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  • US Energy Department assesses Covid-19 likely resulted from lab leak, furthering US intel divide over virus origin | CNN Politics

    US Energy Department assesses Covid-19 likely resulted from lab leak, furthering US intel divide over virus origin | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The US Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely came from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report.

    Two sources said that the Department of Energy assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

    Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.

    The latest assessment further adds to the divide in the US government over whether the Covid-19 pandemic began in China in 2019 as the result of a lab leak or whether it emerged naturally. The various intelligence agencies have been split on the matter for years. In 2021, the intelligence community declassified a report that showed four agencies in the intelligence community had assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild, while one assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident.

    Three other intelligence community elements were unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, the report said.

    The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new assessment from the Department of Energy. A senior US intelligence official told the Journal that the update to the intelligence assessment was conducted in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and in consultation with experts outside government.

    A Department of Energy spokesperson told CNN in a statement: “The Department of Energy continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

    The Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is one of 18 government agencies that make up the intelligence community, which are under the umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

    The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pushing for further investigation into the lab leak theory, while accusing the Biden administration of playing down its possibility.

    A spokesperson for House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement that the committee was “reviewing the classified information provided” by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a letter requesting information earlier this month.

    One of the sources said that the new assessment from the Department of Energy is similar to information from a House Republican Intelligence Committee report released last year on the origins of the virus.

    National security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the intelligence community remains divided on the matter, while noting that President Joe Biden has put resources into getting to the bottom of the origin question.

    “Right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question,” Sullivan told CNN’s Dana Bash. “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”

    Sullivan said Biden had directed the national laboratories, which are part of the Department of Energy, to be brought into the assessment.

    In May 2020, researchers at the government-backed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory issued a classified report that found it was possible that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, which came at a time when that line of inquiry was considered taboo.

    The US began exploring the possibility that Covid-19 spread in a laboratory as early as April 2020, though the intelligence community has noted repeatedly that a lack of cooperation from Beijing has made it difficult to get to the bottom of the question.

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  • A new bipartisan push for paid family and medical leave | CNN Politics

    A new bipartisan push for paid family and medical leave | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A cocktail party on Capitol Hill is often hardly notable.

    But at one recent soiree, the clinking of glasses had a different ring. Members of both parties joined together to kick off a renewed effort to solve a uniquely American problem: no universal paid family and medical leave.

    It’s been 30 years since the Family and Medical Leave Act became law. It guaranteed workers the right to unpaid, job-protected time off.

    But the United States is one of only seven countries in the world without some form of universal paid family and medical leave.

    A bipartisan congressional duo is trying to change that.

    “We live in the greatest nation in the world, and we do so many things well, but when you’re talking about families, this is one area that we have struggled,” Republican Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma told CNN during an interview in her Capitol Hill office last month.

    Sitting beside her, nodding, was Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania.

    “It’s frankly an embarrassment that we are one of the seven nations or so that doesn’t have this kind of focus on the family,” Houlahan said. “It’s really, really important that we lead by our example.”

    At the end of January, determined to find a solution to the lack of universal paid family and medical leave in America, the congresswomen officially launched their House Bipartisan Paid Family Leave Working Group.

    “We are action-oriented, and we are committed to having open eyes and ears,” Houlahan said, addressing policy advocates and politicians alongside Bice at the group’s launch party.

    Their task force is composed of six House members: three from each party, including Democrats Colin Allred of Texas and Haley Stevens of Michigan and Republicans Julia Letlow of Louisiana and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa. Such a partnership across the aisle, Bice insisted, is not that uncommon.

    “More of that happens than people realize back home,” the Oklahoma Republican told CNN. “There’s a lot of bipartisanship that goes on behind the scenes, trying to bring everyone together and move the country forward. And this is one way we’re doing that.”

    Houlahan represents a blue-leaning district in eastern Pennsylvania that includes parts of the Philadelphia suburbs. Bice represents a reliably red seat that includes parts of Oklahoma City. They’re both relatively new to Congress – elected in 2018 and 2020, respectively. They shared committee assignments – and previously a hallway in a House office building – and “just kind of connected,” said Bice.

    But the two have something else in common: They’re both mothers with daughters.

    Bice said she worked in the private sector when her daughters were born and had the ability to take paid family leave through her company. That was 20 years ago. “[It] was almost unheard of,” she shared. She said she doesn’t know what she would have done without that opportunity for paid time off.

    The Oklahoma native acknowledges that her circumstance was the exception, not the rule, when it came to paid family leave. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 1 in 4 workers had access to paid family leave in 2022.

    Families in the lowest 25% of wage earners had even less access. Only 13% of those low-income workers were eligible for paid family leave last year.

    “I was incredibly fortunate,” Bice said.

    Houlahan was an active-duty officer in the Air Force when her daughter was born 30 years ago. She recalled that the policy at the time was effectively six weeks of convalescence.

    “And I know, I remember acutely that the child care on the base was a six-month waiting list,” Houlahan said. “I couldn’t figure out how to make ends meet.”

    The veteran said she struggled to find a solution: Child care on the base was affordable but not accessible, and child care off base was the opposite.

    “To be really honest, it was one of the reasons that drove me to separate from the military,” she admitted. “These are choices that are being made by husbands and wives and families across the country.”

    A lack of paid family and medical leave doesn’t just create burdens for families, Houlahan said – it hurts the economy by taking women out of the workforce, causing what she called a “vicious cycle.”

    “The domino effect of all of this kind of thing is real,” the Pennsylvania Democrat said. “When we’re talking about these issues, it’s not just about the mom. It’s not just about the family. It’s about the infrastructure and the economy as well.”

    Bice and Houlahan face what many from the outside would call insurmountable odds: a deeply partisan and divided Congress, with narrow majorities in both chambers. But Houlahan said the razor-thin majorities present an opening.

    “We have an opportunity-rich environment right now, to use a military term, to make sure that we take advantage of this really special time, honestly, where the majorities and minorities are so small and so slim that it really requires that we work together,” she said.

    “We can pretty much assure that our far edges of both parties will not necessarily be interested in working collaboratively,” Houlahan added. “So we need to find that moderate middle.”

    Bice hopes the growing number of women in the House GOP Conference will make a difference, too. There are now 33 Republican women serving in the chamber – the highest number ever. It’s still small in comparison with the 91 female House Democrats (soon to be 92) across the aisle, but it’s momentum nonetheless.

    “Having that female conservative perspective, I think, is important to bring to the conversation,” Bice said. “Many of the women in the Republican Conference are young mothers. And so I think this conversation is ripe on our side of the aisle right now.”

    GOP Rep. Stephanie Bice, seen in Oklahoma City in 2020 before her election to Congress, says the issue of paid family leave is ripe among Republicans at the moment.

    Part of the frustration in Washington – and around the country – is that universal paid family and medical leave is quite popular across the political spectrum. A Morning Consult poll this past summer found that 85% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans supported congressional action on ensuring paid family leave.

    But the two parties have deep philosophical differences about how to pay for it. It’s part of the reason successful legislation has eluded Congress – and a big obstacle for Bice and Houlahan as they start their work.

    “We want to start with a clean slate,” Bice said. “Coming at this from maybe a new fresh perspective, looking at what’s been done in the past. What legislation currently in place isn’t working? And figuring out either do we expand on that or do we pull back and look at a new policy that would actually be much more effective?”

    They’re also realistic about what’s possible. Houlahan is prepared for incremental change.

    “If we’re able to give some family leave for benefits to our federal employees and then our uniform personnel and then this population and then that population, at least we’re making progress,” she said.

    Bice and Houlahan are certainly not the first lawmakers to try to tackle the issue in recent years.

    In 2021, House Democrats pushed to get 12 weeks of universal paid leave in the sweeping Build Back Better package. They eventually pared it down to just four weeks to get the necessary votes to pass in the House along party lines. But the $1.75 trillion social spending bill stalled in the Senate. Paid family leave was then left out of Democrats’ $750 billion climate, tax and health care package, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, that was enacted last summer.

    Houlahan told CNN that she and Bice “stand on the shoulders of great people, mostly women,” who have worked on the issue for decades and across the Capitol. Currently, New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand and Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy are among the senators working on solutions of their own in the upper chamber.

    The House working group co-chairs also acknowledge the importance of bringing men into the conversation. Their six-member task force includes Allred, who made headlines in 2019 when he became the first member of Congress to take paternity leave.

    “If we’re going to be pro-family, it’s going to be pro-family, Mom and Dad,” Bice said.

    This February marked three decades since the Family and Medical Leave Act became law.

    “We’ve been at this since I was pregnant,” Houlahan quipped at the launch party for their group, noting that her oldest daughter is 30 years old.

    “It’s time for there to be additional progress on this issue. It’s wonderful that you now can’t lose your job for taking time off, but that’s not enough for us to be a competitive nation. I don’t think that embodies the American values of the strengths of families as well,” she told CNN in the joint interview.

    Her Republican colleague agreed.

    “It’s time for us to find a solution and take action,” Bice said. “Thirty years is too long. You can’t sit back and watch. You got to move forward.”

    This headline has been updated.

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  • Inflation is doing a crab walk and Fed officials fear its pinch | CNN Business

    Inflation is doing a crab walk and Fed officials fear its pinch | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The possibility of a 2023 market rally ground to a halt last week amid an onslaught of unfortunate inflation and economic data that spooked investors and increased the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will continue its economically painful rate hikes campaign for longer than Wall Street hoped.

    All major indexes notched their largest weekly losses of 2023 on Friday. The S&P 500 fell by 2.7%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 3%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 3.3%.

    What’s happening: It appears that after months of steady decline, the pace of inflation is going sideways. January’s Personal Consumption Expenditures price index – the Fed’s favored inflation gauge – came in hotter than expected on Friday.

    Prices rose a whopping 5.4% in January from a year earlier, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported. In December, prices rose 5.3% annually.

    In January alone, prices were up 0.6% from the prior month, a higher monthly gain from December’s increase of 0.2%.

    This inflationary crab walk is almost certainly causing Fed officials to rethink their policy.

    A paper presented Friday at the Booth School of Business Monetary Policy Forum in New York argued that disinflation will likely be slower and more painful than markets anticipate.

    “Significant disinflations induced by monetary policy tightening are associated with recessions,” said the paper. “An ‘immaculate disinflation’ would be unprecedented.” (Immaculate, in this instance, refers to the possibility of inflation falling quickly to the Fed’s 2% goal without any serious economic damage).

    Several Fed presidents, governors and top economists were on hand at the Booth School forum to discuss the paper and monetary policy on Friday. The majority of those speaking expressed deep concern about the stubbornness of inflation and general market reaction.

    Inflation won’t quit: Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said that while price growth has moderated from its recent high, the overall pace of inflation remains too high and could be more persistent than her colleagues currently anticipate.

    “I anticipate further rate increases to reach a sufficiently restrictive level, then holding there for some, perhaps extended, time,” echoed Boston Fed President Susan Collins at the conference.

    Collins referred to inflation as “recalcitrant,” a loaded million-dollar word that means uncooperative, or defiant to authority.

    Fed Governor Philip Jefferson struck a more befuddled stance on Friday, observing that inflation continues to baffle economists. “The inflationary forces impinging on the US economy at present represent a complex mixture of temporary and more long-lasting elements that defy simple, parsimonious explanation,” he said. Parsimonious being another million-dollar word for frugal.

    Economists stressed that more pain lies ahead. “It’s important that markets understand that ‘no landing’ is not an option,” said Peter Hooper, vice chair of research at Deutsche Bank, an author of the report.

    While recent data has signaled that the US economy remains strong, “by the time we get to the middle of this year we expect to see some bad news coming and the sooner the markets get that message the more helpful it will be to the Fed,” he said.

    The final word: Former Bank of England Governor Lord Mervyn King summed up what many were thinking on Friday: Given the complexity of the current monetary situation, he said, “I wouldn’t want to give advice to any central banks about what we should do.”

    Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have issued a dire warning: If President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan doesn’t come to fruition, the US could face another credit crisis.

    Some background: The Covid-19 crisis triggered a sudden shift in student loan policy and a new openness to forgiveness. In March 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, which automatically paused required payments on all federally held student loans.

    That forbearance has since been extended eight times and is set to end as late as August, 40 months after it began.

    The Biden Administration had announced an unprecedented debt cancellation proposal which would provide relief to more than 40 million borrowers. An analysis by the New York Fed found that roughly $441 billion of federal student loans are eligible for forgiveness under the proposal, canceling about 30% of all outstanding federal student loan debt.

    That forgiveness proposal is now on hold after an injunction by the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals. On Tuesday, The Supreme Court of the United States will hear the case with its decision expected by June 2023.

    What’s on the line: If the Biden Administration’s forgiveness plan survives the court challenge, it will mark the largest mass discharge of consumer debt in modern history, according to the New York Fed. About 40% of those with federal student loan debt would have a zero balance; even more would have a much smaller monthly payment.

    But, “if payments resume without debt relief, we expect both student loan default and delinquencies to rise and potentially surpass pre-pandemic levels,” warned Fed researchers.

    “We note a stark increase in new credit card and auto loan delinquency for borrowers with eligible student loans over the past few quarters, growing at a faster pace than those without student loans and those with ineligible loans,” they wrote.

    Those missed payments suggest that some federal student loan borrowers are having trouble meeting their monthly debt obligations. “We expect these delinquency patterns to worsen if federal student loan payments resume without relief,” said the report.

    The data “may be suggestive of problems to come, a sign of economic distress that may appear particularly concerning when the burden of student loan payments resumes.”

    Future concerns: If student loan borrowers expect future debt cancellation, they may borrow even more, said researchers, which would increase debt balances even more sharply. “Absent direct policies to address this growing burden, taxpayers may be again called to for relief in the future,” they concluded.

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  • 12 blue states sue FDA, saying it’s too strict in limiting abortion drugs as legal battle over mifepristone heats up | CNN Politics

    12 blue states sue FDA, saying it’s too strict in limiting abortion drugs as legal battle over mifepristone heats up | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Twelve states led by liberal attorneys general announced Friday that they had sued the Food and Drug Administration, saying its limits on mifepristone, one of the two drugs used for medication abortion, are too strict.

    The suit is a possible hedge by states waiting to see how a federal judge in Texas rules in a lawsuit brought by anti-abortion groups seeking to block the FDA’s approval of mifepristone altogether. Conflicting rulings could mean the Supreme Court is asked to sort out the issue.

    RELATED: How a medication abortion, also known as an ‘abortion pill,’ works

    “The federal government has known for years that mifepristone is safe and effective,” Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement. “In the wake of the Supreme Court’s radical decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the FDA is now exposing doctors, pharmacists and patients to unnecessary risk. The FDA’s excessive restrictions on this important drug have no basis in medical science.”

    Mifepristone was first approved in 2000 and medication abortion accounts for more than half of the abortions in the US. It is the first drug, followed by misoprostol, in the medication abortion regimen. Patients and providers must sign agreements stating the drug will be used to end a pregnancy, and pharmacies must have special certification.

    The lawsuit was filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Washington state. The states in the lawsuit are: Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Vermont.

    A lawsuit seeking to block the use of medication abortion nationwide could receive an initial decision at any moment, after the plaintiffs in the case submitted to the court on Friday their final brief on the challenge.

    The lawsuit, filed in November by anti-abortion advocates against FDA, challenges the two-decade-old approval of mifepristone, the first drug in the medication abortion process.

    A decision by US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, in favor of the plaintiffs could have far-reaching consequences since medication abortion now makes up a majority of abortions obtained in the US.

    In the filing submitted Friday, the anti-abortion advocates rehashed many of the arguments they made in earlier briefs. Its submission means that Kacsmaryk could soon rule on a motion by the plaintiffs to temporarily block use of the medication. The judge had previously said that once the February 24 filing deadline ended, “briefing will then be closed on the matter, absent any ‘exceptional or extraordinary circumstances.’”

    Kacsmaryk, however, could also call for a hearing, or ask for additional responses.

    The defendants in the case – the FDA and Danco, which makes mifepristone – argued in separate briefs to the court that a decision against the drug’s approval would be unprecedented and would shutter the drugmaker’s business.

    Reproductive rights advocates have stressed that a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would be devastating, with NARAL Pro-Choice America saying in a statement that if the drug is yanked from the market, “64.5 million women of reproductive age in the US would lose access to medication abortion care, an exponential increase in harm overnight.”

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  • Media organizations ask Congress for access to January 6 footage | CNN Politics

    Media organizations ask Congress for access to January 6 footage | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    CNN, along with a group of other media organizations, has signed on to a letter calling for congressional leaders to grant access to security footage from inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News’ Tucker Carlson access to the material earlier this month.

    In a Friday letter on behalf of the press coalition to McCarthy, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, attorney Charles Tobin called on Congress to release all the security footage showing the attack on the Capitol.

    “Without full public access to the complete historical record, there is concern that an ideologically-based narrative of an already polarizing event will take hold in the public consciousness, with destabilizing risks to the legitimacy of Congress, the Capitol Police, and the various federal investigations and prosecutions of January 6 crimes,” Tobin said in the letter.

    Advance Publications, ABC News, Axios, CBS News, Scripps, Gannett, the Los Angeles Times, Politico and ProPublica are the other media organizations joining CNN on the letter.

    The request comes after Carlson announced on his show that he had been granted “unfettered” access to “44,000 hours” of surveillance footage from inside the Capitol on January 6. CNN previously reported that McCarthy did not consult with his House GOP leadership team or with Jeffries before deciding to give Carlson access.

    In an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, McCarthy justified the decision by saying, “I promised.”

    “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment,” the California Republican told the Times.

    McCarthy has faced significant pressure from his right flank to relitigate the work of the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The now-defunct January 6 panel got access to all the security footage from US Capitol Police during its investigation, but it did not release some footage for security reasons. A source familiar with the committee’s work told CNN that the unreleased footage was considered sensitive material because it showed top officials moving through the US Capitol when they evacuated to safety.

    During his bid for the speakership, McCarthy vowed to hold hearings on the security failures that led to the Capitol getting overrun, and he told the select committee to preserve all of its records for potential future review by the newly empowered GOP majority.

    Carlson has been a prominent promoter of January 6 conspiracy theories and has devoted significant airtime to boosting false claims that liberal “deep state” partisans within the FBI orchestrated the insurrection as a way to undermine former President Donald Trump.

    Some Republican lawmakers had hoped to review the material themselves, likely to look for footage to support their controversial claims about the January 6 attack.

    Democrats have criticized McCarthy’s decision to give Carlson access to the security footage.

    Jeffries said in a letter to colleagues that the move “represents an egregious security breach that endangers the hardworking women and men of the United States Capitol Police, who valiantly defended our democracy with their lives at risk on that fateful day.” Schumer told his Senate colleagues in a letter that the disclosure “poses grave security risks to members of Congress and everyone who works on Capitol Hill.”

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  • US Marshals team up with California Native American tribe to address cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people | CNN

    US Marshals team up with California Native American tribe to address cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The US Marshals Service is teaming up with a Native American tribe based in Northern California for a new push aimed at addressing cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people, a growing crisis that tribes say has not received enough attention.

    The Yurok Tribe was chosen as the first pilot location for the federal agency’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative (MMIP), which is part of the Justice Department’s efforts to address disproportionately high rates of violence experienced by Native Americans, including Indigenous people, its website says.

    The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency aimed at enhancing life for Native Americans, estimates there are more than 4,200 missing and murdered cases that have gone unsolved. The agency lists out many of the cases and photos of the missing on its website. But despite the numbers, cases involving Indigenous people have largely gone under the radar and advocates have been pushing for additional dedicated law enforcement resources and attention in the news media to the crisis, CNN previously reported.

    Authorities say they have long faced a number of challenges that have prevented them from solving cases. Police say in some cases it involves family-on-family crime and relatives refuse to provide information because they don’t want the person responsible to go to jail. In other cases, there is limited evidence, CNN previously reported. Tribal communities generally don’t have doorbell cameras or exterior security cameras that help police investigate cases in urban or suburban areas.

    The partnership with the Yurok Tribe, which was announced on Tuesday, will involve a collaboration between the tribe and USMS “to share information, identify goals, and develop strategies for improving public safety for Yurok Tribe, its members, and the broader community,” the USMS said in a press release.

    The Yurok Tribe is currently the largest tribe in California with more than 5,000 members, according to the tribe’s website. The tribe has been a leader in fighting the crisis of missing and murdered Native American and Indigenous people and calling for programs to prevent future cases.

    “The Yurok Tribe is extremely grateful to partner with the US Marshals Service on this important and timely initiative,” Joseph L. James, chairman of the Yurok Tribe, said in a statement. “The knowledge and tools we will gain from this unique partnership will significantly increase our capacity to keep our community safe.”

    In January, the tribe received a $350,000 grant from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians to hire a full-time investigator for ongoing and cold cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous people, according to CNN affiliate KRCR. Tribal leaders also recently requested $200 million dollars from the state government to fight the crisis, KRCR reported.

    The crisis spurred the FBI into action enlisting the agency’s intelligence resources best known for fighting crime and terrorism to create a master database last year of missing Native Americans in New Mexico and the Navajo Nation, CNN previously reported.

    The database – which includes photos of the missing along with their age, gender and date of last contact – has been praised by advocates who insist that the cases of missing and murdered Native Americans don’t receive the attention they deserve from police, CNN reported.

    The issue has also garnered the attention of President Joe Biden’s administration, which has rolled out a number of initiatives to address violence against Native Americans including a new unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to investigate the cases while coordinating resources among federal agencies and Indian country.

    Members of the Yurok tribe and USMS recently met to discuss the partnership and the potential to work together on a wide range of activities – depending on the tribe’s priorities, the release said.

    The targeted areas may include training on missing child investigations, data analysis, public outreach, sex offender registration and enforcement as well as investigative support for the tribe’s law enforcement officers, the release says.

    “It is my sincere hope that by dedicating resources in Indian Country and partnering with the Yurok Tribe, U.S. Marshals will help address the problem of missing children from the Yurok Tribe and assist with other public safety initiatives, such as ensuring that registered sex offenders in the area are compliant with their statutory requirements,” US Marshals Service Director Ronald L. Davis said in a statement.

    “We are fully committed to supporting the Yurok Tribe’s efforts to keep their communities safe,” he added.

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  • Opinion: The one critical step Congress could take to protect kids online | CNN

    Opinion: The one critical step Congress could take to protect kids online | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank and advocacy group based in Washington, DC. He is also a former senior policy adviser to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed in this piece are his own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    This week the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that raised thorny questions over algorithms and free speech on the Internet. In Gonzalez v. Google, lawyers for the parents of a teenager killed in an Islamic State attack are arguing that YouTube should be held liable for promoting content from the group.

    The political debates over how much speech protections online cover Big Tech firms have inflamed the right for years. In the oral arguments, at least, the justices seemed uncertain about how best to proceed with the complex issues at play.

    But new research shows some issues surrounding tech don’t have a political divide. A new report I wrote for the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Institute for Family Studies shows widespread concern around kids online. And a set of policy proposals that aim to restore parents’ ability to shepherd their kids on the wild west that is the Web all recorded high levels of support across parents from both political sides.

    This issue is something that nearly every parent has to navigate. A recent report from Common Sense Media found that the average age of first exposure to pornography is now 12, and that three-quarters of teens had seen porn online by age 17.

    But parents have plenty to worry about kids online in addition to early exposure to pornography. All manner of online content can impact a child’s life. As this week’s Supreme Court case reminds us, youth can be lured into extremism or self-harm via online content. Parents might want to know if their child is becoming increasingly drawn toward figures who share racist or misogynistic views online.

    Documents released by a whistleblower indicated Facebook’s (now known as Meta, Instagram’s parent company) internal data showed the site made “body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls,” and also led to more severe and self-destructive thoughts. While the company disputed the claims, it also postponed an “Instagram for Kids” offering. Cyberbullying and non-consensual nude photo sharing have plagued high schools.

    These concerns are resonating with policymakers. Current law and decades of Supreme Court precedent establish much more leeway for Congress to protect kids online without having to hash out the complexities of more wide-ranging free speech concerns.

    A bipartisan effort to take modest steps to protect kids online might bear fruit. Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Connecticut Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal have been pushing their colleagues to pass their Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would update the framework for how tech companies serve minors online.

    Among other things, it would require social media sites to default minors into the strongest possible privacy protections and give parents new tools to monitor harmful content. It would mandate social media platforms mitigate harms to minors, such as by restricting or eliminating content relating to self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. And it would set up require an annual audit of risks to minors, including providing broader data access to researchers to study the impact of social media on kids’ development.

    The bill was opposed by some civil rights and LGBTQ groups, who worried that putting greater content restrictions on what kids may come across online could prevent them from accessing information about sexual education without their parents’ knowledge. But that concern may ring hollow with parents who believe they should have better tools to know if their 13- or 14-year-old child is searching for information about birth control.

    Some say parents should be the ultimate gatekeeper of their kids online, which is true. But we have laws relating to the minimum age to consume alcohol or drive a car precisely because we know adolescents’ brains are still developing, and the potential to cause harm to oneself or others is high. After all, unless a critical mass of families agree to move social life offline, minors who don’t have access to Instagram, TikTok or Facebook may be missing out on crucial information or opportunities to socialize.

    Moreover, while some tools exist for helping keep kids safe online, they are often easily circumvented. Asking individual parent to be an expert on the plethora of user settings, filters and options for keeping age-inappropriate content away from their kids places an undue burden on families. Establishing age-based controls, and policing them effectively, would be an appropriate step for Congress to take.

    Indeed, some say the Blackburn-Blumenthal framework doesn’t go far enough. The policy solutions polled in our recent report are more aggressive than those included in KOSA, and still receive support from three in four parents.

    For example, nearly 9 in 10 Republican parents, and 77% of all parents, agreed with a proposal to require social media platforms to grant parents full access to what their children are seeing and who they are communicating with online, the most popular policy polled among that subgroup. 81% were in favor of a law that would require social media platforms to get parents’ permission before allowing minors to open an account. Another two-thirds of parents agreed or strongly agreed that internet service providers should be required to obtain age verification (like a drivers’ license or credit card) before allowing individuals to view pornography.

    Future action will likely take up these concerns. Just last week, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced a bill that would bar users from under age 16 from opening a social media account. While the implementation mechanism would likely need to be improved on – relying on Big Tech companies to keep copies of every American’s drivers’ license safe may not work out – the direction of the legislation is laudable, recognizing that American parents are looking for bold action when it comes to keeping kids safe online.

    The battles over Big Tech and accusations of algorithmic bias may be what gets the Republican base riled up. But in a divided Congress, both parties should listen to the parents who make up their base – giving families more tools to protect their kids online is not only long overdue, it’s a political winner.

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  • No. 2 at USDA, who led efforts to remedy historical racial discrimination, set to leave department | CNN Politics

    No. 2 at USDA, who led efforts to remedy historical racial discrimination, set to leave department | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Jewel Bronaugh, the No. 2 person at the US Department of Agriculture and the first Black woman in the position, will leave the department on Tuesday after a two-year tenure in which she led agency efforts to diversify its workforce and provide relief to farmers of color who say they have been discriminated against over the years.

    Bronaugh announced last month that she was leaving the agency in order to spend more time with her family. Xochitl Torres Small, the under secretary for rural development, has been nominated to succeed her.

    Along with helping steer a department that boasts 29 agencies and more than 100,000 employees across the country, Bronaugh has played a central role in the USDA’s efforts to remedy decades-long discrimination that has impacted farmers and ranchers of color. Most notably, she has co-chaired an independent commission that has examined the USDA’s policies and programs for factors that have contributed to historic discrimination against farmers of color and identify disparities, inequity and discrimination across the agency.

    “I understood as a Black woman, coming into the role as deputy secretary, the weight that went with that. The responsibility that went with that. The people who for years have not been able to get resources from USDA. The history that that has had on farmers and landowners and people who live in rural communities, I knew that I had a responsibility,” Bronaugh explained in an interview with CNN.

    “I knew coming in that there was a lot of work to be done and I was going to have to be real to that commitment, not only to everyone that USDA serves but specifically as a voice for people who have felt like they had not had a voice that represented in their interactions with the USDA. It was my responsibility to carry that.”

    Born and raised in Petersburg, Virginia, by educators, Bronaugh at first had aspirations to become an educator herself and earned a bachelor’s degree in education from James Madison University.

    But after earning a master’s degree and doctorate in vocational education from Virginia Tech, she stepped into agriculture when she took a job as a 4-H extension specialist at Virginia State University, a historically Black college and university. She also became dean of the College of Agriculture at Virginia State University and was executive director of the university’s Center for Agriculture Research, Engagement and Outreach.

    In May 2018, she was appointed commissioner of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and made history as the first Black woman in the position. She was confirmed to her current role in May 2021.

    At USDA, Bronaugh led international agricultural trade missions in the United Kingdom and countries in East Africa to help US farm businesses and organizations strengthen export and trade relationships.

    She also helped create a chief diversity and inclusion office within the Office of the Secretary and has focused on diversifying USDA’s workforce, which has seen a slight uptick in the number of employees of color over the course of her tenure. According to USDA data, 73% of USDA employees are White, 28% are employees of color and 11% are Black. Forty-five percent of USDA employees are women.

    Her very presence atop the department has been inspiring for current and former Black USDA employees, including Shirley Sherrod, who was the USDA’s director of rural development in Georgia before being pushed out under controversial circumstances in 2010.

    “The fact that she is the first Black woman to hold the position means a lot to us. It gives us hope for the future,” Sherrod, who is also a member of the Equity Commission, told CNN. “When you look at the US Department of Agriculture and you look at all of the actions we have suffered as Black people trying to get the programs that should have been available to everyone, to access them and feel that they were being implemented fairly – to actually have someone in the second position … really helping to oversee that and have a voice in places we don’t normally get a chance to be in, just to me meant a lot.”

    As Bronaugh prepares to leave the agency, one of her final orders of business will be to release the Equity Commission’s interim report on its findings on Tuesday, which she hopes will provide a blueprint for acting on the inequities she has tried to address during her time at USDA. She said there is no time frame on when the agency will begin implementing the recommendations but she is hopeful it will happen immediately. If confirmed by the Senate, Small would be tasked with presenting the commission’s final recommendations to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack later this year.

    “Being able to get the Equity Commission to a set of interim recommendations has been huge for me,” Bronaugh said. “That is going to give us an opportunity to look at, you know, where we have discretion, where we have authority and where we have resources to immediately start to address some of the historical inequity issues here are USDA.”

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  • A first report on the Ohio toxic train wreck was released. Here’s what it found — and what investigators are still looking into | CNN

    A first report on the Ohio toxic train wreck was released. Here’s what it found — and what investigators are still looking into | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    After federal officials released an initial report concluding that this month’s toxic train wreck in Ohio was completely preventable, investigators will begin examining procedures, practices and design prior to the derailment that has sparked long-term concerns among hundreds of frustrated residents.

    The National Transportation Safety Board on Thursday released its preliminary report on the investigation into the February 3 train crash in East Palestine, Ohio, where residents have been complaining about feeling sick after hazardous chemicals seeped into the air, water and soil.

    Ohio environmental officials made a civil referral this week asking the state attorney general’s office to begin “legal and/or equitable civil actions” against Norfolk Southern, which could result in a civil complaint if negotiations with the company were to fail.

    The NTSB report found that one of the train’s cars carrying plastic pellets was heated by a hot axle that sparked the initial fire, according to Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the safety board. As the temperature of the bearing got hotter, the train passed by two wayside defect detectors that did not trigger an audible alarm message because the heat threshold was not met at that point, Homendy explained. A third detector eventually picked up the high temperature, but it was already too late by then.

    “This was 100% preventable. … There is no accident. Every single event that we investigate is preventable,” Homendy said during a news conference Thursday. “The NTSB has one goal, and that is safety and ensuring that this never happens again.”

    The next phase of the investigation will examine the train’s wheelset and bearing as well as the damage from the derailment, the NTSB report noted. The agency will also focus on the designs of tank cars and railcars along with maintenance procedures and practices.

    Plus, investigators will review the train operator’s use of wayside defect detectors and the company’s railcar inspection practices. More specifically, determining what caused the wheel bearing failure will be key to the investigation, Homendy said.

    On Friday, Homendy said on “CNN This Morning” that she’s concerned politics could cloud the investigation and prevent safety improvements. Former President Donald Trump visited the site of the train derailment on Wednesday where he criticized President Joe Biden’s administration’s handling of the railway disaster.

    “This is not a time for politics,” Homendy said. “There is a time for politics. It is not this.”

    On Thursday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also visited the derailment site, and when asked how political figures like Trump could help, Buttigieg addressed the former president directly saying he could “express support for reversing the deregulation that happened on his watch.”

    Another key aspect of the investigation will focus on the response to the chemical disaster, particularly the manual detonations of tanks carrying toxic chemicals.

    Five of the 38 derailed train cars were carrying more than 115,000 gallons of vinyl chloride, according to the NTSB’s report. Exposure to high levels of vinyl chloride can increase cancer risk or cause death.

    Those five cars “continued to concern authorities because the temperature inside one tank car was still rising,” indicating a polymerization reaction which could have resulted in an explosion, the report said. To help prevent a potentially deadly blast of vinyl chloride, crews released the toxic chemical into a trench and burned it off on February 6 — three days after the derailment.

    Since then, some East Palestine residents have said they are experiencing headaches, dizziness, nausea and bloody noses — a host of health issues they say they did not have prior to the crash.

    At the same time, officials have been adamant in reassuring residents of the air’s safety and the municipal water supply.

    Around 2 million gallons of firefighting water from the train derailment site are expected to be disposed in Harris County, Texas, according to the county’s chief executive.

    Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said her office was told by Texas Molecular on Thursday that the shipments began arriving around last Wednesday, she said.

    Texas Molecular was hired to dispose of the potentially dangerous water from the train derailment, the company, which said it has more than four decades of experience in managing water safely, has told CNN.

    The company told Hidalgo’s office Thursday that half a million gallons was already in the county.

    Hidalgo expressed frustration that she first learned about the water shipments from the news media – not from a government agency or Texas Molecular,

    “It’s a very real problem we were told yesterday the materials were coming only to learn today they’ve been here for a week,” Hidalgo said.

    She added that although there’s no legal requirement for her office to be notified, “It doesn’t quite seem right.”

    Texas Molecular is receiving the water from trucks, but it’s unclear if trucks are used for the entire trip, Hidalgo said. The company told her office they’re receiving about 30 trucks of water a day, she said.

    CNN is seeking comment from Texas Molecular about how the water is being transported.

    Hidalgo said her office is looking for information about the disposal, including the chemical composition of the firefighting water, the precautions that are being taken, and why Harris County was the chosen site.

    “There’s nothing right now to tell me – to tell us – there’s going to be an accident in transport, that this is being done in such a way that is not compatible with the well, that there’s a nefarious reason why the water is coming here and not to a closer site,” Hidalgo said. “But it is our job to do basic due diligence on that information.”

    A total of 1.7 million gallons of contaminated liquid has been removed from the immediate site of the derailment, according to a Thursday news release from the Ohio Emergency Management Agency.

    More than 1.1 million gallons of “contaminated liquid” from East Palestine has been transported off-site so far, with the majority going to Texas Molecular and the rest going to a facility in Vickery, Ohio.

    CNN has asked the Ohio agency the location of the remaining 581,500 gallons which have been “removed” but not “hauled off-site.”

    Congresswoman Debbie Dingell of Michigan said she was “not given a heads up” that contaminated soil from East Palestine would be transported to the US Ecology Wayne Disposal in Belleville, Michigan.

    “We were not given a heads up on this reported action,” Dingell said in a press release on Friday, “Our priority is to always keep the people we represent safe.”

    Dingell said inquires to the EPA, Department of Transportation, Norfolk Southern, US Ecology, the state of Ohio and others involved are in the process.

    On Friday afternoon, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine released an update on the removal of the contaminated site in East Palestine, saying that soil would be transported to Michigan.

    So far, 4,832 cubic yards of soil have been removed from the ground in East Palestine. Approximately six truckloads of that contaminated soil are on their way to the hazardous waste disposal facility in Michigan, according to a press release from DeWine.

    The 149-car train operated by Norfolk Southern on February 3 had three employees on board: a locomotive engineer, a conductor and a trainee who were all in the head end of the locomotive, Homendy told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday.

    So far, the investigation found the crew did not do anything wrong prior to the derailment, though the crash was “100% preventable,” Homendy said.

    Video of the train before the derailment showed what appeared to be an overheated wheel bearing, according to the NTSB report. Footage showed sparks flying from underneath the train.

    NTSB investigators are now focusing on one train car’s wheel set and bearing to figure out what may have caused the overheating, Homendy said.

    “We have a lot of questions about that,” she said Friday, including the “thresholds and why they vary so much between railroads.”

    Ultimately, it’s the railroads that set the temperature thresholds for the detectors, Homendy said.

    Releasing publicly a probable cause or causes for the derailment could take 12 to 18 months, Homendy said during the news conference.

    “We are very deliberative. We are the gold standard when it comes to investigations globally, and we are methodical in our approach,” Homendy said. “But if we see a safety issue that we need to be addressed immediately, something systemic, we will not hesitate to issue an urgent safety recommendation.”

    In the meantime, here’s what the NTSB preliminary report found so far:

    • One wheel bearing’s temperature reached a “critical” level — 253 degrees Fahrenheit above the ambient temperature — and prompted an audible alarm that instructed “the crew to slow and stop the train to inspect a hot axle,” the report says.
    • The train’s engineer applied the train’s brakes and additional braking after the alert of an overheating axle, the report states. “During this deceleration, the wheel bearing failed,” Homendy explained. “Car 23 derailed, and the train initiated an emergency brake application and came to a stop.”

    Even after reading the preliminary NTSB report, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told “CNN This Morning” that there’s still a lot of facts he doesn’t know.

    Among his biggest questions are: “Had the train been shorter, had there been additional staff, could this have been averted? Based on the alerts that occurred, how long is the reaction time and how is that influenced by the size of the train?” Yost told CNN.

    The US Environmental Protection Agency has ordered Norfolk Southern to cover the full cost of cleaning up the aftermath of the train crash.

    “EPA has special authority for situations just like this where we can compel companies who inflict trauma and cause environmental and health damage to communities, like Norfolk Southern has done, to completely clean up the mess that they’ve caused and pay for it,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said.

    Norfolk Southern will be required to:

    • Provide a descriptive work plan on how they intend to clean up the water, soil and debris
    • Reimburse the EPA for providing residents a cleaning service of their homes and businesses
    • Show up to public meetings and explain their progress

    If the company does not follow the order, the EPA will step in to complete the duties, while fining Norfolk Southern up to $70,000 a day, Regan said Wednesday during a CNN town hall.

    “And the law gives us the authority to charge Norfolk Southern up to three times the amount that the cleanup will cost us,” he said.

    The company plans to take a series of measures moving forward to minimize the long-term impacts of chemicals on the land and groundwater, including ripping up the tracks where the train derailed and removing soil underneath, Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw said.

    Shaw added his company is working with the Environmental Protection Agency on a “long-term remediation plan.”

    Yost, who received the referral from the Ohio EPA to initiate necessary legal civil actions against Norfolk Southern this week, told CNN any criminal referral in Ohio regarding the derailment would be a decision made by local prosecutors.

    “We’ve been in contact with the local county prosecutor, and … we may be assisting him, but at this point, he has not empaneled a grand jury, to my understanding,” he said Friday on “CNN This Morning.”

    Ohio environmental officials made a civil referral Tuesday asking Yost’s office to “initiate all necessary legal and/or equitable civil actions” and “seek appropriate penalties” against Norfolk Southern, according to a copy of the referral provided by the attorney general’s office.

    “I respectfully request that this referral result in the filing of a civil complaint in the appropriate court if efforts on your part to resolve this matter through negotiation fail,” Ohio Environmental Protection Agency Director Anne Vogel wrote in a letter to Yost.

    Vogel cited potential violations of state laws regarding air and water pollution and solid and hazardous waste.

    Expanding the definition of a high-hazard flammable train – a standard the derailed train did not meet, despite sparking a major fire – is among the changes NTSB advocated for in the past, Homendy said Friday.

    NTSB urged regulators to include in the classification “a broad array of flammable materials,” rather than focusing on crude oil, she said.

    Additionally, NTSB will look at whether vinyl chloride needs to be carried in more fortified cars, Homendy said.

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  • Rare blizzard warnings issued in Southern California as Midwest digs out from powerful winter storm | CNN

    Rare blizzard warnings issued in Southern California as Midwest digs out from powerful winter storm | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A slow-moving winter storm brought snow, rain and high winds to the West on Friday, prompting rare blizzard warnings in Southern California.

    In its first-ever blizzard warning, the National Weather Service in San Diego said the San Bernardino County mountains could see 3 to 5 feet of snow through Saturday morning.

    Blizzard warnings were also issued for Los Angeles and Ventura counties through Saturday afternoon. Up to 5 feet of snow is possible with some isolated areas seeing between 7 and 8 feet. The National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office issued its last blizzard warning on February 4, 1989.

    “This storm system will be unusually cold, and snow levels will be very low. In fact, areas very close to the Pacific Coast and also into the interior valleys that are not accustomed to seeing snow, may see some accumulating snowfall,” the National Weather Service said early Friday.

    “For Friday morning through Saturday afternoon, plan to hunker down and avoid travel. The worst impacts from flooding and blizzard conditions occur Friday afternoon through Saturday morning, when any non-essential or non-emergency travel should be postponed!” the San Diego weather service said.

    The National Weather Service on Friday afternoon issued a flash flood warning with a “considerable flash flood damage threat,” for Los Angeles and surrounding areas. This is the second highest level of flood warning from the NWS, only topped by a flood emergency.

    Over 6 million people are covered by the warning, including downtown Los Angeles, Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Burbank and Santa Barbara.

    “Flash flooding is already occurring…and is expected to worsen into the evening hours,” the NWS warning said.

    The weather service also warned that debris flows are likely from previous burn scars in the region.

    Up to 5 inches of rain could fall across lower elevations of the greater Los Angeles area while the mountains could see 6 inches. In the San Diego area, up to 3 inches of rain is possible in lower elevations while the mountains could get 7 inches.

    The storm has put more than 20 million people under flood watches and more than 30 million people under high wind alerts across Southern California – roughly two months after the state endured rounds of deadly flooding. The highest gusts in the warning areas could reach 75 mph.

    The storm system will impact Northern California early in the day Friday. Up to 6 inches of snow is possible across lower elevations and up to 3 feet could fall on the region’s highest peaks before conditions begin to improve by Friday evening as the storm slips to the south.

    The Sierra Nevada Mountains could see up to 6 feet of snow Friday into Saturday and in Nevada, a blizzard warning for northwestern Nye County will be in effect Friday morning through early Saturday.

    “Heavy snow, winds gusting as high as 60 mph, will cause zero visibility due to blowing and drifting snow,” the weather service warned.

    Snow has already hit the Santa Cruz Mountain, resident Ngugi Kihara told CNN on Friday.

    “We never seen this much snow up here,” Kihara said. “We woke up to it. It started yesterday but picked up a lot overnight. Lots of trees are falling and all the roads around us are closed. Power is out and has been mostly gone since Tuesday.”

    Children revel in the rare snowfall in Yucaipa with a view of the San Bernardino County mountains in California.

    Power outages were already adding up in California early Friday, with nearly 75,000 customers in the dark, largely in the northern region. That accounts for a small portion of the more than 820,000 power outages recorded nationwide as the day began, according to PowerOutage.us. The majority of the outages – nearly 720,000 – were in Michigan, where freezing rain and ice this week damaged utility lines and trees.

    The storm struck the West as a ferocious, multiday winter storm began to subside after wreaking havoc in several states across the West, northern Great Plains the Great Lakes region and New England.

    Several counties in Wyoming went into search-and-rescue mode after more than 40 inches of snow fell in the southern parts of the state over the course of several days and motorists were trapped in heavy snow, the state highway patrol said on Twitter.

    Ice covered tree branches are seen on the ground after a freezing ice storm in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on Thursday.

    Minneapolis, Minnesota, saw more than 13 inches in a three-day period this week. More than 160 vehicle crashes were reported statewide, and dozens of cars spun off roads Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Minnesota State Patrol said in a series of tweets.

    Minneapolis officials have declared a one-day snow emergency beginning Friday, and city crews have been plowing and treating streets.

    Since the storm began Monday evening, cumulative snowfall reached dozens of inches in some cities, including 48 inches in Battle Lake, Wyoming, 32 inches in Dupuyer, Montana, and 29 inches in Park City, Utah.

    But snow was not the storm’s only culprit. Severe icing was also a danger.

    Ann Arbor, Michigan, recorded 0.65 inches, while Fransville, Wisconsin, measured 0.75 inches of ice.

    And in New England, icy conditions likely contributed to a massive 15-vehicle pileup on the Massachusetts Turnpike Thursday night, according to a tweet by the Massachusetts State Police.

    The chain-reaction crash involved multiple personal vehicles and tractor trailers, officials said. Troopers, firefighters and EMS responded to the incident and multiple victims had to be transported to the hospital, according to the tweet.

    As northern regions of the country were measuring snowfall and ice accumulation, parts of the Southeast were experiencing record-high heat.

    More than 50 daily record highs were recorded in the Southeast Thursday.

    • St. Simons Island, Georgia, saw a high temperature of 88 degrees, an all-time February record.
    • Tupelo, Mississippi, reached a high temperature of 87 degrees, another an all-time February record. The previous record of 84 degrees was set Wednesday.
    • Raleigh, North Carolina, saw a high temperature of 85 degrees, which was an all-time February record. The previous record of 84 degrees was set in 1977.

    The dueling winter storm and southern heat wave created a stark 100-degree temperature difference between the Northern Rockies and the South earlier this week.

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  • Pentagon’s suicide prevention committee recommends age limit and waiting period for on-base gun purchases | CNN Politics

    Pentagon’s suicide prevention committee recommends age limit and waiting period for on-base gun purchases | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A suicide prevention committee that was established by the Pentagon last year is recommending instituting a waiting period for gun purchases on bases and raising the minimum age for buying firearms in an attempt to reduce the number of suicides among service members.

    The Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee (SPRIRC) announced the suggested measures as part of a broader set of 127 recommendations to reverse the current trend of suicides in the military, which has steadily increased over the last 15 years.

    The committee recommended putting in place a seven day waiting period for gun purchases on Defense Department facilities and a four day waiting period for ammunition purchases.

    The committee was created by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in May 2022 to review the Department of Defense’s ongoing suicide prevention efforts. The committee submitted a first set of 10 recommendations to Austin in December before submitting its latest report.

    Dr. Craig Bryan, one of the members of the committee, said a high percentage of suicides on base involved guns purchased at base military exchanges.

    “There’s a very strong scientific basis showing that waiting period, even as short as seven days, significantly reduce suicide rates,” said Bryan, a lethal means safety expert, in urging the Defense Department to “follow the science.”

    The committee also recommended raising the minimum age to purchase weapons on base to 25 years old.

    “There’s arguably only one thing that all researchers agree on,” said Bryan, “and that one thing is that taking steps to slow down convenient access to highly lethal methods like firearms is the single most effective strategy for saving lives.”

    According to the Defense Department’s annual report, 519 service members died by suicide in 2021, the most recent number for which numbers are available. Though the latest figure is a slight decrease from the previous year’s 582 suicides, the overall number has still been trending upward.

    “We will review those closely,” said Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder of the latest recommendations. “I don’t have anything to announce today in terms of what steps we may take, but again this is a very important topic to the Secretary and to the entire Department of Defense.”

    However, Dr. Rajeev Ramchand, an epidemiologist with the RAND corporation and another member of the SPRIRC, told reporters on Friday that service members the committee spoke with said they felt the Defense Department’s “current approach … was more of a check-the-block approach” and that suicide prevention was “not discussed frequently.”

    Ramchand gave an example of a series of required suicide prevention trainings that took place over a course of several days, saying service members sat in a dark auditorium where many of them fell asleep or “were on their phones.”

    “It’s hard to think this is having an effect,” Ramchand said.

    In addition to gun safety regulations, the committee also urged the Defense Department to address the lack of mental health services available for service members, including hiring psychologists and other mental health specialists quickly.

    “When service members were getting into care, they might not be seen for their second visit for about 6 weeks,” said Rebecca Blais, a sexual assault and suicide expert who is on the committee.

    Often, when job openings in mental health services were posted, the hiring process could drag out over a year, at which point the psychologist or other professional was no longer available, Blais said.

    In cases where mental health services were not available or already booked, the committee urged the Defense Department to increase insurance payments so service members could seek mental health experts outside of the military’s healthcare system.

    Editor’s Note: If you or a loved one have contemplated suicide, call The National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255) to connect with a trained counselor.

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  • Earthquakes Fast Facts | CNN

    Earthquakes Fast Facts | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at earthquakes worldwide.

    The US Geological Survey describes an earthquake as “the ground shaking caused by a sudden slip on a fault. Stresses in the earth’s outer layer push the sides of the fault together. Stress builds up and the rocks slip suddenly, releasing energy in waves that travel through the earth’s crust and cause the shaking that we feel during an earthquake.”

    Earthquakes are measured using seismographs, which monitor the seismic waves that travel through the Earth after an earthquake strikes.

    Scientists used the Richter Scale for many years to measure earthquakes but now largely follow the “moment magnitude scale,” which USGS says is a more accurate measure of size.

    (selected timeline of earthquakes around the world with death tolls exceeding 100)

    June 4, 2000 – A magnitude 7.9 earthquake strikes southern Sumatra, Indonesia, killing an estimated 103 people.

    January 13, 2001 – A magnitude 7.7 earthquakes hits near San Miguel, El Salvador, killing an estimated 852 people.

    January 26, 2001 – An estimated 20,000 people are killed by a magnitude 7.7 earthquake centered in Gujarat, India.

    February 13, 2001 – Another earthquake strikes El Salvador, magnitude 6.6. Three hundred and fifteen people are estimated to have been killed.

    June 23, 2001 – An estimated 138 people are killed in Peru by an 8.4-magnitude earthquake.

    March 3, 2002 – In the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, an estimated 166 people are killed by a magnitude 7.4 earthquake.

    March 25, 2002 – Another earthquake in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, this one a magnitude 6.1, kills 1,000 people.

    June 22, 2002 – A magnitude 6.5 earthquake strikes western Iran, killing an estimated 261 people.

    February 24, 2003 – In southern Xianjiang, China, a magnitude 6.3 quake leaves an estimated 263 people dead.

    May 1, 2003 – A 6.4-magnitude quake strikes eastern Turkey, killing approximately 177 people.

    May 21, 2003 – An estimated 2,266 people are killed by a magnitude 6.8 quake in northern Algeria.

    December 26, 2003 – A magnitude 6.6 earthquake strikes the city of Bam in southeast Iran. Around 31,000 people die in the quake.

    February 24, 2004 – Approximately 631 people are killed in Morocco by a magnitude 6.4 quake.

    December 26, 2004 – A magnitude 9.1 earthquake strikes off the west coast of Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. The earthquake and tsunamis generated by the earthquake kill 227,898 people in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and Bangladesh. The quake releases an amount of energy equal to a 100-gigaton bomb and lasts between 500-600 seconds.

    February 22, 2005 – A magnitude 6.4 earthquake strikes central Iran, killing at least 612 people.

    March 28, 2005 – A magnitude 8.6 earthquake strikes off the coast of Indonesia, on the same fault line that originated a December 26 earthquake that launched a deadly tsunami. At least 1,300 people are killed.

    October 8, 2005 – A magnitude 7.6 earthquake strikes Pakistan. At least 86,000 people are killed.

    May 26, 2006 – A magnitude 6.3 earthquake occurs in central Java, Indonesia, killing at least 5,749 people.

    July 17, 2006 – A magnitude 7.7 quake strikes Java, Indonesia, killing an estimated 730 people.

    August 15, 2007 – A magnitude 8.0 earthquake hits Peru, about 100 miles south of the capital of Lima. Approximately 514 people are reported dead.

    May 12, 2008 – A magnitude 7.9 earthquake strikes in central China, killing more than 87,000 people.

    October 28, 2008 – A 6.4-magnitude earthquake strikes Pakistan, killing an estimated 166 people.

    April 6, 2009 – A magnitude 6.3 earthquake strikes central Italy, killing 295 people.

    September 29, 2009 – A magnitude 8.0 earthquake in the Samoa Islands kills 192 people.

    September 30, 2009 – A magnitude 7.6 earthquake strikes Sumatra, Indonesia, killing more than 1,000 people.

    January 12, 2010 – A 7.0-magnitude earthquake strikes 14 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. USAID estimates the death toll to be about 230,000, but other estimates are as high as 316,000.

    February 27, 2010 – An 8.8-magnitude earthquake strikes central Chile, killing an estimated 547 people.

    April 13, 2010 – A 6.9-magnitude earthquake strikes China’s Qinghai province. Approximately 2,968 people are reported dead.

    October 25, 2010 – At least 503 people die due to a magnitude 7.7 earthquake off Indonesia and a subsequent tsunami.

    February 21, 2011 – A 6.3-magnitude earthquake strikes Christchurch, New Zealand. An estimated 181 people are killed.

    March 11, 2011 – A 9.1-magnitude earthquake strikes near the east coast of Honshu, Japan, causing a massive tsunami. The quake’s epicenter is 231 miles away from Tokyo. The total of confirmed deaths and missing is over 22,000.

    September 18, 2011 – A magnitude 6.9 earthquake strikes Sikkim, India, killing an estimated 111 people.

    October 23, 2011 – A 7.1-magnitude earthquake strikes eastern Turkey. The death toll is 604 people.

    February 6, 2012 – A 6.7-magnitude earthquake strikes off the coast of Negros, Philippines, killing at least 113 people.

    August 11, 2012 – Two earthquakes hit northern Iran. The first to strike is a 6.4-magnitude earthquake. 11 minutes later, a second earthquake with a magnitude of 6.3 hits. At least 306 people are killed.

    November 7, 2012 – A 7.4 earthquake off the coast of Guatemala kills an estimated 139 people.

    April 20, 2013 – An earthquake strikes the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, killing at least 192 people. The USGS gauges it at 6.6-magnitude and the China Earthquake Networks Center estimates it at 7.0-magnitude.

    September 24, 2013 – A magnitude 7.7 earthquake hits the Balochistan province of Pakistan. More than 300 people are reported killed.

    August 3, 2014 – An earthquake hits China’s Yunnan province, killing at least 615 people and injuring more than 2,400. The USGS gauges the quake at 6.1 magnitude and the China Earthquake Networks Center estimates it at 6.5 magnitude.

    April 25, 2015 – A 7.8-magnitude earthquake strikes Nepal, and is centered less than 50 miles from its capital Kathmandu. The death toll is more than 8,000, with 366 missing, according to Nepal’s National Emergency Operations Center. Weeks later on May 12, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake strikes the already reeling country of Nepal, killing at least 125 in Nepal, India and Tibet.

    October 26, 2015 – A 7.5-magnitude earthquake hits South Asia, killing at least 364 people and injuring more than 2,000 others. The epicenter is in northeastern Afghanistan, but most of the deaths – at least 248 – are reported in Pakistan.

    April 16, 2016 – A 7.8-magnitude earthquake strikes coastal Ecuador, killing 663 people.

    August 24, 2016 – A 6.2-magnitude earthquake strikes central Italy, killing at least 290 people.

    September 19, 2017 – A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hits Mexico City and surrounding states, killing at least 369 people.

    November 12, 2017 – A 7.3-magnitude earthquake hits the border region between Iraq and Iran. More than 600 people are killed.

    September 28, 2018 – A 7.5-magnitude earthquake strikes the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. More than 2,100 people are killed and 1,300 missing from the earthquake and resulting tsunami.

    August 14, 2021 – A 7.2-magnitude earthquake strikes southwest Haiti. Two days later, Tropical Storm Grace brings strong winds and heavy rain to the same region, complicating relief efforts. Approximately 2,248 people are killed and 12,763 injured.

    June 22, 2022 – A 5.9-magnitude earthquake strikes eastern Afghanistan. More than 1,000 people are killed and at least 1,500 are injured.

    November 21, 2022 – A 5.6-magnitude earthquake hits the Cianjur region in West Java, Indonesia, killing more than 334 people.

    February 6, 2023 – A 7.8-magnitude earthquake strikes Turkey and Syria. The epicenter is 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, in Turkey’s Gaziantep province. More than 50,000 people are killed and tens of thousands injured.

    (from the USGS)

    May 22, 1960 – Chile, 9.5

    March 28, 1964 – Prince William Sound, Alaska, 9.2

    December 26, 2004 – Sumatra, Indonesia, 9.1

    March 11, 2011 – Honshu, Japan, 9.1

    November 4, 1952 – Kamchatka, Soviet Union, 9.0

    February 27, 2010 – Chile, 8.8

    January 31, 1906 – Ecuador, 8.8

    February 4, 1965 – Rat Islands, Alaska, 8.7

    August 15, 1950 – Assam, Tibet, 8.6

    April 11, 2012 – Northern Sumatra, Indonesia, 8.6

    March 28, 2005 – Northern Sumatra, Indonesia, 8.6

    March 9, 1957 – Andreanof Islands, Alaska, 8.6

    April 1, 1946 – Unimak Island, Alaska, 8.6

    February 1, 1938 – Banda Sea, Indonesia, 8.5

    November 11, 1922 – Chile-Argentina Border, 8.5

    October 13, 1963 – Kuril Islands, 8.5

    February 3, 1923 – Kamchatka, Soviet Union, 8.4

    September 12, 2007 – Southern Sumatra, Indonesia, 8.4

    June 23, 2001 – Arequipa, Peru, 8.4

    March 2, 1933 – Sanriku, Japan, 8.4

    January 12, 2010 – Haiti – 316,000 killed (magnitude 7.0). Other sources report 230,000.

    July 27, 1976 – Tangshan, China – 255,000 killed (7.5)

    December 26, 2004 – Sumatra, Indonesia – 227,898 killed in quake and resulting tsunami (9.1)

    December 16, 1920 – Haiyuan, China – 200,000 killed (7.8)

    September 1, 1923 – Kanto, Japan – 143,000 killed (7.9)

    October 5, 1948 – Ashgabat, Turkmenistan – 110,000 killed (7.3)

    May 12, 2008 – Eastern Sichuan, China – 87,587 killed (7.9)

    October 8, 2005 – Pakistan – 86,000 (7.6)

    December 28, 1908 – Messina, Italy – 70,000 (7.2)

    May 31, 1970 – Chimbote, Peru – 66,000 killed (7.9)

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  • Pentagon investigating how internal emails leaked for 2 weeks without its knowledge | CNN Politics

    Pentagon investigating how internal emails leaked for 2 weeks without its knowledge | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Pentagon is investigating how a trove of internal US Special Operations Command emails was apparently exposed publicly online and leaked unclassified data for nearly two weeks without the military’s knowledge, a Pentagon spokesperson told CNN.

    The Department of Defense’s chief information officer and the US military’s Cyber Command are investigating the root cause of the incident and “why this problem was not detected sooner,” US Navy Commander Jessica McNulty, a Pentagon spokesperson, told CNN Thursday night.

    The investigation follows an independent cybersecurity researcher’s discovery of three terabytes of Department of Defense unclassified emails sitting on the public internet, apparently due to a misconfiguration of a computer server and dating to February 8. That amount is equivalent to dozens of standard smart phones’ storage.

    CNN reported earlier this week that the military had launched a probe into the researcher’s report.

    Samples of the emails that the researcher, Anurag Sen, shared with CNN dated back years and included standard information about US military contracts and requests by Department of Defense employees to have their paperwork processed.

    It is not uncommon for large organizations to inadvertently expose internal data to the internet, but the fact that this was a Department of Defense email server will give US officials cause for concern.

    Special Operations Command is an elite Pentagon command responsible for counterterrorism and hostage rescue missions around the globe.

    The involvement of Cyber Command in the investigation underscores the greater prominence it has taken in securing the US military’s sprawling set of computer networks in recent years. More than a decade since its formation, the command has taken on a bigger role in hacking cybercriminal networks and foreign governments, but also in helping with defense of military computer networks.

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  • West Virginia brothers who brought bats to the US Capitol on January 6 sentenced | CNN Politics

    West Virginia brothers who brought bats to the US Capitol on January 6 sentenced | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Two West Virginia brothers who brought bats to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, were sentenced Thursday by a federal judge in Washington, DC.

    Eric Cramer, 43, who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in a restricted area and tried to grab a baton from a police officer, was sentenced to eight months in prison. His brother, Country Cramer, 38 – who entered the Capitol for two minutes on January 6 – was sentenced to 45 days of home detention after pleading guilty to unlawfully parading or picketing.

    The brothers traveled together to DC to support members of Congress who were contesting the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote in several states, according to their plea agreement.

    While at the Capitol, Eric Cramer – wearing a gas mask throughout the day and carrying with him a baseball bat – grabbed an officer’s baton and attempted to pull it from his hands before another officer came forward and Cramer backed away, the judge said during the hearing.

    Eric Cramer posted a photo on Facebook of a police baton which, he wrote, he took “from the cop that hit me with it … so I guess that’s my trophy,” according to court documents.

    Judge Randolph Moss told Eric Cramer the Justice Department could have charged him with a felony for interfering with law enforcement officers and that the baseball bat – though there is no evidence it was ever used as a weapon – concerned him greatly.

    Someone carrying a baseball bat, Moss said, was likely “engaging in threatening behavior unless they’re walking up to the plate.”

    “It is just more and more disturbing the more I see,” Moss said of the Capitol attack. “It was one of the most regrettable days in our country.”

    Before being sentenced, Eric Cramer apologized for his actions and said he understood how the bat could be seen as threatening, adding that he only brought it for protection after seeing how violent some protests had become over the previous year.

    “I know in my heart though that I was not there for negative anything,” Eric Cramer told the judge.

    According to investigators, the FBI received a tip from a classmate of Eric Cramer’s daughter, after she posted a photo of Cramer’s Facebook post bragging about the baton. “MY DAD YALL,” his daughter allegedly wrote, adding a rock-and-roll emoji along with one of an American flag.

    Prosecutors did not mention the baton during the sentencing Thursday and the plea agreement does not say whether the baton in the photo was stolen from an officer.

    Country Cramer brought a miniature baseball bat with him, which he told the judge he kept in his backpack while on Capitol grounds.

    Country Cramer told the judge, “Had I known how the day would have turned out on the 6th, I would have never of came.” He said he brought the small bat and wore a helmet because he expected to walk back to their car in the dark that night and “that can be a little scary” – citing past violent protests.

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  • DOJ seeks court sanctions against Google over ‘intentional destruction’ of chat logs | CNN Business

    DOJ seeks court sanctions against Google over ‘intentional destruction’ of chat logs | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Google should face court sanctions over “intentional and repeated destruction” of company chat logs that the US government expected to use in its antitrust case targeting Google’s search business, the Justice Department said Thursday.

    Despite Google’s promises to preserve internal communications relevant to the suit, for years the company maintained a policy of deleting certain employee chats automatically after 24 hours, DOJ said in a filing in District of Columbia federal court.

    The practice has harmed the US government’s case against the tech giant, DOJ alleged.

    “Google’s daily destruction of written records prejudiced the United States by depriving it of a rich source of candid discussions between Google’s executives, including likely trial witnesses,” the filing said.

    “We strongly refute the DOJ’s claims,” Google

    (GOOGL)     said in a statement. “Our teams have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation. In fact, we have produced over 4 million documents in this case alone, and millions more to regulators around the world.”

    The federal government’s call for sanctions adds to the pressure Google faces as it battles antitrust suits on multiple fronts, and highlights a rare move by prosecutors.

    Through a setting in its chat software, Google employees can save chat history for up to 18 months — but only if the setting is manually enabled, the US government said in its filing, adding that Google routinely trained and encouraged employees to discuss sensitive topics over chat messages they knew would be auto-deleted the next day.

    The filing cites several attached exhibits in which Google employees, sensing that a conversation was about to stray into sensitive territory, suggested that the discussion continue on the chat platform, with history turned off.

    The government’s filing follows a similar sanctions motion against Google by Epic Games, maker of the hit video game “Fortnite,” in a separate antitrust case related to Google’s app store. The two sides faced off in an evidentiary hearing last month; on Feb. 15, the judge in the case ordered Google to produce more chat messages.

    Thursday’s DOJ filing also cites the Epic evidentiary hearing, saying that it proved Google destroyed records of at least nine individuals who were each considered potential trial witnesses, and that the federal judge overseeing that case agreed the chats could have contained relevant evidence but that Google “did not systematically preserve those chats.”

    “Google admitted that — for litigations spanning the past five years — it has never preserved all chats for relevant individuals by turning chat history on,” the DOJ filing said.

    It was not until earlier this month that Google agreed to preserve the chats, the filing alleged, after failing to disclose to prosecutors its practice of deleting history-off chats after 24 hours.

    It is not the first time DOJ has tussled with Google over evidence. Last year, in the same case, the agency asked the court to sanction Google for a program known as “Communicate with Care,” in which the company allegedly trained employees to copy lawyers on emails as a way to claim attorney-client privilege on communications that were business sensitive but did not seek legal advice and did not merit confidentiality.

    While Judge Amit Mehta declined to issue sanctions at the time, he ordered that all of the emails in question be re-reviewed.

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  • 2 personal stories shed light on the unforeseen consequences of Brown v. Board of Education | CNN Politics

    2 personal stories shed light on the unforeseen consequences of Brown v. Board of Education | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Everett R. Berryman Jr. was 11 years old when the Supreme Court handed down the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which made racial segregation in public schools illegal.

    But supervisors in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where Berryman was attending public school, had no intention of complying. Five years later, in 1959, as Berryman was looking ahead to attending 7th grade, the county shuttered all public schools and opened a private school – for White children only. It would take five years, an intervention by the Department of Justice and another Supreme Court order, before integrated public schooling in Prince Edward County proceeded.

    Around the same time, in North Carolina, Dr. E.B. Palmer was working as the executive secretary of state for the North Carolina Teachers Association, advocating for Black teachers after Brown was decided.

    “When the school system said ‘separate but equal,’ that was fine,” Palmer recalled to CNN. “But when we moved a little further, they tried to say, ‘We don’t want Black teachers teaching White students.’”

    Nearly 40,000 teaching positions held by Black teachers in 17 southern and border states would be lost in the ensuring years, according to Samuel B. Ethridge, a National Education Association official who was a leader in the movement to integrate teacher organizations during the civil rights movement.

    Today, Brown v. Board of Education is remembered as a watershed moment in the history of America’s civil rights progress and the fight against systemic racism. But the ruling also had the unintended effect of leaving behind thousands of Black students and educators whose fates were not considered when America moved to reshape its education system.

    Berryman and Palmer shared their stories with CNN as part of the “History Refocused” series, which explores surprising and personal stories from America’s past that may bring new understanding of today’s conflicts.

    The Supreme Court officially struck down the legal basis for segregated classrooms in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a second, follow-up ruling a year later outlined the process for implementing school desegregation. In “Brown II,” the Supreme Court ordered district courts to enforce desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” reasoning that such language would provide local authorities with time to adjust to the new law of the land.

    Instead, those opposed to desegregation exploited the terms, including officials in Prince Edward County, who figured that by starving the local public school system of funding, they could do an end-run around the high court’s order by opening a private – and all-White – school.

    “Even in cases where White children or White families rather could not afford to attend the school, they even charged as little as a dollar to allow White students to attend school,” Dawn Williams, dean of Howard University’s School of Education, told CNN. “Now, for the Black community – something totally different for the Black community. There were no forms of public schooling.”

    To combat the lack of educational opportunities, members of the Black community in the area created a grassroots community center, which also served as a makeshift school, but it was not the real thing.

    Two years into the lockout, the Berryman family looked for other ways to keep their children in school. They tried to enroll their children in the neighboring county of Appomattox, Virginia, only to find out that they had to live in the county and present a valid address to do so. The next step was to move in with a family friend.

    At that point, Berryman was a 14-year-old who stood 6-foot-2 but was still in 7th grade, when he should have been in the 9th grade had he not missed out on years of public schooling.

    “I was the tallest guy in the whole school,” he recalled.

    Eventually, the Supreme Court had to become involved again. In 1964, it ruled that the time for desegregating schools “with all deliberate speed” had passed and that there was no justification for “denying these Prince Edward County school children their constitutional rights to an education equal to that afforded by the public schools in the other parts of Virginia.”

    Berryman and his family returned to Prince Edward County when the public schools reopened, and he remembered feeling “happy to be back home.” But there were constant reminders of the toll taken on the Black community.

    “We ran across students – all students were with us that hadn’t been in school for going on five years. And some of the students here began school at 10 years old. … And on the upper end, we had guys and girls graduating high school at 21 and 22 years old,” Berryman said. “So we had – it was like a kaleidoscope of pupils every which way in this grand scheme of school opening again.”

    Brown was intended to protect education opportunities for students. It didn’t say anything about teachers whose jobs would be soon jeopardized by school integration, when Black students often moved to White facilities that had superior conditions.

    In the wake of Brown, various tactics were used across the nation to undercut Black teachers and educators, from outright dismissals or demotions to forcing teachers to teach unfamiliar subjects or grades – making it easier to fire them based on poor performance.

    In Alabama, tenure rules were rewritten in several counties and teachers believed they were dismissed because of their participation in the civil rights movement, the NEA found in a 1965 report. North Carolina and South Carolina repealed their teachers’ continuing contract laws.

    “I had to spend day and night traveling all over the state following behind complaints of Black teachers being dismissed where schools were being desegregated,” recalled Palmer, the former official with the North Carolina Teachers Association.

    Ethridge, writing in the Negro Educational Review in 1979, found that by the mid-1970s, 39,386 teaching positions had been lost by Black teachers as a result of desegregation in 17 states, mostly in the South. In the 1970-71 school year alone, the cumulative loss in income to the Black community in those states totaled $240,564,911, the NAACP found.

    “The cumulative amount is staggering to the imagination,” Ethridge wrote in his research, noting that even as the Black student population grew in those years, the number of Black teachers decreased in those states.

    The Black teaching force has never recovered from the tremendous losses. In the 2017-18 school year, even though Whites accounted for less than half of the students in public schools – the result of a steady increase in diversity over the last 30 years – White teachers made up 79% of the workforce, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, down from 87% three decades earlier. The percentage of public school Black teachers – 7% in 2017-18 – decreased one percentage point over that same time period.

    “Sadly, the reasons for this disparity go far back, and a key impetus happened just as the nation attempted to fix our public education system,” Williams said.

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  • Russia to launch replacement spacecraft for astronauts stranded by coolant leak | CNN

    Russia to launch replacement spacecraft for astronauts stranded by coolant leak | CNN

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    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    Russia is gearing up to launch a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station that will replace a capsule that sprang a coolant leak in December, leaving two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut without a ride home.

    Liftoff of the capsule, called the Soyuz MS-23, is expected to occur out of Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 7:24 p.m. ET, which is 5:24 a.m. Friday local time. NASA will air coverage of the event beginning at 7 p.m. ET Thursday.

    The uncrewed spacecraft will spend two days in orbit, maneuvering toward the orbiting laboratory. It’s expected to dock with the Poisk module — which is on the space station’s Russian-run portion — just after 8 p.m. ET Saturday.

    The Soyuz MS-23 will be the return vehicle for cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, all of whom traveled to the space station aboard the Soyuz MS-22 capsule in September.

    About two months into the three men’s journey, the MS-22 experienced a coolant leak, leaving the cabin at temperatures deemed unsafe for the crewmates. The Russian space agency Roscosmos and NASA quickly worked to establish plans to send a replacement vehicle. Roscosmos officials said they had determined that the leak resulted from a small hole caused by an impact with a micrometeoroid.

    Plans to launch the rescue vehicle, however, were drawn into question when a Russian cargo ship, called Progress, experienced a similar coolant leak after docking with the space station on February 11. Three days later, Roscosmos had said in a post on the social media site Telegram, that it would delay the Soyuz MS-23 launch until at least March while the agency investigated the cause of the Progress vehicle’s coolant leak.

    On Tuesday, however, Roscosmos said in an updated Telegram post that it had determined the cause of the Progress spacecraft leak was “external influences.”

    “The Russians are continuing to take a very close look at both the Soyuz and the Progress coolant leaks,” Dana Weigel, the space station’s deputy manager for NASA, said during a Wednesday briefing.

    “They formed a state commission that is assessing the anomalies,” she added, noting that the team is analyzing potential causes from the time the capsules launched through their journey in orbit.

    Originally, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara were expected to launch to the space station on March 16 aboard MS-23.

    Instead, Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio’s time will be extended on the space station until they can return to Earth aboard Soyuz MS-23 later this year. That return could happen in September, according to a report from Russia state-run media outlet TASS.

    If that timeline holds, the three crewmates will have extended their expected six-month stay in space to about one year.

    When asked about the extended stay, Joel Montalbano, the space station’s program manager for NASA, said the crew remains in good health and there is no reason to expedite their journey home.

    The crew is “willing to help wherever we ask,” Montalbano said during a January 11 news conference. “They’re excited to be in space, excited to work and excited to do the research that we do on orbit. So they are ready to go with whatever decision that we give them.”

    He added, “I may have to fly some more ice cream to reward them.”

    The launch of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft comes just days before NASA and SpaceX will launch their Crew-6 mission. Expected to lift off early Monday morning, Crew-6 will carry NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg as well as Sultan Alneyadi, an astronaut with the United Arab Emirates, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

    Shortly after those four arrive at the space station, NASA’s Crew-5 astronauts will return home from their five-month stay there aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. NASA officials said this week that the coolant leaks experienced on the Soyuz and Progress vehicles would not have any impact on the SpaceX missions and that no similar issues were discovered on Crew Dragon vehicles.

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  • Proud Boy testifies in sedition trial about far-right group being the ‘tip of the spear’ on January 6 | CNN Politics

    Proud Boy testifies in sedition trial about far-right group being the ‘tip of the spear’ on January 6 | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The sole Proud Boy to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy in connection to the US Capitol riot testified on Wednesday that members of the far-right organization believed the country was barreling toward revolution and that they were the “tip of the spear.”

    Jeremy Bertino, a top lieutenant to Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, testified as part of a cooperation deal that he struck with prosecutors against Tarrio and four other members of the Proud Boys charged with conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

    “We had a big fight on our hands. It was going to be an uphill battle, and everyone had turned against us,” Bertino testified. “My belief was that we had to take the reins and pretty much be the leaders that we had been building ourselves up to be.”

    His testimony allowed prosecutors to show jurors how the events of January 6, 2021, unfolded in the mind of a top member of the organization as he watched it online from his North Carolina home, sending messages to his “brothers” about targeting then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assuring them that members of the far-left group Antifa weren’t there to stop them.

    Some of the messages featured in court were from defendants in the case, whom Bertino said he would “take a bullet for.” But Bertino and the five defendants – Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola – rarely made eye contact during the testimony.

    There was not a premeditated or specific plan to storm the Capitol, Bertino testified, adding that getting the Proud Boys to communicate and work together was like “herding cats.” The Proud Boys had several group messages from the days before the riot where members mentioned descending on the Capitol building, according to exhibits shown by prosecutors.

    As court challenges to the 2020 election failed, members of the Proud Boys – who saw themselves as the “foot soldiers of the right” – began to believe the country was headed toward an “all-out revolution,” Bertino testified.

    “I felt it coming,” he said.

    The Proud Boys believed that the government was controlled by “commies,” he testified, and they began to turn against the police, whom the group increasingly saw as their enemy. Everybody in the organization felt “desperate,” including Tarrio, Bertino told the jury.

    “His tones were calculated,” Bertino said of Tarrio. “Cold, but very determined. He felt the exact same way that I did.”

    Members also were inspired by then-President Donald Trump’s reference to their organization in a 2020 presidential debate, where he told the group to “stand back and stand by.” Bertino testified that there were “nonstop requests for membership” after the debate, specifically from people who wanted to attend rallies, and that the group did less vetting of new members to keep up with applications.

    During cross examination, Bertino said that he thought the Proud Boys had a goal to stop the 2020 election but had no knowledge of how that goal would be achieved.

    “I didn’t have a direct idea of where they were going, how they were going to get there.”

    Bertino was not in Washington, DC, on the day of the riot because he was at home recovering from a stab wound he suffered during a previous pro-Trump rally, but he testified that he watched on a livestream video. He saw the mob as starting the “next American revolution,” and told others Proud Boys he was brought to tears during the attack.

    “I was happy, excited, in awe and disbelief that people were doing what they said they would do,” Bertino told the jury. When the crowd descended on the Capitol building, “it meant that we influenced people, the normies, enough to make them stand for themselves and take back their country and take back their freedom,” he said.

    In chats to other Proud Boys, Bertino encouraged members to move forward, telling them that he could see the Capitol building on a livestream and that no members of Antifa would be at the building to stop the pro-Trump mob.

    Bertino also messaged: “They need to get peloton” – which he testified was a misspelled reference to Pelosi. “She was the talking head of the opposition and they needed to remove her from power,” he said.

    By the evening of January 6, Bertino grew angry at Trump supporters for leaving the Capitol building, he told the jury.

    “The way I felt at the moment, if we give that building up, we were giving up our country,” Bertino testified. He sent encrypted messages to other Proud Boys members, saying that “we failed,” and “Half measures mean nothing,” and, referring to lawmakers inside the Capitol, “Fuck fear: They need to be hung.”

    “Once they took that step, there was no coming back from it,” Bertino testified Wednesday. “And they decided basically to balk and walk away after creating all that chaos down there.”

    “The revolution had failed,” he continued, “because the House was still going to go on and certify the election.”

    Bertino told the jury that after January 6, he tried to delete what he saw as incriminating messages on his phone and he wasn’t fully truthful with FBI agents when they asked him about the Capitol attack.

    “I guess it’s a natural instinct to protect yourself and protect those you love,” Bertino testified.

    “I love them,” he said of the five defendants. “I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to them. Still don’t.”

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  • Steve Bannon’s ex-lawyers sue him over nearly $500,000 in unpaid legal bills | CNN Politics

    Steve Bannon’s ex-lawyers sue him over nearly $500,000 in unpaid legal bills | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A law firm that represented former Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon during his fight against a subpoena from the House January 6 committee and other cases is suing Bannon for nearly $500,000 in unpaid legal bills.

    The lawsuit states that Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP worked for Bannon from November 2020 through November 2022 and represented him on several high-profile cases, including investigations into Bannon’s crowdfunding border-wall effort and the subpoena from the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.

    “This action simply seeks payment of an outstanding bill for legal services rendered in the amount of $480,487.87 in addition to scheduling a hearing on the reasonable attorneys’ fees DHC is contractually entitled to as the prevailing party in this litigation,” the law firm wrote.

    Bannon’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

    While Trump pardoned Bannon in the federal border wall case, the Manhattan DA’s office announced an indictment last year charging Bannon with state charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering related to the effort. Bannon has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

    The lawyers representing him in that case – from a different firm – have sought to withdraw from representing him and said there were “irreconcilable differences.” Bannon is due in court next week to update the judge on his efforts to find new lawyers.

    In his criminal case related to the House January 6 investigation, a jury convicted Bannon of failing to turn over documents and appearing for testimony last summer. Bannon has appealed his contempt of Congress conviction for defying the committee’s subpoena.

    Robert Costello, an attorney at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, had represented Bannon opposite the House subpoena, but became a witness in the case so Bannon had a different legal team at trial.

    The Davidoff firm said in the lawsuit that its “bills for fees and expenses totaled $855,487.87. Defendant paid only $375,000.00 of the total bill leaving a total of $480,487.87 outstanding.”

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  • Capitol rioter who tweeted threat to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez sentenced to 38 months in prison | CNN Politics

    Capitol rioter who tweeted threat to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez sentenced to 38 months in prison | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A Texas man was sentenced to more than three years in prison Wednesday for assaulting police officers during the US Capitol riot and threatening Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter shortly after the attack.

    Garret Miller, 36, pleaded guilty in December to charges related to his conduct on January 6, 2021. He was arrested weeks after the riot – on Inauguration Day – while wearing a shirt that said: “I was there, Washington, D.C., January 6, 2021.”

    According to court documents, Miller brought gear with him to DC, including a rope, a grappling hook and a mouth guard, and prosecutors said he was “at the forefront of every barrier overturned, police line overrun, and entryway breached within his proximity that day.” Miller was detained twice during the riot, according to court documents.

    When he left the Capitol building, he took the fight to Twitter, according to court documents. In response to a tweet from Ocasio-Cortez calling for then-President Donald Trump’s impeachment, Miller responded: “Assassinate AOC.”

    “At the time that I tweeted at the Congresswoman, I intended that the communication be perceived as a serious intent to commit violence against the Congresswoman,” Miller said in court documents as part of his guilty plea. He also levied threats against the officer who shot and killed a pro-Trump rioter during the melee, according to court documents, saying that he wanted to “hug his neck with a nice rope.”

    Clint Broden, Miller’s laywer, said in a statement to CNN that the sentence “ultimately reflects Judge Nichols careful consideration of the case,” and said that his client “has expressed his sincere remorse for his actions.”

    Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the nature of Garret Miller’s guilty plea.

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