particularly when it comes to keeping explicit photos off its site.
“Sextortion is one of the biggest growing crimes we see at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” said Gavin Portnoy, vice president of communications and branding at NCMEC. “We’re calling it the hidden pandemic, and nobody is really talking about it.”
Portnoy said there’s also been an uptick in youth dying by suicide as a result of sextortion. “That is the driving force behind creating Take It Down, along with our partners,” he said. “It really gives survivors an opportunity to say, look, I’m not going to let you do this to me. I have the power over my images and my videos.”
In addition to Meta’s platforms, OnlyFans and Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek are also adding this technology into their services.
But limitations do exist. To get around the hashing technology, people can alter the original images, such as by cropping, adding emojis or doctoringthem. Some changes, such as adding a filter to make the photo sepia or black and white, will still be flagged by the system. Meta recommends teens who have multiple copies of the image or edited versions make a hash for each one.
“There’s no one panacea for the issue of sextortion or the issue of the non-consensual sharing of intimate images,” Davis said. “It really does take a holistic approach.”
The company has rolled out a series of updates to help teens have an age-appropriate experience on its platforms, such as adding new supervision tools for parents, an age-verification technology and defaulting teens into the most private settings on Facebook and Instagram.
This is not the first time a major tech company has poured resources into cracking down on explicit imagery of minors. In 2022, Apple abandoned its plans to launch a controversial tool that would check iPhones, iPads and iCloud photos for child sexual abuse material following backlash from critics who decried the feature’s potential privacy implications.
“Children can be protected without companies combing through personal data, and we will continue working with governments, child advocates, and other companies to help protect young people, preserve their right to privacy, and make the internet a safer place for children and for us all,” the company said in a statement provided to Wired at the time.
Davis did not comment on whether it’s expecting criticism for Meta’s approach, but noted “there were significant differences between the tool that Apple launched and the tool that NCMEC is launching today.” She emphasized Meta will not be checking for images on users phones.
“I do welcome any member of the industry trying to invest in efforts to prevent this kind of terrible crime from happening on their apps,” she added.
