Coahoma and Warren Counties highlight a sustainable, community-driven model for increasing digital readiness and opportunity.
NORTH CONWAY, N.H., April 22, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– Digitunity, a national nonprofit focused on closing the digital divide through expanding computer ownership, has released a new case study about its recent work in Coahoma and Warren Counties, Mississippi. The report details a collaborative effort to expand computer ownership, digital skills training, and affordable internet in rural communities that face some of the country’s highest rates of digital disconnection.
In partnership with the Mississippi Broadband Association(MSBA), AT&T, and local community organizations, Digitunity helped distribute refurbished laptops and fostered sustainable pathways to computer ownership. By combining computer access with digital literacy instruction and localized support, the initiative helps build a community-centered model known as a Sustainable Device Ecosystem.
“We know that access to a computer is more than a convenience; it’s a gateway to opportunity,” said Scot Henley, Executive Director at Digitunity. “This case study shows what’s possible when communities come together to build their own digital future.”
The need is urgent. In 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 1 in 4 households in Mississippi lacked access to a large-screen computer or relied only on a smartphone for internet connectivity. That figure rose to 39% in Coahoma County, while in Warren County, 25.3% of households faced the same barrier.
Digitunity’s work in Mississippi reflects its role as a field catalyst, helping rural communities create systems they can adopt, sustain, and lead independently. The model documented in this case study offers a replicable framework for practitioners, funders, and policymakers focused on long-term digital access strategies.
Key Highlights from the Case Study
As of January 2025, more than 500 refurbished laptops have been distributed or are scheduled for deployment across Coahoma and Warren Counties through various community-driven initiatives outlined in the case study.
Community-based pathways to computer ownership were integrated with workforce development and digital skills training through local institutions
Launch of a Digital Opportunity Fund reinvests in local access and training
About Digitunity Digitunity is a national nonprofit organization with a mission to make owning a computer possible for everyone. For over 40 years, Digitunity has been engaged in the work of shaping and strengthening systems to address computer ownership among those impacted by the digital divide. Through generating and placing donated computers with organizations serving people in need, supporting a national practitioner network, and providing strategic advisory support to states and cities, Digitunity works to create sustainable solutions that make computer ownership possible for all.
The leading national nonprofit devoted to computer access partners with AT&T and Chicanos Por La Causa Parenting Arizona to connect families in six Arizona communities with 120 computers, giving them access to educational and employment resources.
NORTH CONWAY, N.H., April 9, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– Digitunity, a national nonprofit with a mission to make computer ownership possible for everyone, announced today that it has begun distributing 120 laptop computers to families across six rural Arizona communities, in partnership with AT&T and Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC) Parenting Arizona.
This effort is part of Digitunity’s AT&T Rural project, designed to increase access to digital services by providing free and low-cost computers to rural families who lacked such devices. It demonstrates Digitunity’s commitment to addressing the digital divide through partnering with trusted community-based organizations to deliver solutions and shape systems to eliminate barriers to computer ownership and empower people with digital opportunity.
In this initiative, the Digitunity AT&T Rural project has partnered with the CPLC Parenting Arizona initiative to provide computers to families with children from prenatal to 5 years old. The new computers will enable the young families to participate in virtual visits with Parent Educators, access online healthcare resources, and engage with educational activities essential to their children’s early development.
“As more services like appointment scheduling and applications shift online, computers become a critical bridge for families to access these resources,” said Jennifer Goodall, program director at CPLC Parenting Arizona. “Some families may need more guidance in using technology, while others simply need the tools to help themselves.”
By bringing digital tools into homes, Digitunity and its partners are addressing an urgent need in Arizona. More than 340,000 households – about 12% of the state – do not own a large-screen computing device. And nearly one-quarter of the state’s residents said a lack of access to computers or other digital devices prevented them from using the internet, according to Arizona’s Digital Equity Plan.
“Families in the rural parts of Arizona have two different obstacles: a gap in resources and a method to access the resources available,” said Renato Ramos, associate director at CPLC Parenting Arizona. “Every family has strengths that our teams focus on to help families navigate whatever situation they may be facing. Having a computer to find a job, update information for their kids’ school, or anything else they can work through themselves, helps to build upon these strengths and that feeling of pride in themselves.”
The initiative is already underway, with CPLC Parenting Arizona staff beginning laptop distribution in late March 2025 via its established Home Visitation program. The project will deliver 75 laptops to La Paz-Mohave, 23 to Sierra Vista, 10 to Flagstaff, six to Globe, and six to Hopi. Through the home visits, CPLC staff will help families build valuable digital skills and connect to essential support services for parents and children.
For families in CPLC’s Home Visitation program, the laptops will allow them to conduct virtual visits with Parent Educators, participate in monthly group connections on topics like dental health and child nutrition, and access developmental activities for children up to age 5. This evidence-based program helps children develop a strong foundation for kindergarten.
For families in CPLC’s Family Support Coordination program, the laptops represent pathways to self-sufficiency. Parents can now more easily apply for employment, complete online GED courses, conduct virtual check-ins with coordinators, and research and access essential services like WIC, SNAP, and housing assistance.
Through collaborations like this project, Digitunity continues to advance its mission of eliminating barriers to digital opportunity. By equipping people with computers and devices they lack, Digitunity, AT&T, and CPLC Parenting Arizona empower families with the means to succeed in the modern digital economy.
For more information about Digitunity’s programs and initiatives, visit www.digitunity.org.
About Digitunity Digitunity is a national nonprofit organization with a mission to make owning a computer possible for everyone. For over 40 years, Digitunity has been engaged in the work of shaping and strengthening systems to address the computer needs of those impacted by the digital divide. Through generating and placing donated computers with organizations serving people in need, supporting a national practitioner network, and providing strategic advisory support to states and cities, Digitunity works to create sustainable solutions that make computer ownership possible for all.
Donald Trump’s renewed pledge on social media and in campaign rallies to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has put him on a collision course with a widening circle of Republican constituencies directly benefiting from the law.
In 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the ACA, also known as Obamacare, they faced the core contradiction that many of the law’s principal beneficiaries were people and institutions that favored the GOP. That list included lower-middle-income workers without college degrees, older adults in the final years before retirement, and rural communities.
In the years since then, the number of people in each of those groups relying on the ACA has grown. More than 40 million Americans now receive health coverage through the law, about 50 percent more than the roughly 27 million the ACA covered during the repeal fight in 2017. In the intervening years, nine more states, most of them reliably Republican, have accepted the law’s federal funding to expand access to Medicaid for low-income working adults.
“Republicans came very close to repealing and replacing the ACA in 2017, but that may have been their best window before the law had fully taken hold and so many people have benefited from it,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan think tank that studies health-care issues, told me. “I think it gets harder and harder to repeal as more people benefit.”
Trump’s repeated declarations over the past several weeks that he intends to finally repeal the ACA if reelected surprised many Republicans. Few GOP leaders have talked about uprooting the law since the party’s last effort failed, during Trump’s first year as president. At that point, Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress. But whereas the House, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, narrowly voted to rescind the law, the Senate narrowly rejected repeal. Three GOP senators blocked the repeal effort by voting no—including the late Senator John McCain, who dramatically doomed the proposal by signaling thumbs-down on the Senate floor. (Trump mocked McCain while calling the ACA “a catastrophe” as he campaigned in Iowa last weekend.)
Republicans lost any further opportunity to repeal the law in the 2018 election when Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. With the legislative route blocked, Trump instead pursued an array of regulatory and legal efforts to weaken the ACA during his final years in office. But since the 2017 vote, the GOP has never again held the unified control of the White House, the House, and the Senate required to launch a serious legislative repeal effort.
If Republicans did win unified control of Congress and the White House next November, most health-care experts I spoke with agreed that Trump would follow through on his promises to again target the ACA. Leslie Dach, the founder of Protect Our Care, a liberal group that supports the law, says that he takes Trump’s pledge to pursue repeal seriously, “because he is still trying to overturn the legacy of John McCain, and it’s one of the few things he lost. He doesn’t like to be a loser.”
Trump hasn’t specified his plan to replace the ACA. But whatever alternative Trump develops will inevitably face one of the main problems that confounded Republicans’ last attempt at repeal: Every plan they put forward raised costs and diminished access to care for core groups in their electoral coalition.
That was apparent in the contrast between how the ACA and the GOP alternatives treated the individual insurance market. The ACA created exchanges where the uninsured could buy coverage, provided them with subsidies to help them afford it, and changed the rules about what kind of policies insurers could sell them. Key among those changes were provisions that barred insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting health conditions, required them to offer a broad package of essential health benefits in all policies, and prevented them from charging older consumers more than three times the premiums of younger people.
The common effect of all these and many other requirements was to require greater risk sharing in the insurance markets. The ACA made coverage in the individual insurance market more available and affordable for older and sicker consumers partly by requiring younger and healthier consumers to purchase more expensive and comprehensive plans than they might have bought before the law went into effect. That shift generated complaints from relatively younger and healthier consumers in the ACA’s early years as their premiums increased.
Every alternative that Republicans proposed during the Trump years sought to lower premiums by unraveling the ACA provisions that required more sharing of risks and costs. For instance, the House GOP plan allowed insurers to charge seniors five times as much as young people, reduced the number of guaranteed essential benefits, and allowed states to exempt insurers from the requirement to cover all applicants with preexisting health conditions.
One problem the GOP faced was that althoughthis approach might have lowered premiums for the young and healthy (albeit while leaving them with less comprehensive coverage), it would have significantly raised costs and reduced access for the old or sick. “A lot of ‘repeal and replace’ was putting more cost back on people with health-care problems,” Linda Blumberg, an institute fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, told me. The Rand Corporation calculated that for individuals with modest incomes, the House GOP plan would have cut premiums for the majority of those under age 45 while raising them for virtually everyone older than 45. The Congressional Budget Office, in its assessment of the House-passed GOP bill, projected that it would nearly double the number of people without health insurance by 2026, and that the greatest coverage losses would happen “among older people with lower income.”
As I wrote in 2017, the paradox was that the Republican plans would have hurt older working-age adults—a preponderantly GOP-leaning constituency—while lowering costs for younger generations that mostly vote Democratic. I called this inversion the “Trumpcare conundrum.”
Until the ACA, Medicaid was generally available only to adults earning less than the federal poverty level. But the law provided states with generous federal financing to expand coverage to low-income individuals earning up to 138 percent of the poverty level. Particularly in interior states, research showed that many of those low-income workers covered under the Medicaid expansion were white people without a college degree, the cornerstone of the modern Republican electoral coalition.
Another big beneficiary from the Medicaid expansion was rural communities, which have become more reliably Republican in the Trump years. Expanding access to Medicaid was especially important to rural places because studies have consistently found that more people in those areas than in metropolitan centers suffer from chronic health problems, while fewer obtain health insurance from their employer, and more lack insurance altogether.
The increased number of people covered under Medicaid gave rural hospitals a lifeline by reducing the amount of uncompensated care they needed to provide for patients lacking insurance. “When you go out to the rural areas, frankly most hospital executives, like other business people, they tend to be pretty conservative,” Timothy McBride, a co-director of the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. “And they don’t like government intervention. But I would go to see these people and they would say, ‘I’m for Medicaid expansion,’ because they had to deal with the uninsured.”
The Medicaid expansion also quickly became a crucial source of financing for addiction treatment in states ravaged through the 2010s by the opioid epidemic. Before the ACA, addiction treatment programs relied on “a little bit of block grant money here, a local voucher there, kind of out-of-pocket payments, and a little bit of spit and glue,” Brendan Saloner, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies addiction, told me. “Then Medicaid came along, and it provided a much more reliable and stable source of payment.”
Since the 2017 legislative battle, the ACA’s impact on all these fronts has only deepened. Biden and congressional Democrats both increased the federal subsidies to buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges and expanded eligibility to families further into the middle class. Largely as a result, the number of people obtaining insurance through the exchanges soared from about 10 million then to more than 15 million as of this past December.
Similarly, a majority of the 31 states that had expanded Medicaid by 2017 were solidly Democratic-leaning. But the nine additional states that have broadened eligibility since then include seven that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.
That has not only increased the total number of low-income workers covered through the Medicaid expansion (from about 16 million then to well over 24 million now), but also broadened the red-state constituency for the ACA. McBride estimates that the federal government has annually pumped $2 billion into the health-care system in Missouri alone since voters there approved a Medicaid expansion in 2020. The federal Department of Health and Human Services recently calculated that the likelihood of rural hospitals closing was more than twice as high in the states that have refused to expand Medicaid than in those that have. Simultaneously, the amount of funding that Medicaid provides for the treatment of substance abuse has at least doubled since 2014, allowing it to serve nearly 5 million people, according to calculations by Tami Mark, a distinguished fellow in behavioral health at RTI International, a nonprofit independent research institute.
Even more fundamentally, Blumberg argues, the pandemic showed the ACA’s value as a safety net. Through either the exchanges or Medicaid, the law provided coverage to millions who lost their job, and insurance, during the crisis. “This law was critical in protecting us from unforeseen circumstances even beyond the value that people had seen in 2017,” she told me. “If we had not had that in place, we would have seen massive amounts of uninsurance and people who could not have accessed vaccines and could not have accessed medical care when they became sick.”
For all of these reasons and more, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, told me that he believes it’s a mistake for Trump and the GOP to seek repeal once again. Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, remains critical of the ACA, which he says has not done enough to improve the quality of coverage or control costs.
But, he points out, during the Trump years, Republicans succeeded in repealing some of the law’s elements that they disliked most, including the tax penalty on uninsured people who did not buy coverage. “I don’t think we should be happy with the current system,” Holtz-Eakin told me. “But it’s not fruitful to try to roll the clock back to 2010.”
Beyond the policy challenges of excising the ACA from the health-care system, the political landscape also appears less hospitable to a renewed repeal drive. In 2017, KFF polling found that the share of Americans who viewed the law favorably only slightly exceeded the share dubious of it; in the group’s most recent survey measuring attitudes toward the law, more than three-fifths of Americans expressed favorable views, while only slightly more than one-third viewed it negatively. Support for individual provisions in the law, such as the ban on denying coverage because of preexisting conditions or the requirement that insurers allow kids to stay on their parents’ plans through age 26, runs even higher in polls.
Yet even with all these obstacles, Trump’s promise to seek repeal again virtually ensures another round of the ACA war next year if Republicans win unified control of the federal government. By historical standards, that’s a remarkable, even unprecedented, prospect. Though Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, had opposed the creation of Medicare, for instance, no Republican presidential nominee ever proposed to repeal it after Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1965.
If Trump wins the nomination, by contrast, it would mark the fourth consecutive time the GOP nominee has run on ending the ACA. (Among Trump’s main competitors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also promised to produce an alternative to the ACA, and Nikki Haley, who has spoken less definitively on the topic, might feel irresistible pressure to embrace repeal too.) Congressional Republicans may have been surprised that Trump committed them to charging up that hill again, but that doesn’t mean they would refuse his command to do so. “He wants to reverse a loss and take it off the books,” Dach told me. “And we’ve learned that that party follows him. It’s not like they are going to stand up against him, especially in the House. They will destroy the law if they can.”
The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.
The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.
The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state.
In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.
These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. Particularly since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s national leader, Republicans have solidified their hold on exurban, small-town, and rural communities, whose populations tend to be predominantly white and Christian and many of whose economies are reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture. Democrats, in turn, are consolidating their advantage inside almost all of the nation’s largest metro areas, which tend to be more racially diverse, more secular, and more integrated into the expanding 21st-century Information Age economy.
New data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, show, in fact, that the counties that voted against the proposed abortion restrictions are the places driving most economic growth in their states. Using data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Brookings Metro at my request calculated the share of total state economic output generated by the counties that voted for and against abortion rights in five of these recent contests. The results were striking: Brookings found that the counties supporting abortion rights accounted for more than four-fifths of the total state GDP in Michigan, more than three-fourths in Kansas, exactly three-fourths in Ohio, and more than three-fifths in both Kentucky and Wisconsin.
“We are looking at not only two different political systems but two different economies as well within the same states,” Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings Metro, told me.
The Ohio vote demonstrated again that abortion is extending the fault line between those diverging systems, with stark electoral implications. Concerns that Republicans would try to ban abortion helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 elections in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, particularly in well-educated suburbs around major cities. Democrats won four of the six governor contests and four of the five U.S. Senate races in those states despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s job performance. Even if voters remain unhappy on both of those fronts in 2024, Democratic strategists are cautiously optimistic that fear of Republicans attempting to impose a national abortion ban will remain a powerful asset for Biden and the party’s other candidates.
When given the chance to weigh in on the issue directly, voters in communities of all sizes have displayed resistance to banning abortion. As Philip Bump of The Washington Postcalculated this week, the share of voters supporting abortion rights exceeded Biden’s share of the vote in 500 of the 510 counties that have cast ballots on the issue since last year (outside of Vermont, which Bump did not include in his analysis).
But across these states, most smaller counties still voted against legal abortion, including this last week in Ohio. A comprehensive analysis of the results by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that in Ohio’s rural counties, more than three-fifths of voters still backed Issue 1.
Opponents of Issue 1 overcame that continued resistance with huge margins in the state’s largest urban and suburban counties. Most voters rejected Issue 1 in 14 of the 17 counties that cast the most ballots this week, including all seven that cast the absolute most votes (according to the ranking posted by The New York Times). In several of those counties, voters opposed Issue 1 by ratios of 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.
Equally striking were the results in suburban counties around the major cities, almost all of which usually lean toward the GOP. Big majorities opposed Issue 1 in several large suburban counties that Trump won in 2020 (including Delaware and Lorain). Even in more solidly Republican suburban counties that gave Trump more than 60 percent of their vote (Butler, Warren, and Clermont), the “yes” side on Issue 1 eked out only a very narrow win. Turnout in those big urban and suburban counties was enormous as well.
Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says the suburban performance may signal an important shift for the party. One reason that Ohio has trended more solidly Republican than other states in the region, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he argues, is that women in Ohio have not moved toward Democrats in the Trump era as much as women in those other states have. But, he told me, the “no” side on Issue 1 could not have run as well as it did in the big suburban counties without significant improvement among independent and even Republican-leaning women. “In Ohio, women who were not necessarily following the Great Lakes–state trends, I think, now woke up and realized, Aha, we better take action,” Rusnak said.
The Ohio results followed the pattern evident in the other states that have held elections directly affecting abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court decision. In Kansas, abortion-rights supporters carried all six of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Kentucky and Michigan votes, abortion-rights supporters carried eight of the 10 counties that cast the most votes, and in California they carried the 14 counties with the highest vote totals. Montana doesn’t have as many urban centers as these other states, but its anti-abortion ballot measure was defeated with majority opposition in all three of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Wisconsin state-supreme-court race this spring, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, who centered her campaign on an unusually explicit pledge to support legal abortion, carried seven of the 10 highest-voting counties. (All of these figures are from the New York Times ranking of counties in those states’ results.) For Republicans hoping to regain ground in urban and suburban communities, abortion has become “a huge challenge because they really are on the wrong side of the issue” with those voters, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.
The results in these abortion votes reflect what I’ve called the “class inversion” in American politics. That’s the modern dynamic in which Democrats are running best in the most economically dynamic places in and around the largest cities. Simultaneously, Republicans are relying more on economically struggling communities that generally resist and resent the cultural and demographic changes that are unfolding mostly in those larger metros.
Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, has described this process to me as Republicans exchanging “the country club for the country.” In some states, trading reduced margins in large suburbs for expanded advantages in small towns and rural areas has clearly improved the GOP position. That’s been true in such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, as well as in Texas, Iowa, Montana, and, more tenuously, North Carolina. Ohio has fit squarely in that category as well, with GOP gains among blue-collar voters, particularly in counties along the state’s eastern border, propelling its shift from the quintessential late-20th-century swing state to its current position as a Republican redoubt.
But that reconfiguration just as clearly hurt Republicans in other states, such as Colorado and Virginia earlier in this century and Arizona and Georgia more recently. Growing strength in the largest communities has even allowed Democrats to regain the edge in each of the three pivotal Rust Belt states Trump in 2016 dislodged from the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In 2022, Democrats swept the governorships in all three states, and won a Senate race as well in Pennsylvania. Support for legal abortion was central to all of those victories: Just over three-fifths of voters in each state said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances and vast majorities of them backed the Democratic candidates, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media outlets. The numbers were almost identical in Arizona, where just over three-fifths of voters also backed abortion rights, and commanding majorities of them supported the winning Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator.
Those races made clear that protecting abortion rights was a powerful issue in 2022 for Democrats in blue-leaning or purple states where abortion mostly remains legal. But, as I’ve written, the issue proved much less potent in the more solidly red-leaning states that banned abortion: Republican governors and legislators who passed severe abortion bans cruised to reelection in states including Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Exit polls found that in those more reliably Republican states, even a significant minority of voters who described themselves as pro-choice placed greater priority on other issues, among them crime and immigration, and supported Republican governors who signed abortion restrictions or bans.
Ohio exemplified that trend as powerfully as any state. Though the exit polls showed that nearly three-fifths of voters said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, Republican Governor Mike DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the state’s six-week abortion ban. Republican J. D. Vance, who supported a national abortion ban, nonetheless attracted the votes of about one-third of self-described voters who said they supported abortion rights in his winning Ohio Senate campaign last year, the exit polls found.
The fate of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s facing reelection in 2024, may turn on whether he can win a bigger share of the voters who support abortion rights there, as Democrats did last year in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. (The same is likely true for Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Republican-leaning Montana, another state that voted down an anti-abortion ballot initiative last year.)
Brown has some reasons for optimism. After the defeat of Issue 1 last week, the follow-on ballot initiative in November to restore abortion rights in the state will keep the issue front and center. The two leading Republican candidates to oppose Brown are each staunch abortion opponents; Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the probable front-runner in the GOP race, was the chief public advocate for last week’s failed initiative. Most encouraging for Brown, the “no” vote on Issue 1 in the state’s biggest suburban counties far exceeded not only Biden’s performance in the same places in 2020, but also Brown’s own numbers in his last reelection, in 2018.
For Brown, and virtually every Democrat in a competitive statewide race next year, the road to victory runs through strong showings in such large urban and suburban counties. Given the persistence of discontent over the economy, it will be particularly crucial for Biden to generate big margins among suburban voters who support abortion rights in the very few states likely to decide control of the White House. The resounding defeat of Issue 1 this week showed again that Republicans, in their zeal to revoke the right to legal abortion, have handed Biden and other Democrats their most powerful argument to move those voters.
A rural Texas high school that had postponed graduation after only five of 33 seniors initially met requirements says a majority of seniors are now on track to graduate on June 22.
Marlin Independent School District Superintendent Darryl J. Henson told CNN Tuesday that 33 of 38 seniors at Marlin High School this week met all requirements for graduation.
“The remaining five seniors are attending our extended school year program and are on-track to complete all requirements before the June 22 graduation date,” Henson said via email.
“We knew that with extra support and accountability, all seniors would meet the requirements outlined by the Texas Education Agency,” Henson added.
Marlin ISD serves 880 student in Marlin, about 25 miles southeast of Waco.
The district had announced late last month the small high school had to postpone its graduation ceremony after an end-of-year review revealed only five seniors had met the requirements to graduate, according to the superintendent.
The district rescheduled the ceremony for June, according to a letter posted on Facebook on May 24. “The decision by the high school to postpone graduation will provide more time for students to meet necessary requirements for graduation,” it said.
Many students at the school “did not meet requirements due to attendance or grades,” the letter stated.
The school district added in the notice that it has “affirmed its commitment to providing necessary resources and support for students.
Henson had called a mandatory meeting for parents of seniors last month.
“The state of Texas has guidelines for graduation,” Henson said at the meeting. “This is not a dance floor. … It’s not a homecoming pep rally. This is graduation.”
After some students made up classroom hours and assignments last month, 17 additional students were made eligible for graduation in June, according to Henson at the time.
The community responded with an informal graduation ceremony at a church on May 27, the day the students were originally meant to graduate, according to CNN affiliate KWTX. Some family members flew in from as far as Mexico for the canceled graduation and would be unable to make a second trip for the rescheduled ceremony in June, KWTX reported.
According to Marlin High Schools’ Texas Schools report card, 98.7% of the school’s students come from an economically disadvantaged background. A total of 229 students were enrolled at the school in the 2021-22 school year.
When Kentaro Yokobori was born almost seven years ago, he was the first newborn in the Sogio district of Kawakami village in 25 years. His birth was like a miracle for many villagers.
Well-wishers visited his parents Miho and Hirohito for more than a week – nearly all of them senior citizens, including some who could barely walk.
“The elderly people were very happy to see [Kentaro], and an elderly lady who had difficulty climbing the stairs, with her cane, came to me to hold my baby in her arms. All the elderly people took turns holding my baby,” Miho recalled.
During that quarter century without a newborn, the village population shrank by more than half to just 1,150 – down from 6,000 as recently as 40 years ago – as younger residents left and older residents died. Many homes were abandoned, some overrun by wildlife.
Kawakami is just one of the countless small rural towns and villages that have been forgotten and neglected as younger Japanese head for the cities. More than 90% of Japanese now live in urban areas like Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto – all linked by Japan’s always-on-time Shinkansen bullet trains.
That has left rural areas and industries like agriculture, forestry, and farming facing a critical labor shortage that will likely get worse in the coming years as the workforce ages. By 2022, the number of people working in agriculture and forestry had declined to 1.9 million from 2.25 million 10 years earlier.
Yet the demise of Kawakami is emblematic of a problem that goes far beyond the Japanese countryside.
The problem for Japan is: people in the cities aren’t having babies either.
“Time is running out to procreate,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a recent press conference, a slogan that seems so far to have fallen short of inspiring the city dwelling majority of the Japanese public.
Amid a flood of disconcerting demographic data, he warned earlier this year the country was “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions.”
The country saw 799,728 births in 2022, the lowest number on record and barely more than half the 1.5 million births it registered in 1982. Its fertility rate – the average number of children born to women during their reproductive years – has fallen to 1.3 – far below the 2.1 required to maintain a stable population. Deaths have outpaced births for more than a decade.
And in the absence of meaningful immigration – foreigners accounted for just 2.2% of the population in 2021, according to the Japanese government, compared to 13.6% in the United States – some fear the country is hurtling toward the point of no return, when the number of women of child-bearing age hits a critical low from which there is no way to reverse the trend of population decline.
All this has left the leaders of the world’s third-largest economy facing the unenviable task of trying to fund pensions and health care for a ballooning elderly population even as the workforce shrinks.
Up against them are the busy urban lifestyles and long working hours that leave little time for Japanese to start families and the rising costs of living that mean having a baby is simply too expensive for many young people. Then there are the cultural taboos that surround talking about fertility and patriarchal norms that work against mothers returning to work.
Doctor Yuka Okada, the director of Grace Sugiyama Clinic in Tokyo, said cultural barriers meant talking about a woman’s fertility was often off limits.
“(People see the topic as) a little bit embarrassing. Think about your body and think about (what happens) after fertility. It is very important. So, it’s not embarrassing.”
Okada is one of the rare working mothers in Japan who has a highly successful career after childbirth. Many of Japan’s highly educated women are relegated to part-time or retail roles – if they reenter the workforce at all. In 2021, 39% of women workers were in part-time employment, compared to 15% of men, according to the OECD.
Tokyo is hoping to address some of these problems, so that working women today will become working mothers tomorrow. The metropolitan government is starting to subsidize egg freezing, so that women have a better chance of a successful pregnancy if they decide to have a baby later in life.
New parents in Japan already get a “baby bonus” of thousands of dollars to cover medical costs. For singles? A state sponsored dating service powered by Artificial Intelligence.
Whether such measures can turn the tide, in urban or rural areas, remains to be seen. But back in the countryside, Kawakami village offers a precautionary tale of what can happen if demographic declines are not reversed.
Along with its falling population, many of its traditional crafts and ways of life are at risk of dying out.
Among the villagers who took turns holding the young Kentaro was Kaoru Harumashi, a lifelong resident of Kawakami village in his 70s. The master woodworker has formed a close bond with the boy, teaching him how to carve the local cedar from surrounding forests.
“He calls me grandpa, but if a real grandpa lived here, he wouldn’t call me grandpa,” he said. “My grandson lives in Kyoto and I don’t get to see him often. I probably feel a stronger affection for Kentaro, whom I see more often, even though we are not related by blood.”
Both of Harumashi’s sons moved away from the village years ago, like many other young rural residents do in Japan.
“If the children don’t choose to continue living in the village, they will go to the city,” he said.
When the Yokoboris moved to Kawakami village about a decade ago, they had no idea most residents were well past retirement age. Over the years, they’ve watched older friends pass away and longtime community traditions fall by the wayside.
“There are not enough people to maintain villages, communities, festivals, and other ward organizations, and it is becoming impossible to do so,” Miho said.
“The more I get to know people, I mean elderly people, the more I feel sadness that I have to say goodbye to them. Life is actually going on with or without the village,” she said. “At the same time, it is very sad to see the surrounding, local people dwindling away.”
If that sounds depressing, perhaps it’s because in recent years, Japan’s battle to boost the birthrate has given few reasons for optimism.
Still, a small ray of hope may just be discernible in the story of the Yokoboris. Kentaro’s birth was unusual not only because the village had waited so long, but because his parents had moved to the countryside from the city – bucking the decades old trend in which the young increasingly plump for the 24/7 convenience of Japanese city life.
Some recent surveys suggest more young people like them are considering the appeals of country life, lured by the low cost of living, clean air, and low stress lifestyles that many see as vital to having families. One study of residents in the Tokyo area found 34% of respondents expressed an interest in moving to a rural area, up from 25.1% in 2019. Among those in their 20s, as many as 44.9% expressed an interest.
The Yokoboris say starting a family would have been far more difficult – financially and personally – if they still lived in the city.
Their decision to move was triggered by a Japanese national tragedy twelve years ago. On March 11, 2011, an earthquake shook the ground violently for several minutes across much of the country, triggering tsunami waves taller than a 10-story building that devastated huge swaths of the east coast and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Miho was an office worker in Tokyo at the time. She remembers feeling helpless as daily life in Japan’s largest city fell apart.
“Everyone was panicking, so it was like a war, although I have never experienced a war. It was like having money but not being able to buy water. All the transportation was closed, so you couldn’t use it. I felt very weak,” she recalled.
The tragedy was a moment of awakening for Miho and Hirohito, who was working as a graphic designer at the time.
“The things I had been relying on suddenly felt unreliable, and I felt that I was actually living in a very unstable place. I felt that I had to secure such a place by myself,” he said.
The couple found that place in one of Japan’s most remote areas, Nara prefecture. It is a land of majestic mountains and tiny townships, tucked away along winding roads beneath towering cedar trees taller than most of the buildings.
They quit their jobs in the city and moved to a simple mountain house, where they run a small bed and breakfast. He learned the art of woodworking and specializes in producing cedar barrels for Japanese sake breweries. She is a full-time homemaker. They raise chickens, grow vegetables, chop wood, and care for Kentaro, who’s about to enter the first grade.
The big question, for both Kawakami village and the rest of Japan: Is Kentaro’s birth a sign of better times to come – or a miracle birth in a dying way of life.
Effie Schnacky was wheezy and lethargic instead of being her normal, rambunctious self one February afternoon. When her parents checked her blood oxygen level, it was hovering around 80% – dangerously low for the 7-year-old.
Her mother, Jaimie, rushed Effie, who has asthma, to a local emergency room in Hudson, Wisconsin. She was quickly diagnosed with pneumonia. After a couple of hours on oxygen, steroids and nebulizer treatments with little improvement, a physician told Schnacky that her daughter needed to be transferred to a children’s hospital to receive a higher level of care.
The physical and mental burnout that occurred during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic has not gone away for overworked health care workers. Shortages of doctors and technicians are growing, experts say, but especially in skilled nursing. That, plus a shortage of people to train new nurses and the rising costs of hiring are leaving hospitals with unstaffed pediatric beds.
But a host of reasons building since well before the pandemic are also contributing. Children may be the future, but we aren’t investing in their health care in that way. With Medicaid reimbursing doctors at a lower rate for children, hospitals in tough situations sometimes put adults in those pediatric beds for financial reasons. And since 2019, children with mental health crises are increasingly staying in emergency departments for sometimes weeks to months, filling beds that children with other illnesses may need.
“There might or might not be a bed open right when you need one. I so naively just thought there was plenty,” Schnacky told CNN.
The number of pediatric beds decreasing has been an issue for at least a decade, said Dr. Daniel Rauch, chair of the Committee on Hospital Care for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
By 2018, almost a quarter of children in America had to travel farther for pediatric beds as compared to 2009, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Pediatrics by lead author Dr. Anna Cushing, co-authored by Rauch.
“This was predictable,” said Rauch, who has studied the issue for more than 10 years. “This isn’t shocking to people who’ve been looking at the data of the loss in bed capacity.”
The number of children needing care was shrinking before the Covid-19 pandemic – a credit to improvements in pediatric care. There were about 200,000 fewer pediatric discharges in 2019 than there were in 2017, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“In pediatrics, we have been improving the ability we have to take care of kids with chronic conditions, like sickle cell and cystic fibrosis, and we’ve also been preventing previously very common problems like pneumonia and meningitis with vaccination programs,” said Dr. Matthew Davis, the pediatrics department chair at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Pediatrics is also seasonal, with a typical drop in patients in the summer and a sharp uptick in the winter during respiratory virus season. When the pandemic hit, schools and day cares closed, which slowed the transmission of Covid and other infectious diseases in children, Davis said. Less demand meant there was less need for beds. Hospitals overwhelmed with Covid cases in adults switched pediatric beds to beds for grownups.
Only 37% of hospitals in the US nowoffer pediatric services, down from 42% about a decade ago, according to the American Hospital Association.
While pediatric hospital beds exist at local facilities, the only pediatric emergency department in Baltimore County is Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, according to Dr. Theresa Nguyen, the center’s chair of pediatrics. All the others in the county, which has almost 850,000 residents, closed in recent years, she said.
The nearby MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center consolidated its pediatric ER with the main ER in 2018, citing a 40% drop in pediatric ER visits in five years, MedStar Health told CNN affiliate WBAL.
In the six months leading up to Franklin Square’s pediatric ER closing, GBMC admitted an average of 889 pediatric emergency department patients each month. By the next year, that monthly average jumped by 21 additional patients.
“Now we’re seeing the majority of any pediatric ED patients that would normally go to one of the surrounding community hospitals,” Nguyen said.
In other cases, it’s the hospitals that have only 10 or so pediatric beds that started asking the tough questions, Davis said.
“Those hospitals have said, ‘You know what? We have an average of one patient a day or two patients a day. This doesn’t make sense anymore. We can’t sustain that nursing staff with specialized pediatric training for that. We’re going to close it down,’” Davis said.
Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise closed its pediatric inpatient unit in July because of financial reasons, the center told CNN affiliate KBOI. That closure means patients are now overwhelming nearby St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital, which is the only children’s hospital in the state of Idaho, administrator for St. Luke’s Children’s Katie Schimmelpfennig told CNN. Idaho ranks last for the number of pediatricians per 100,000 children, according to the American Board of Pediatrics in 2023.
The Saint Alphonsus closure came just months before the fall, when RSV, influenza and a cadre of respiratory viruses caused a surge of pediatric patients needing hospital care, with the season starting earlier than normal.
The changing tide of demand engulfed the already dwindling supply of pediatric beds, leaving fewer beds available for children coming in for all the common reasons, like asthma, pneumonia and other ailments. Additional challenges have made it particularly tough to recover.
Another factor chipping away at bed capacity over time: Caring for children pays less than caring for adults. Lower insurance reimbursement rates mean some hospitals can’t afford to keep these beds – especially when care for adults is in demand.
Medicaid, which provides health care coverage to people with limited income, is a big part of the story, according to Joshua Gottlieb, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.
“Medicaid is an extremely important payer for pediatrics, and it is the least generous payer,” he said. “Medicaid is responsible for insuring a large share of pediatric patients. And then on top of its low payment rates, it is often very cumbersome to deal with.”
Medicaid reimburses children’s hospitals an average of 80% of the cost of the care, including supplemental payments, according to the Children’s Hospital Association, a national organization which represents 220 children’s hospitals. The rate is far below what private insurers reimburse.
More than 41 million children are enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data from October. That’s more than half the children in the US, according to Census data.
At Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, about 55% of patients use Medicaid, according to Dr. David Wessel, the hospital’s executive vice president.
“Children’s National is higher Medicaid than most other children’s hospitals, but that’s because there’s no safety net hospital other than Children’s National in this town,” said Wessel, who is also the chief medical officer and physician-in-chief.
And it just costs more to care for a child than an adult, Wessel said. Specialty equipment sized for smaller people is often necessary. And a routine test or exam for an adult is approached differently for a child. An adult can lie still for a CT scan or an MRI, but a child may need to be sedated for the same thing. A child life specialist is often there to explain what’s going on and calm the child.
“There’s a whole cadre of services that come into play, most of which are not reimbursed,” he said. “There’s no child life expert that ever sent a bill for seeing a patient.”
“When insurance pays more, people build more health care facilities, hire more workers and treat more patients,” Gottlieb said.
“Everyone might be squeezed, but it’s not surprising that pediatric hospitals, which face [a]lower, more difficult payment environment in general, are going to find it especially hard.”
Dr. Benson Hsu is a pediatric critical care provider who has served rural South Dakota for more than 10 years. Rural communities face distinct challenges in health care, something he has seen firsthand.
A lot of rural communities don’t have pediatricians, according to the American Board of Pediatrics. It’s family practice doctors who treat children in their own communities, with the goal of keeping them out of the hospital, Hsu said. Getting hospital care often means traveling outside the community.
Hsu’s patients come from parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota, as well as across South Dakota, he said. It’s a predominantly rural patient base, which also covers those on Native American reservations.
“These kids are traveling 100, 200 miles within their own state to see a subspecialist,” Hsu said, referring to patients coming to hospitals in Sioux Falls. “If we are transferring them out, which we do, they’re looking at travels of 200 to 400 miles to hit Omaha, Minneapolis, Denver.”
Inpatient pediatric beds in rural areas decreased by 26% between 2008 and 2018, while the number of rural pediatric units decreased by 24% during the same time, according to the 2021 paper in Pediatrics.
“It’s bad, and it’s getting worse. Those safety net hospitals are the ones that are most at risk for closure,” Rauch said.
In major cities, the idea is that a critically ill child would get the care they need within an hour, something clinicians call the golden hour, said Hsu, who is the critical care section chair at the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“That golden hour doesn’t exist in the rural population,” he said. “It’s the golden five hours because I have to dispatch a plane to land, to drive, to pick up, stabilize, to drive back, to fly back.”
When his patients come from far away, it uproots the whole family, he said. He described families who camp out at a child’s bedside for weeks at a time. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles from home, unlike when a patient is in their own community and parents can take turns at the hospital.
“I have farmers who miss harvest season and that as you can imagine is devastating,” Hsu said. “These aren’t office workers who are taking their computer with them. … These are individuals who have to live and work in their communities.”
Back at GBMC in Maryland, an adolescent patient with depression, suicidal ideation and an eating disorder was in the pediatric emergency department for 79 days, according to Nguyen. For months, no facility had a pediatric psychiatric bed or said it could take someone who needed that level of care, as the patient had a feeding tube.
“My team of physicians, social workers and nurses spend a significant amount of time every day trying to reach out across the state of Maryland, as well as across the country now to find placements for this adolescent,” Nguyen said before the patient was transferred in mid-March. “I need help.”
Nguyen’s patient is just one of the many examples of children and teens with mental health issues who are stayingin emergency rooms and sometimes inpatient beds across the country because they need help, but there isn’t immediately a psychiatric bed or a facility that can care for them.
It’s a problem that began before 2020 and grew worse during the pandemic, when the rate of children coming to emergency rooms with mental health issues soared, studies show.
Now, a nationwide shortage of beds exists for children who need mental health help. A 2020 federal survey revealed that the number of residential treatment facilities for children fell 30% from 2012.
“There are children on average waiting for two weeks for placement, sometimes longer,” Nguyen said of the patients at GBMC. The pediatric emergency department there had an average of 42 behavioral health patients each month from July 2021 through December 2022, up 13.5% from the same period in 2017 to 2018, before the pandemic, according to hospital data.
When there are mental health patients staying in the emergency department, that can back up the beds in other parts of the hospital, creating a downstream effect, Hsu said.
“For example, if a child can’t be transferred from a general pediatric bed to a specialized mental health center, this prevents a pediatric ICU patient from transferring to the general bed, which prevents an [emergency department] from admitting a child to the ICU. Health care is often interconnected in this fashion,” Hsu said.
“If we don’t address the surging pediatric mental health crisis, it will directly impact how we can care for other pediatric illnesses in the community.”
Funding for children’s hospitals is already tight, Rauch said, and more money is needed not only to make up for low insurance reimbursement rates but to competitively hire and train new staff and to keep hospitals running.
“People are going to have to decide it’s worth investing in kids,” Rauch said. “We’re going to have to pay so that hospitals don’t lose money on it and we’re going to have to pay to have staff.”
Virtual visits, used in the right situations, could ease some of the problems straining the pediatric system, Rauch said. Extending the reach of providers would prevent transferring a child outside of their community when there isn’t the provider with the right expertise locally.
Increased access to children’s mental health services
With the ongoing mental health crisis, there’s more work to be done upstream, said Amy Wimpey Knight, the president of CHA.
“How do we work with our school partners in the community to make sure that we’re not creating this crisis and that we’re heading it off up there?” she said.
There’s also a greater need for services within children’s hospitals, which are seeing an increase in children being admitted with behavioral health needs.
“If you take a look at the reasons why kids are hospitalized, meaning infections, diabetes, seizures and mental health concerns, over the last decade or so, only one of those categories has been increasing – and that is mental health,” Davis said. “At the same time, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of mental health hospital resources dedicated to children and adolescents in a way that meets the increasing need.”
Most experts CNN spoke to agreed: Seek care for your child early.
“Whoever is in your community is doing everything possible to get the care that your child needs,” Hsu said. “Reach out to us. We will figure out a way around the constraints around the system. Our number one concern is taking care of your kids, and we will do everything possible.”
Nguyen from GBMC and Schimmelpfennig from St. Luke’s agreed with contacting your primary care doctor and trying to keep your child out of the emergency room.
“Anything they can do to stay out of the hospital or the emergency room is both financially better for them and better for their family,” Schimmelpfennig said.
Knowing which emergency room or urgent care center is staffed by pediatricians is also imperative, Rauch said. Most children visit a non-pediatric ER due to availability.
“A parent with a child should know where they’re going to take their kid in an emergency. That’s not something you decide when your child has the emergency,” he said.
After Effie’s first ambulance ride and hospitalization last month, the Schnacky family received an asthma action plan from the pulmonologist in the ER.
It breaks down the symptoms into green, yellow and red zones with ways Effie can describe how she’s feeling and the next steps for adults. The family added more supplies to their toolkit, like a daily steroid inhaler and a rescue inhaler.
“We have everything an ER can give her, besides for an oxygen tank, at home,” Schnacky said. “The hope is that we are preventing even needing medical care.”
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.”
When Dina Boluarte was anointed Peru’s sixth president in five years, she faced battles on two fronts: appeasing the lawmakers who had ousted her boss and predecessor Pedro Castillo, and calming protesterse enraged by the dethroning of yet another president.
She called for a “political truce” with Congress on her first day of her job — a peace offering to the legislative body that had been at odds with Castillo and impeached him in December after he undemocratically attempted to dissolve Congress.
But nearly two months on, her presidency is looking even more beleaguered than Castillo’s aborted term. Several ministers in her government have resigned while the country has been rocked by its most violent protests in decades. She was forced to once again call for a truce on Tuesday – this time appealing to the protesters, many of whom hail from Peru’s majority-indigenous rural areas, saying in Quechua that she is one of them.
Boluarte, who was born in a largely indigenous region in south-central Peru where Quechua is the most spoken language, might have been the leader to channel protesters’ frustrations and work with them. She has made much of her rural origins, and rose to power initially as Castillo’s vice president on the leftwing Peru Libre party ticket, buoyed by the rural and indigenous vote.
But her plea for mutual understanding with protesters now is likely too late in what analysts are calling the deadliest popular uprising in South America in recent years. Officials say 56 civilians and one police officer has died in the violence, and hundreds more have been injured, as protesters call for fresh elections, a new constitution and Boluarte’s resignation.
Boluarte has tried to placate protesters, asking Congress for an earlier election date. But Peru watchers say she already made the fatal error of distancing herself from rural constituents after she took the top job as Peru’s first woman president.
“One has to understand Boluarte’s own ambitions, she was clearly willing to sacrifice her leftist ideas and principles in order to build a coalition with the right to hold onto power,” Jo-Marie Burt, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America and an expert on Peru, told CNN. “And to use force against the very same people who voted for the Castillo-Boluarte ticket.”
Castillo’s brief term saw him face a hostile Congress in the hands of the opposition, limiting his political capital and capacity to operate. ” (Boluarte) had to make a choice: either she went the Castillo way and spent the next four years fighting a Congress that wants to impeach her or she sided with the right and got power,” Alonso Gurmendi, a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford, who is a Peruvian legal expert, told CNN.
She chose the latter, experts say, distancing herself from Castillo and instead relying on support of a broad coalition of right-wing politicians to stay in presidency. CNN has reached out to Boluarte’s office for comment and has made repeated requests for an interview.
During her inauguration, former political rival Keiko Fujimori – whose father Alberto Fujimori is a former president who used security forces to repress opponents during his decade-long rule of Peru – said Boluarte could “count on the support and backing” of her party.
Boluarte’s woes are a far cry from her early days in Peruvian’s civil service, working at the National Registry of Identification and Civil Status in Surco, as an advisor to senior management and, later, as the head of the local office.
She ran as a candidate for mayor of Surquillo with the Marxist-Leninist Peru Libre Party in 2018. She failed to gain a seat in the 2020 parliamentary elections, but had better luck the following year, as Castillo’s running-mate.
In an interview with CNN en Espanol that year, Boluarte clarified a statement she made about dissolving Congress: “We need a Congress that works for the needs of Peruvian society and that coordinates positively with the executive so that both powers of state can work in a coordinated manner to meet the multiple needs of Peruvian society. We do not want an obstructionist Congress … At no time have I said that we are going to close Congress.”
Castillo, a former teacher and union leader, was also from rural Peru and positioned himself as a man of the people. Despite his political inexperience and mounting corruption scandals, Castillo’s presidency was a symbolic victory for many of his rural supporters. They hoped he would bring better prospects to the country’s rural and indigenous people who have long felt excluded from Peru’s economic boom in the past decade.
His ousting from power last year was seen by some of his supporters as another attempt by Peru’s coastal elites to discount them.
The public have long been disillusioned with the legislative body, which has been criticized as being self-interested and out-of-touch. In a January poll by the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP) more than 80% of Peruvians say they disapproved of Congress.
The public also have a dim view of Boluarte, according to polling by IPSOS, which found that 68% disapproved of her in December. That figure rose to 71% in January, according to the poll. She is more unpopular in rural areas, according to the same poll, which found that she had an 85% disapproval score in rural regions in January compared to urban areas (76%).
In January 2022, Peru Libre expelled her from the party. She told Peruvian newspaper La República at the time she had “never embraced the ideology of Peru Libre.”
As protests spread through many of Peru’s 25 regions following Castillo’s detention, Boluarte’s government declared a state of emergency and doubled down on law-and-order policies.
The country has since seen its highest civilian death toll since strongman Alberto Fujimori was in power, say human rights advocates, when 17 civilians were killed during a protest in the south-eastern Puno region on January 9. A police officer was burned to death in Puno on the following day. Autopsies of the 17 dead civilians found wounds caused by firearm projectiles, the city’s head of legal medicine told CNN en Español.
Human rights groups have accused Boluarte of using state violence to stymie protests and on January 11, Peru’s prosecutor launched an investigation into the president and other key ministers for the alleged crime of “genocide, qualified homicide, and serious injuries” in relation to the bloodshed.
Boluarte has said she will cooperate with the probe, but plans to remain in office and has shown little sympathy for the demonstrators. “I am not going to resign, my commitment is with Peru, not with that tiny group that is making the country bleed,” she said in a televised speech days after the investigation was announced.
When asked why she has not prevented security officials from using lethal weapons on protesters, Boluarte said on Tuesday that investigations will determine where the bullets “come from,” speculating without evidence that Bolivian activists may have brought weapons into Peru – a claim that Burt describes as “a total conspiracy theory.”
Boluarte has done little to ease the angry rhetoric deployed by public officials, parts of the press and the public in criticizing the ongoing demonstrations. Boluarte herself described the protests as “terrorism” – a label that the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) has warned could instigate a “climate of more violence.”
She again inflamed tensions during Tuesday’s press conference. When asked how she intended to implement a national truce, she said attempts for dialogue with representatives in the region of Puno had not been successful. “We have to protect the life and tranquillity of 33 million Peruvians. Puno is not Peru,” she said. At least 20 civilians have died in clashes in the region, according to data by Peru’s Ombudsman office, and the comment led to an immediate online backlash.
The presidential office later apologized for the statement on Twitter, saying Boluarte’s words were misinterpreted, and that the president intended to emphasize that the safety of all Peruvians was important. “We apologize to the sisters and brothers of our beloved highland region,” it wrote.
As the protests show no end in sight, Boluarte on Wednesday dialed down the inflammatory rhetoric when she spoke at a special meeting on the Peruvian crisis at the Organization of American States (OAS).
She announced plans to investigate the alleged abuses by security forces against protesters, adding that while she respected the “legitimate right to peaceful protest, but it is also true that the state has the duty to ensure security and internal order.”
The violence had caused around $1 billion in damages to the country, and affected 240,000 businesses, but she was “deeply pained” at the “loss of lives of many compatriots,” she said.
Boluarte, again, appealed to her former base of voters, indigenous Peruvians. “You are the great force that we need to include to achieve development with equity,” she said. “Your contributions to national development needs to be valued as well as your strength.”
Amanda Shelley was sitting in her dentist’s waiting room when she received a call from the police. A local teenage girl had been sexually assaulted and needed an exam.
Shelley, a nurse in rural Eagle County, Colorado, went to her car and called a telehealth company to arrange an appointment with a sexual-assault nurse examiner, or SANE. The nurse examiners have extensive training in how to care for assault survivors and collect evidence for possible criminal prosecution.
About an hour later, Shelley met the patient at the Colorado Mountain Medical urgent-care clinic in the small town of Avon. She used a tablet to connect by video with a SANE about 2,000 miles away, in New Hampshire.
The remote nurse used the video technology to speak with the patient and guide Shelley through each step of a two-hour exam. One of those steps was a colposcopy, in which Shelley used a magnifying device to closely examine the vagina and cervix. The remote nurse saw, in real time, what Shelley could see, with the help of a video camera attached to the machine.
The service, known as “teleSANE,” is new at Shelley’s hospital. Before, sexual-assault patients faced mountains of obstacles—literally—when they had to travel to a hospital in another county for care.
“We’re asking them to drive maybe over snowy passes and then [be there] three to four hours for this exam and then drive back home—it’s disheartening for them,” Shelley says. “They want to start the healing process and go home and shower.”
To avoid this scenario, teleSANE services are expanding across the country in rural, sparsely populated areas. Researchshows that SANE programs encourage psychological healing, provide comprehensive health care, allow for professional evidence collection, and improve the chance of a successful prosecution.
Jennifer Pierce-Weeks is the CEO of the International Association of Forensic Nurses, which created the national standards and certification programs for sexual-assault nurse examiners. She says every sexual-assault survivor faces health consequences. Assaults can cause physical injuries, sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies, and mental-health conditions that can lead to suicide attempts and drug and alcohol misuse.
“If they are cared for on the front end, all of the risks of those things can be reduced dramatically with the right intervention,” Pierce-Weeks says.
Pierce-Weeks says there are no comprehensive national data on the number and location of health-care professionals with SANE training. But she says studies show that there’s a nationwide shortage, especially in rural areas.
Some rural hospitals struggle to create or maintain in-person SANE programs because of staffing and funding shortfalls, Pierce-Weeks says.
Training costs money and takes time. If rural hospitals train nurses, they still might not have enough to provide round-the-clock coverage. And nurses in rural areas can’t practice their skills as often as those who work in busy urban hospitals.
Some hospitals without SANE programs refer sexual-assault survivors elsewhere because they don’t feel qualified to help and aren’t always legally required to provide comprehensive treatment and evidence collection.
Avel eCare, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has been providing telehealth services since 1993. It recently added teleSANE to its offerings.
Avel provides this service to 43 mostly rural and small-town hospitals across five states and is expanding to Indian Health Service hospitals in the Great Plains. Native Americans face high rates of sexual assault and might have to travel hours for care if they live in one of the region’s large, rural reservations.
Jen Canton, who oversees Avel’s teleSANE program, says arriving at a local hospital and being referred elsewhere can be devastating for sexual-assault survivors. “You just went through what is potentially the worst moment of your life, and then you have to travel two, three hours away to another facility,” Canton says. “It takes a lot of courage to even come into the first hospital and say what happened to you and ask for help.”
Patients who receive care at hospitals without SANE programs might not receive trauma-informed care, which focuses on identifying sources of trauma, determining how those experiences may affect people’s health, and preventing the retraumatizing of patients. Emergency-department staffers may not have experience with internal exams or evidence collection. They also might not know about patients’ options for involving police.
Patients who travel to a second hospital might struggle to arrange for and afford transportation or child care. Other patients don’t have the emotional bandwidth to make the trip and retell their story.
That’s why some survivors, such as Ada Sapp, don’t get an exam.
Sapp, a health-care executive at Colorado Mountain Medical, was assaulted before the hospital system began its SANE program. She was shocked to learn that she would need to drive 45 minutes to another county for an exam. “I didn’t feel comfortable doing that by myself,” Sapp says. “So my husband would have had to come with me, or a friend. The logistics made it feel insurmountable.”
Sapp’s experience inspired her to help bring SANE services to Colorado Mountain Medical.
Shelley and several other of the hospital system’s nurses have SANE training but appreciate having telehealth support from the remote nurses with more experience. “We are a rural community, and we’re not doing these every single day,” Shelley says. “A lot of my nurses would get really anxious before an exam because maybe they haven’t done one in a couple months.”
A remote “second set of eyes” increases the confidence of the in-person nurse and is reassuring to patients, she says.
Avera St. Mary’s Hospital in Pierre, South Dakota, recently began using teleSANE. Rural towns, farms, and ranches surround this capital city, home to about 14,000 people. The nearest metropolitan area is more than a two-and-a-half-hour drive.
Taking a break from a recent busy morning in the emergency department, the nurse Lindee Miller rolled out the mobile teleSANE cart and colposcope device from Avel eCare. She pulled out a thick binder of instructions and forms and opened drawers filled with swabs, evidence tags, measuring devices, and other forensic materials.
“You’re never doing the same exam twice,” Miller said. “It’s all driven by what the patient wants to do.”
She said some patients might want only medicines to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Other patients opt for a head-to-toe physical exam. And some might want her to collect forensic evidence.
SANE programs, including telehealth versions aimed at rural communities, are expected to continue expanding across the country.
President Joe Biden signed a bill last year that provides $30 million annually through 2027 to expand SANE services, especially those that use telehealth and help rural, tribal, and other underserved communities. The law also requires the Justice Department to create a website listing the locations of the programs and grant opportunities for starting them.
California’s new proposed Fire Hazard Severity Zone map, which analyzes only the land that Cal Fire is responsible for and is mainly used for insurance purposes, is based on long-term data and created to last a decade or more. The previous version, which was done in 2007, was considered out of date.
The amount of land in “very high” severity zones saw a significant jump, increasing by 14.6% in the fresh analysis. If the proposed map is approved, nearly 17 million acres – an area larger than the state of West Virginia – will be in Cal Fire’s worst designation.
“A lot has happened since 2007,” Cal Fire said in a release announcing the update. “Using the best available science with academic researchers and others, this updated map reflects the impacts of a changing climate and includes a variety of other key factors.”
Around 98% of California was in drought conditions this week, according to the US Drought Monitor, as the state remains in the grips of a multiyear megadrought fueled by warmer temperatures and drier conditions.
As recently as 2018, California saw the largest, deadliest and most destructive wildfires in state history. In the past five years, California has seen an average of more than 7,000 wildfires each year, consuming an average of over 2 million acres, according to data from the governor’s office.
The proposed map includes only rural and unincorporated areas – cities and large urban areas are excluded, but are expected to be added in an updated version next year.
Dozens of meetings to discuss the findings are scheduled over the next several weeks to allow for public comment before the map is officially adopted.
“CAL FIRE’s fire scientists and wildfire mitigation experts developed the map using a science-based and field-tested model that assigns a hazard score based on the factors that influence fire likelihood and fire behavior. Many factors are considered, such as fire history, existing and potential fuel (natural vegetation), predicted flame length, blowing embers, terrain, and typical fire weather for an area. These zones fall into the following classifications – moderate, high, and very high,” the agency explained.
Cal Fire said the new map should help communities tailor their wildfire planning and preparedness efforts to the most vulnerable locations. The zones are also used to determine where defensible space standards, wildland-urban interface building codes and the State Minimum Fire Safe Regulations are required, according to Cal Fire.
Officials in a rural Arizona county Monday delayed the certification of November’s midterm elections, missing the legal deadline andleading the Arizona secretary of state’s office to sue over the county’s failure to sign off on the results.
By a 2-1 vote Monday morning, the Republican majority on the Cochise County Board of Supervisors pushed back certification until Friday, citing concerns about voting machines. Because Monday was the deadline for all 15 Arizona counties to certify their results, Cochise’s action could put at risk the votes of some 47,000 county residents and could inject chaos into the election if those votes go uncounted.
In the lawsuit filed by the office of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs – a Democrat who will be the state’s next governor – officials said failing to certify the election results violates state law and could “potentially disenfranchise” the county’s voters.
CNN has reached out to the supervisors for comment.
The standoff between officials in Cochise County and the Arizona secretary of state’s office illustrates how election misinformation is continuing to stoke controversy about the 2022 results in some corners of the country even though many of the candidates who echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election were defeated in November.
A crowd of grassroots activists turned up at a special meeting of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to loudly protest that county’s election administration procedures during a public comment portion of the meeting after problems with printers at voting locations on Election Day led to long lines at about a third of the county’s voting locations. In a new letter to the state attorney general’s office – which had demanded an explanation of the problems – the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said that “no voter was disenfranchised because of the difficulty the county experienced with some of its printers.”
Disputes over the results have erupted elsewhere.
In Pennsylvania, where counties also faced a Monday deadline to certify their general election balloting, local officials have faced an onslaught of petitions demanding recounts. And officials in Luzerne County, in northeastern Pennsylvania, deadlocked Monday on whether to certify the results, according to multiple media reports. Election officials there did not respond to inquiries from CNN on Monday afternoon.
In a statement to CNN, officials with the Pennsylvania Department of State said they have reached out to Luzerne officials “to inquire about the board’s decision and their intended next steps.”
On Election Day, a paper shortage in Luzerne County prompted a court-ordered extension of in-person voting.
Arizona, another key battleground state, has long been a cauldron of election conspiracies. GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and GOP secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, both of whom pushed Trump’s lies about 2020, have refused to concede their races, as they continue to sow doubts about this year’s election results.
Lake’s campaign filed a lawsuit last week demanding more information from Maricopa County’s elections department about the number of voters who checked in to polling places compared to the ballots cast. And Arizona’s GOP attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh – who, like Lake and Finchem, was backed by Trump – filed a lawsuit in the state superior court in Maricopa County last week challenging the election results based on what the suit describes as errors in the management of the election.
Hamadeh is trailing his opponent Democrat Kris Mayes by 510 votes as their race heads toward a recount. But the lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the Arizona secretary of state from certifying Mayes as the winner and asks the court to declare Hamadeh as the winner. A recount cannot begin until the state’s votes are certified.
Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director of All Voting is Local, said the drama over certification of the votes and the refusal by losing candidates to back down is part of an “infrastructure of election denial” that has been building since the 2020 election in Arizona.
“Those folks are going to continue to try and find fertile ground for their efforts to undermine our elections. They are not going to give up,” Gulotta said. “We had a whole slate of election deniers, many of whom were not elected.”
But their refusal to concede “was inevitable in Arizona, at least in this cycle, given the candidates. These aren’t good losers,” he added. “They said from the beginning that they would be bad losers.”
In Cochise County, the Republican officials on the county Board of Supervisors advocated for the delay, citing concerns about voting machines.
Ann English, the Democratic chairwoman, argued that there was “no reason for us to delay.”
But Republican commissioners Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, who have cited claims that the machines were not properly certified, voted to delay signing off on the results.Monday’s action marked the second time the Republican-controlled board has delayed certification. And it marked the latest effort by Republicans on the board to register their disapproval of vote-tallying machines. Earlier this month, they attempted to mount an expansive hand count audit of the midterm results, pitting them against Cochise’s election director and the county attorney, who warned that the gambit might break the law.
State election officials said the concerns cited by the Republican majority about the vote-tallying machines are rooted in debunked conspiracy theories.
The state’s election director Kori Lorick has confirmed in writing that the voting machines had been tested and certified – a point Hobbs reiterated in Monday’s lawsuit. She is asking the court to force the board to certify the results by Thursday.
An initial deadline of December 5 had been set for statewide certification. In the lawsuit, Hobbs’ lawyers said state law does allow for a slight delay if her office has not received a county’s results, but not past December 8 – or 30 days after the election.
“Absent this Court’s intervention, the Secretary will have no choice but to complete statewide canvass by December 8 without Cochise County’s votes included,” her lawyers added.
If votes from this Republican stronghold somehow went uncounted, it could flip two races to Democrats: the contest for state superintendent and a congressional race in which Republican Juan Ciscomani already has been projected as the winner by CNN and other outlets.
In a recent opinion piece published in The Arizona Republic, two former election officials in Maricopa County – said the courts were likely to step in and force Cochise to certify the results.
But Republican Helen Purcell, a former Maricopa County recorder, and Tammy Patrick, a Democrat and the county’s former federal compliance officer, warned that “a Republican-controlled board of supervisors could end up disenfranchising their own voters and hand Democrats even more victories in the midterms.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Workers with the water district in Wenden, Arizona, saw something remarkable last year as they slowly lowered a camera into the drought-stricken town’s well: The water was moving.
But the aquifer which sits below the small desert town in the southwestern part of the state is not a river; it’s a massive, underground reservoir which stores water built up over thousands of years. And that water is almost always still.
Gary Saiter, a longtime resident and head of the Wenden Water Improvement District, said the water was moving because it was being pumped rapidly out of the ground by a neighboring well belonging to Al Dahra, a United Arab Emirates-based company farming alfalfa in the Southwest.
Al Dahra did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
“The well guys and I have never seen anything like this before,” Saiter told CNN. The farm was “pumping and it was sucking the water through the aquifer.”
Groundwater is the lifeblood of the rural Southwest, but just as the Colorado River Basin is in crisis, aquifers are rapidly depleting from decades of overuse, worsening drought and rampant agricultural growth.
Residents and farms pull water from the same underground pools, and as the water table declines, the thing determining how long a well lasts is how deeply it was drilled.
Now frustration is growing in Arizona’s La Paz County, as shallower wells run dry amid the Southwest’s worst drought in 1,200 years. Much of the frustration is pointed at the area’s huge, foreign-owned farms growing thirsty crops like alfalfa, which ultimately get shipped to feed cattle and other livestock overseas.
“You can’t take water and export it out of the state, there’s laws about that,” said Arizona geohydrologist Marvin Glotfelty, a well-drilling expert. “But you can take ‘virtual’ water and export it; alfalfa, cotton, electricity or anything created in part from the use of water.”
Residents and local officials say lax groundwater laws give agriculture the upper hand, allowing farms to pump unlimited water as long as they own or lease the property to drill wells into. In around 80% of the state, Arizona has no laws overseeing how much water corporate megafarms are using, nor is there any way for the state to track it.
But rural communities in La Paz County know the water is disappearing beneath their feet.
Shallow, residential wells in the county started drying up in 2015, local officials say, and deeper municipal well levels have steadily declined. In Salome, local water utility owner Bill Farr told CNN his well – which supplies water to more than 200 customers, including the local schools – is “nearing the end of its useful life.”
And in Wenden, water in the town well has been plummeting. Saiter told CNN the depth-to-water – how deep below the surface the top of the water table is – has dropped from about 100 feet in the late 1950s to about 540 feet in 2022, already far beyond what an average residential well can reach. Saiter is anxious the farms’ rapid water use could push the water table too low for the town well to draw safe water from.
La Paz County supervisor Holly Irwin told CNN getting the state to act on – or even acknowledge – the region’s dwindling water supply has been a “frustrating” yearslong battle which has left her community feeling “forgotten.”
Middle East agriculture companies “have depleted their [water], that’s why they are here,” Irwin said. “That’s what angers people the most. We should be taking care of our own, and we just allow them to come in, purchase property and continue to punch holes in the ground.”
In 2018, Saudi Arabia finalized a ban on growing thirsty crops like alfalfa and hay to feed livestock and cattle. The reason was simple: the arid Middle East – also struggling with climate change-fueled drought – is running out of water, and agriculture is a huge consumer.
But vast dairy operations are a point of national pride in the Middle East, according to Eckart Woertz, director of the Germany-based GIGA Institute for Middle East Studies. So, they needed to find water somewhere else.
“They have all their cows there and they need feeding. That feedstock comes from abroad,” Woertz told CNN.
Valued at $14.3 billion, the Almarai Company – which owns about 10,000 acres of farmland in Arizona under its subsidiary, Fondomonte – is one of the biggest players in the Middle East’s dairy supply. The company also owns about 3,500 acres in agriculture-heavy Southern California, according to public land records, where they use Colorado River water to irrigate crops.
Woertz said while most of the company’s cattle feed is purchased on the open market, Alamarai took the extra step of buying farmland abroad, as part of a growing trend in foreign-owned farmland in the US. Foreign-owned farmland in the West increased from around 1.25 million acres in 2010 to nearly three million acres in 2020, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture. In the Midwest, foreign-owned farmland has nearly quadrupled.
“It gives you that sense you’re closer to the source,” Woertz added. “The sense that you own land or lease land somewhere else and have direct bilateral access [to water] gives you a sense of maybe false security.”
In the high desert of Arizona, emerald-green fields stretch for miles alongside dry tumbleweeds and Saguaro cactus.
The Fondomonte-owned Vicksburg Ranch near Salome is massive. The company spent $47.5 million to buy nearly 10,000 acres of land there in 2014, and it leases additional farmland from the state.
Huge storage facilities were erected to hold the harvests. Rows of small houses were built for the farm’s workers, all surrounded by flowering desert shrubs. Tractor trailers filled with bales of alfalfa hay rumble down the highway, which local officials told CNN they had to repair because of the increased agricultural traffic.
The alfalfa on the trucks is eventually shipped to feed cattle in Saudi Arabia.
“They’ve definitely increased production,” Irwin said. “They’ve grown so much since they’ve been here.”
Almarai was transparent about why it wanted the land, according to an article on the purchase from Arab News: The transaction was part of “continuous efforts to improve and secure its supply of the highest quality alfalfa hay from outside the Kingdom to support its dairy business.”
“It is also in line with the Saudi government direction toward conserving local resources,” Arab News added.
Representatives of Fondomonte declined an interview request for this story, but Jordan Rose, the company’s Arizona attorney, provided a statement: “Fondomonte decided to invest in the southwest United States just as hundreds of other agricultural businesses have because of the high-quality soils, and climatic conditions that allow growth of some of the finest quality alfalfa in the world.”
Rose added the farm installed “the most technologically advanced conservation oriented watering systems available on the market.”
Indeed, there is nothing illegal about foreign-owned farming in the US. And many American farmers use the West’s water to grow crops which are eventually exported around the globe.
But amid the worst drought in centuries, residents and officials have questioned the merit of allowing countries, which themselves are running out of water, unlimited access to a resource as good as gold in the Southwest.
Cynthia Campbell, water resources management adviser for the city of Phoenix, has been watching the La Paz County water situation with frustration.
Phoenix currently gets most of its water from local rivers and the Central Arizona Project, which diverts Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. But it could use rural groundwater as a safety net in the coming years if the city’s primary sources are further restricted.
That is, if there is any groundwater left by then.
“We are literally exporting our economy overseas,” Campbell said. “I’m sorry, but there’s no Saudi Arabian milk coming back to Southern California or Arizona. The value of that agricultural output is not coming through in value to the US.”
Despite the ever-looming water crisis, people are still drawn to small Southwest towns like Wenden and Salome because of the low home prices and the freedom of desert living.
While housing costs in the country rocket upward, rural Arizona has remained a stubbornly affordable place to live. Homes cost between $30,000 and $40,000, and residential taxes paid to the county are below $300 per year, Saiter, the head of Wenden’s water district and a longtime resident, told CNN.
“People are able to afford to live here, versus Phoenix,” Gary’s wife, De Vona Saiter, told CNN. Median incomes in the county are low, “but you can still have a beautiful life.”
The Saiters’ house and rental properties around town – as well as De Vona’s mother Gloria Kaisor’s home down the street – are decorated with hand-drawn art, gardens and antiques.
Kaisor is a longtime resident who first moved to Wenden with her family in the 1960s. After living in Phoenix for years, she gravitated back to the rural area.
“This is home,” Kaisor said. “You don’t hear a noise. It’s quiet. I don’t want to be around a lot of people. You can do whatever you want.”
Yet the impacts of living near a corporate farm are starting to pile up.
Kaisor’s home was inundated with silty, wet mud this summer. Rainfall runoff from a recent monsoon flood carried it from the farm right into Wenden. Gary Saiter believes Al Dahra farm staff have rerouted natural waterways, forcing the rainfall into town rather than out into the desert washes.
Kaisor and her neighbors’ fences are reinforced with sheet metal to try to stop mud and water from coming into their houses, but Kaisor was trapped in her house during a storm earlier this year.
“The whole property was full of mud,” De Vona Saiter said.
Al Dahra did not respond to CNN’s questions for this story, including questions about its water usage, the uptick in residential flooding and potential rerouting of natural waterways.
The company did provide a statement to the Arizona Republic for a story published in 2019: “Water resources in Arizona must be managed wisely in order to preserve our quality of life and to protect the state’s economic health,” Al Dahra said. “The company is fully committed to Arizona and plans to remain here for the long-term.”
Living near the Al Dahra farm also brings more frequent and alarming drought-related impacts.
When it gets windy, a “dirt wall” of soil and dust whips up from the alfalfa fields, exacerbating the Saiters’ allergies. And most noticeably, the ground is literally sinking as the water below the surface gets pumped out.
The floor in De Vona’s shop has sunk a couple inches, she said, and the ground around one well casing has sunk about a foot; so much the wellhead needed to be cut and resized.
With all of this, Gary Saiter doesn’t care if the farm is owned by a company overseas. The way he sees it, it doesn’t make much of a difference who owns the farm; he just wishes they were better neighbors.
“I am kind of ambivalent about the Saudis,” Saiter said. “You can’t control where people sell stuff, and it’s going to go somewhere.”
“I just don’t like the crops they’re growing and the water they’re pumping,” he added.
Kari Avila, superintendent and athletics director for Salome High School, believes the farms are providing local economic benefits. Rose, Fondomonte’s Arizona attorney, told CNN in an email the company is the fourth-largest employer in the county.
“They employ a lot of people,” Avila told CNN. “If they weren’t farming it, someone else would be. A lot of people are upset it’s not Americans farming.”
Avila praised the farms for their internship programs and career fairs. Last year, Al Dahra donated an irrigation pump and generator to water Salome’s high school fields, which had been drying up. Avila said the pump installation for the field was fast and took just a few weeks.
But even as the companies are trying to invest in the area, many still question whether those benefits are worth it as water disappears.
“It’s great,” Irwin, the La Paz County supervisor said, “but if you can’t turn your faucet on in five years, that sh*t’s not going to matter.”
The reason some rural residents feel powerless about the fate of their groundwater is because they say Arizona’s state lawmakers have thus far not acted to protect it.
The last time the state passed regulations around groundwater was in 1980, with a law creating certain zones in mostly urban areas, where officials had to ensure they were replenishing underground aquifers and not pumping them dry.
The laws governing the so-called active management areas, or AMAs, are strong compared to groundwater laws in other Southwest states, said Kathleen Ferris, a former top state water official and senior researcher at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.
But “outside of the AMAs, not so much,” Ferris told CNN.
About 80% of the state falls outside the active management areas, with no restrictions on how much groundwater can be pumped and no way to monitor it.
“It can’t get any worse” than Arizona’s lack of regulation on rural groundwater, Ferris said. “Let’s put it that way.”
Water officials can measure whether water levels in the aquifers are going up or down, but because groundwater is so lightly regulated in rural areas, they don’t have enough data to answer a crucial question: Exactly how much water is left?
“That is one of the challenges of our state; you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said top Arizona water official Tom Buschatzke, the director of the state’s Department of Water Resources. “We do the best we can with the data and estimated data that we have, but it really begs questions about how much benefit we can really provide.”
As the West’s water crisis grows more intense, groundwater reform has become a flashpoint in this year’s election campaigns.
Arizona attorney general candidate Kris Mayes, a Democrat, has seized on the state’s practice of leasing public land to corporate farms, including more than 6,000 acres leased to Fondomonte, according to the state land department.
A recent investigation by the Arizona Republic found Fondomonte – the second-largest agricultural lessor of Arizona land – is paying the state a heavily discounted rate which does not take their water usage into account.
Mayes said she thinks the leases violate the state constitution and has vowed to cancel them if she’s elected.
“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Mayes told Irwin in September, standing outside Fondomonte’s farm. “We can get these leases canceled, and we should. We are essentially giving our water away for free to a Saudi corporation, and that has to come to an end.”
The Arizona State Land Department is studying the state’s water resources in western Arizona, department spokesman Bill Fathauer told CNN. But he added it does not have the authority to implement additional groundwater restrictions.
“The comprehensive data determined from these studies will allow the Department to make an informed decision about not only future land use in these areas but also help determine what the future value of the land is as well,” Fathauer said in an email.
The kind of sweeping water reforms Arizona needs must ultimately come from the state legislature, says outgoing state House member Regina Cobb, a Republican.
For years, Cobb tried to advance bills to allow local officials to regulate their aquifers. The bills never got a committee hearing, Cobb said, never mind making it to the floor for a vote. CNN reached out to Gov. Doug Ducey and top Arizona lawmakers in the state House and Senate for comment; none responded.
As the Colorado River shrinks and Arizona’s share of the water continues to be cut, Cobb told CNN the state’s approach to groundwater has been unthinkable.
“Why are we allowing a foreign company to come into Arizona – which is drought-stricken right now – and have a sweetheart deal [on leases], when we are trying to conserve as much water as we can?” she asked.
A person walking their dog in rural Idaho was in for quite a surprise when they encountered an alligator, hundreds of miles from the coast where the reptiles are usually found.
“They spotted something moving in the brush and discovered the 3.5-foot alligator,” said the department in the statement.
The resident apparently captured the gator, put it in a horse trailer, and called the department, which picked it up the next morning and moved it to a Fish and Game facility where it is currently being housed, according to the statement.
The agency said it is investigating the alligator’s origins and urged anyone with information to contact the Idaho Fish and Game Southwest Regional Office.
“In all likelihood, this alligator got loose from someone, and we are interested in finding the owner,” Regional Conservation Officer Matt O’Connell said in the statement.
It is illegal to own alligators without a permit in Idaho or to release captive crocodilians – the family to which alligators belong – into the wild, according to the statement.
Adult alligators can grow to be about 8 to 11 feet long on average. The large reptiles tend to be found in on the east and Gulf coasts, as far north as North Carolina and as far west as eastern Texas. Florida and Louisiana have the country’s two highest alligator populations, with over a million living in each state, according to Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries.
When former President Donald Trump touched down in Minden, Nevada, on Saturday to campaign for a slate of Republican candidates, he landed in a town of just under 3,500 people – about 0.1% of the state’s population.
It’s a tiny stop for the former President, who rode stronger-than-expected turnout in rural stretches of the country like Minden to the White House in 2016. But it highlights just how important rural counties are to Nevada Republicans such as Senate nominee Adam Laxalt and gubernatorial hopeful Joe Lombardo in the critical midterm elections.
“We believe that rural Nevada is the key to turning our state back,” Laxalt said during a stop late last year in Winnemucca, a mining town of under 8,000 people in northern Humboldt County.
Nevada, which Trump lost twice, represents one of the biggest tests for Democratic power in the 2022 midterms. The party holds all but one statewide office in Nevada, and Democratic presidential nominees have carried the state in every election since 2008, buoyed by the strength of the late Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid’s so-called Reid Machine. But those Democratic margins have been declining and after closures around the coronavirus pandemic dramatically affected Nevada’s tourism-centric economy, Republicans see a strong chance to make gains in the state, hanging their hopes on Lombardo’s bid to unseat Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and Laxalt’s challenge to Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
A CNN poll released on Thursday found no clear leader in either race: Laxalt and Lombardo had the support of 48% of likely voters compared with 46% for Cortez Masto and Sisolak.
The same poll was littered with warning signs for Democrats. Forty-four percent of registered Nevada voters said the country would be better off if Republicans are in control of Congress, compared with 35% who said it wouldn’t be. More Republican voters in Nevada said they were extremely motivated to vote – 62% versus 52% for Democrats. And 41% of voters said the economy was the most important issue in the midterms, something Republicans have used to hammer Democrats.
Nevada has been home to one of the most dramatic and politically important urban-rural divides in recent years. And that split could prove even more pivotal in November, given the tightness of the Senate and gubernatorial contests.
Rural voters make up a tiny fraction of Nevada’s electorate, with the state’s major urban centers – Clark County, home to Las Vegas, and Washoe County, home to Reno – making up nearly 90% of Nevada’s population of some 3.1 million. According to a study by Iowa State University, Nevada’s rural population fell from nearly 20% of the state in 1970 to less than 6% in 2010.
The urbanization of Nevada has long allowed Democratic candidates in the state to run on one strategy: Run up the vote total around Las Vegas, win narrowly or at least stay competitive in the Reno area and lose big in rural Nevada. Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the Senate, followed this strategy in 2016 when she lost every Nevada county, except Clark, but still won a first term by over 2 points.
In recent years, that strategy paid even greater dividends as Washoe County, the second largest in the state, has tilted toward Democrats. Democratic presidential candidates have carried Washoe County in the last four presidential elections, while Sisolak and the state’s junior senator, Jacky Rosen, both won the county in 2018.
That has put more pressure on Nevada Republicans to not only close the gap in Clark and Washoe counties but to also boost as much turnout as possible in rural areas.
Whether that “rural first” strategy can even lead to wins any more is an open question, according to David Damore, a political science professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“It’s a huge part of the Republican playbook, but every year it is smaller and smaller,” he said of GOP attempts to turn out rural voters. “It’s all about cutting the margin in Clark. What has happened is, even though Trump did that last time, Washoe is becoming more liberal. … It is a little bit of a whack-a-mole game for Republicans.”
Laxalt knows the pressure he faces firsthand. When he successfully ran for state attorney general in 2014, he became the only statewide candidate in recent decades to lose both Clark and Washoe counties but win the election when he narrowly defeated Democrat Ross Miller.
Laxalt did what a statewide Republican candidate needed do in Nevada in that race: He kept the margins down in Clark and Washoe – losing the former by less than 6 points and the latter by 1 point – and posted strong margins across the rest of the state.
Laxalt also knows it’s not a perfect strategy. Nevada’s increased urbanization has put a strain on that rural-focused strategy as evidenced by Laxalt’s 4-point loss to Sisolak in 2018. In that race, Laxalt once again lost both Clark and Washoe, but this time by wider margins, including losing the Las Vegas area by nearly 14 points.
Laxalt, on multiple tours through rural Nevada during his Senate campaign, has stressed the area’s importance to his success. At the same time, he’s had to walk a fine line between raising false claims about the validity of the 2020 election, including Republican concerns about vote-counting in Clark County, and the need to boost rural turnout. Laxalt has done so by raising baseless questions about Clark County elections while stressing to rural voters that their votes matter.
“In the end of the day, rural Nevada can provide 75,000-vote cushions, so rural Nevada still matters,” he told an audience in Fallon in late 2021. “Rural Nevada is discouraged. They think Vegas is all that matters. Not true. The vote block out of rural Nevada still makes a huge difference.”
Brian Freimuth, a spokesman for Laxalt, said in a statement that the Republican’s effort “is the most well-traveled campaign in the state” and has “hosted events in every rural county, dozens of rural meet & greets, a cattle drive, and events with ranchers and farmers.”
“Rural Nevadans know that Adam’s record on water rights, the second amendment, sage grouse, and fighting federal overreach make him the best candidate in this race,” said Freimuth.
Cortez Masto, arguably the most vulnerable Democratic Senate incumbent in the country, has focused much of her campaign on tying Laxalt to Trump. Laxalt, who was a co-chair of Trump’s 2020 campaign in Nevada, was central to filing election lawsuits seeking to overturn the presidential result in the state, which Biden won by 2 points. Those lawsuits did not change the election result.
Cortez Masto has also looked to cut into Laxalt’s advantage in rural areas.
A former state attorney general herself, she embarked on a rural tour of Nevada in August, campaigning in communities such as Ely, Elko, Winnemucca and Fallon – all with populations of less than 20,000 people.
“When I became your US senator, it was just as important to me to get out and talk to Nevadans, because here’s the deal: To me, it is about all of us succeeding and that rising tide lifting all of us,” she said in Ely. “At the end of the day, your party affiliation, your background is about making sure your families are successful, your businesses are successful, we’re all in this together.”
Cortez Masto has been endorsed by several rural Republican leaders, such as former Winnemucca Mayor Di An Putnam and Ely Mayor Nathan Robertson, who said in a statement that the incumbent will “continue working hard in the Senate to champion issues important to all rural Nevadans.”
In response to a question from CNN about Trump rallying with Laxalt in rural Nevada, Cortez Masto spokesman Josh Marcus-Blank said, “No one did more to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump than Adam Laxalt, and he is once again being rewarded.”
Four kidnapped California family members – including a baby girl – were found dead in a farm area Wednesday, authorities said, two days after they were abducted from their business in a case where investigators have detained a suspect but not announced a motive.
The bodies of 8-month-old Aroohi Dheri, her parents Jasleen Kaur and Jasdeep Singh, and her uncle Amandeep Singh were recovered by authorities Wednesday evening after a farmworker alerted them to remains in an orchard in central California’s Merced County, authorities said.
The discovery, coming a day after a suspect in the case was detained, was announced by a visibly emotional sheriff who said the killings were “completely and totally senseless.”
“There’s a special place in hell for this guy,” Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said Wednesday night, referring to the suspect.
“A whole family (was) wiped out, and we still don’t know why,” Warnke said.
The suspect, identified by the Merced Sheriff’s Office as 48-year-old Jesus Manuel Salgado, remains in custody but has not been charged.
Salgado is “suspected of involvement in the kidnapping and death of the four victims,” Alexandra Britton, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department, told CNN on Thursday.
Salgado was previously in prison for nearly a decade after being convicted of attempted false imprisonment, first degree robbery and possession of a controlled substance, according to records from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The family was kidnapped at gunpoint – an abduction recorded on surveillance video – from their trucking business Monday morning in Merced, a city between Modesto and Fresno in central California, authorities said. Investigators learned they were missing after a family vehicle was found abandoned and on fire that morning, authorities said.
Police took the suspect into custody Tuesday after his family told law enforcement he admitted to being involved in the kidnapping, Britton said.
“The circumstances around this, when we are able to release everything, should anger the hell out of you,” Warnke said.
The suspect attempted suicide sometime before he was taken into custody, and he has been receiving medical attention, Warnke said.
Warnke did not say how the family was slain. He said it appears they were killed where they were found, and killed before the sheriff’s department was notified Monday that the family was missing.
Salgado is the main suspect in the killings, though investigators believe others may have been involved, according to Warnke, who did not elaborate on the extent of that involvement.
“I fully believe that we will uncover and find out that there was more than just him involved,” Warnke said.
He has been providing information to investigators, and officials are working with him to identify a motive, Warnke said.
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‘Our worst fears were realized’: Sheriff makes announcement about missing family
In the previous case, Salgado was sentenced to 11 yearsin January 2007. He was released on parole in June 2015, and his parole supervision ended in Jun 2018, the department told CNN in an email.
CNN is working to identify Salgado’s legal representative for comment.
Earlier Wednesday, authorities released surveillance footage of the kidnapping at the family’s Merced trucking business Monday morning.
The video shows Jasdeep Singh arriving at the business’ parking lot at 8:30 a.m., followed by Amandeep Singh arriving nine minutes later.
Shortly before 9 a.m., Jasdeep is seen encountering a man outside the business. The man carried a trash bag and pulled out what appeared to be a firearm, the video shows.
Several minutes later, Jasdeep and Amandeep are seen with their hands tied behind their backs as they get into a truck. Shortly after, the truck leaves and returns six minutes later.
Upon returning, the suspect enters the business and exits with a gun in hand as Jasleen Kaur holds 8-month-old Aroohi and walks in front of the suspect to the truck.
Later Monday, a farmer found two of the victims’ cell phones on a road, authorities said. At one point, the farmer answered the phone and spoke with a relative of the victims.
Before the bodies were found Wednesday evening, a family member had urged people to come forward with any information in the case.
“This is a peace-loving family and running a small business in the Merced area,” pleaded Balvinder, a family member. “This is something that nobody is prepared for dealing with … we are just hoping and praying every moment.”
On Tuesday morning, investigators learned that an ATM card belonging to one of the victims was used at a bank in Atwater, California, which is about 9 miles northwest of Merced, the sheriff’s office said.
It is unclear whether the man in custody is the person who used that card, Britton said.
The suspect in custodywas convicted in 2005 in a case involving armed robbery and false imprisonment and was paroled in 2015, Warnke said.
In that previous case, the man acted alone and knew the victims, according to Warnke.
